Just like a computer, your iPhone can slow down over time. Here are some tips to help get it running as good as new.
Is your iPhone running slower than it used to? While iPhones seem
to hold up fairly well over the length of a standard two-year contract
(at least in my experience), there are plenty of factors that can
contribute to some slight or significant slowdown. So if you’re looking
to make your iPhone faster, these tips should help bring it back to
feeling brand new.
What’s taking up the most space?
A bloated phone is a slower phone, so you want to make sure your
iPhone has a little room to breathe. But before you do anything drastic,
you should get a sense of what’s actually taking up the most space.
Luckily, checking out your iPhone’s usage is a very simple process.
Simply tap on Settings > General > Usage. (Note that it might take
a while for this list to populate, especially if your phone is really
loaded up.)
This will show you a list of what’s taking up all that space,
starting with the biggest data hogs and moving down to the smallest. To
start, I’d play closer attention to the top of the list, since that’s
where there’s the most work to be done.
Note: Before you delete anything, it’s a good idea to make sure your phone is backed up, just in case. You can find information on backing up your iPhone here.
Delete unused apps
Now that you know just how much space those apps take up, it’s time
to clear some of them out. You can do this from the home screen — by
holding down an app until it wiggles, then pressing the X icon in the
upper left corner — but it’s easier to do it from the Usage menu, where
you’ll be reminded of how big an app is before you delete it.
To delete an app from here, simply tap on it, then hit Delete App on the next page it brings up.
Delete some music, photos and (lots of) video
When you look at your phone’s usage, you’ll probably find that music,
photos and video are taking up a ton of space — especially video files,
which are huge. You’ll want to delete as much as possible, but it’s up
to you to decide what stays and what goes. That said, there are multiple
ways you can go about deleting these files.
If you want to delete all of your music in one fell swoop, you can do
so from the Usage menu. Simply tap on Music, then hit Edit at the top
of the next screen. This will bring up a red circle with a Minus sign
next to All Music. Tap the circle and you’ll be given an option to
delete everything.
Chances are you don’t want to start from scratch, however. In that
case, whenever you find a song you want to delete from your Music app,
simply swipe across the name of the song to the left (like you’re
deleting an email) to bring up the option to delete it.
Note: Unless you’re an audiophile with a great pair of
headphones, you probably don’t need to store super-high-quality audio
files on your iPhone. iTunes offers the option to automatically convert
higher bit rate songs to 128kbps AAC files before placing them on your
phone (you can also choose 192 or 256kbps). For most people, even
128kbps will sound good enough and can save you a ton of space.
Deleting photos isn’t quite as simple. The only way to delete them
all at once in iOS 7 is to connect your phone to your computer and
choose Select All from the File menu before deleting the images through
iPhoto (you can read more about quickly deleting photos from your iPhone here).
But if you only want to delete certain images and videos directly
from your phone, you can do it right from the Photos app. Just open the
app up, make sure you’re in the Photos view at the bottom of the screen,
then tap Select in the top right corner. This will allow you to select
all of the photos you wish to delete, which you can do by tapping the
trash can icon in the bottom right corner.
Don’t forget to get rid of old messages (especially photos and video)
Messages take up a lot of space too. Not necessarily text messages,
but all those picture messages you send and receive take up a ton of
space.
If you don’t mind losing your entire message history with someone,
you can delete an entire series of messages by swiping left across the
most recent message in your Messages app. But if you want only want to
delete pictures and video you can do that too, though it’s going to take
a little more work.
Open a message. Find a picture or video you want to delete and hold
your finger down on it. When a dialogue box appears choose More. This
will allow you to select individual messages to delete by checking off
the boxes to the left of each message. You can then delete them by
tapping on the trash can icon in the bottom left corner.
Clear out your cache
Safari caches data to speed up page load times, but too much data can
also slow down your phone overall. To clear it out, tap on Settings
> Safari > Clear History. Then do the same but choose Clear
Cookies and Data.
And if you make to make sure Safari is squeaky clean, tap on Settings
> Safari > Advanced > Website Data. Scroll down to the bottom
of the screen, tap Remove All Website Data, confirm that you wish to
remove it, and there it goes. Note that doing this will also remove any
saved login information you have unless you store it in iCloud Keychain.
Update your software
Yes, sometimes upgrading to a big, new iOS on an older iPhone can
actually slow down your device. But if you’re already running iOS 7,
make sure you have the latest version installed. New releases often
bring tiny speed and performance bumps. You can make sure you’re up to
date by tapping Settings > General > Software Update.
Some other software fixes
If you’re running iOS 7, there are a couple of other things you can
try. First, you can turn off some of the new visual features introduced
in the OS, like parallax motion, which are taxing on your CPU. To do
this, tap Settings > General > Accessibility, and set Reduce
Motion to On.
You should also turn off background processes, which use up a lot of
available processing resources. Your best bet is to keep background apps
from automatically refreshing. This means apps like Twitter won’t
continue to update even when not in use. To do this tap Settings >
General > Background App Refresh, then switch the toggle to off.
Reset your settings
Sometimes making your phone feel like new again requires you to
switch some settings back to when your phone actually was new. Your best
bet for this is to reset all of your phone’s settings.
To do this, tap on Settings > General > Rest > Reset All
Settings. This won’t delete any of your apps, music, photos or other
data, but it will reset all of your configurations, including email and
network settings.
And if you truly want to start off fresh, you can choose to erase all of your iPhone’s content and settings. This will delete
all of the data and settings on your phone, restoring it back to its original out-of-box state. You can read more on how to reset your iPhone here.
Get a new phone
This might seem obvious. But then again maybe not. If you’re still
using an iPhone 3GS, there really isn’t much else you can do at this
point to make it run any faster. Most of the tips above should help, but
the only way to get your phone feeling brand new is to get a brand new
phone
