Two years in, your phone starts acting its age. Apps take a beat longer to open. The keyboard stutters. Scrolling feels like wading through something. And right on schedule, your brain starts doing the maths on a new phone — the one that promises to fix all of this for a thousand dollars.
Sometimes a new phone really is the answer. But most of the time, a phone that feels slow is a phone with fixable problems: storage packed to the brim, an update waiting to be installed, a tired battery the software is quietly compensating for. Work through this list before you reach for your wallet. In the worst case, you’ll lose an hour. In the best case, you’ll keep a thousand dollars.
Restart it. Seriously.
This sounds like the joke answer from tech support, and yet it fixes more “my phone is slow” complaints than any other single action. Your phone runs dozens of processes in the background; over days and weeks, a stuck or misbehaving one can drag everything down. A restart clears them all and starts fresh.
On a modern iPhone, hold the side button and either volume button until the power slider appears, drag it, wait, then hold the side button again to switch back on. On Android, press and hold the power button and choose Restart (or Power off, then power back on after a few seconds). If your phone is completely frozen and won’t respond to the normal steps, Apple publishes a force-restart sequence: quickly press and release volume up, then volume down, then hold the side button until the Apple logo appears. The whole ritual takes about a minute, and if your slowdown was caused by one rogue process, you’ll feel the difference immediately.
Check your storage — this is the usual suspect
If the restart changed nothing, storage is the next place to look. A phone that’s nearly full genuinely runs worse: the operating system needs free space to shuffle temporary files around, and when there’s barely any, everything slows down. Google’s own support pages phrase it plainly — clearing space on your phone can help it run better.
On iPhone, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. You’ll get a colour-coded breakdown of what’s eating the space, plus recommendations at the top. Two worth using: Offload Unused Apps, which removes the app itself but keeps your documents and data (reinstall it later and it’s exactly as you left it), and reviewing large attachments in Messages, where years of shared photos and videos hide. On Android, open Settings > Storage > Free up space to get a list of photos, videos and unused apps you can delete in a few taps. If you’re backed up to Google Photos, use the “Free up device storage” option inside the Photos app — it removes the local copies of photos that are already safely backed up.
Photos are usually the biggest win, and WhatsApp is often the biggest surprise — media from your chats can quietly pile up into gigabytes. If you haven’t audited it in a while, here’s how WhatsApp eats your phone storage and how to take it back.
On Android, you can also clear an app’s cached files one by one: Settings > Apps, tap the app, then Storage & cache > Clear cache. This deletes temporary data only — not your logins, chats or settings. Google notes the app may be a little slower the next time you open it, since it rebuilds its cache, but a bloated cache stops being rebuilt. Do not tap “Clear storage” unless you’re ready to sign back in and start over — that wipes everything the app holds.
Install the updates you’ve been ignoring
Yes, the update that keeps nagging you can actually make the phone faster. Software updates regularly include performance improvements and bug fixes, and running an old version of an app on a new version of the OS (or vice versa) is a classic recipe for stutter.
On iPhone, go to Settings > General > Software Update and install anything pending. On Android, go to Settings > System > Software updates and follow the instructions — Google recommends being on Wi-Fi with a decent charge before starting. Update your apps too: open the App Store or Play Store and clear the backlog.
One fair warning: right after a major OS update, your phone can feel slower for a day or two. That’s not your imagination — the system is re-indexing files and rebuilding its caches in the background. Give it 48 hours on the charger before you judge.
iPhone owners: check your battery health
This one is iPhone-specific and genuinely important. As your battery chemically ages, it can’t always deliver the peak power the processor asks for. To prevent unexpected shutdowns, iOS quietly reduces the maximum performance of the CPU and GPU — Apple’s own documentation says this can show up as longer app launch times, lower frame rates while scrolling, dimmer backlight, even lower speaker volume.
You can see exactly where you stand. Go to Settings > Battery and look at the battery health section. If it says your battery is supporting normal peak performance, the battery isn’t your problem. If it says performance management has been applied, your phone is being deliberately slowed down to protect itself — and the most effective fix is a battery replacement, not a new phone. That’s a much smaller bill for a phone that feels fast again, and worth pricing out before you shop for a handset.
Quiet down the background noise
Some apps are busy even when you’re not using them — refreshing feeds, syncing files, fetching updates. Individually it’s nothing; across fifty apps it adds up to a phone that’s always slightly out of breath.
First, find the culprits. On iPhone, Settings > Battery shows exactly which apps have been chewing through battery over the last 24 hours or 7 days — the battery hogs are usually the same apps hogging the processor. On Android, the same screen (Settings > Battery) breaks down usage per app. Then act: on iPhone, go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and switch off background refreshing for anything that doesn’t need it live — you can turn off individual apps, or the whole feature at the top of the screen. On Android, the equivalent lives in each app’s battery settings, where you can restrict background activity for the worst offenders.
While you’re in there, this is a good moment to review which apps have which permissions at all — an app you forgot you installed might be refreshing, tracking location and burning cycles in the background. We put together a checklist of the app permissions worth reviewing if you want to do both jobs in one pass.
What not to do
A slow phone attracts bad advice. A few things to skip:
Don’t install a “phone booster” or “RAM cleaner” app. Both iOS and Android manage their own memory aggressively and intelligently; a third-party cleaner can’t do it better, and the sketchiest of them are the ones asking for the most permissions.
Don’t obsessively close your apps. Google says it outright: you don’t usually need to close apps. On Android, you only need to close or force-stop an app that isn’t responding. Force-closing everything and relaunching it from scratch often uses more power and makes the phone feel slower, not faster.
Don’t factory-reset first. A full reset is the nuclear option — it wipes everything and starts you from zero. It’s occasionally justified, but it should be the last thing you try, not the first. Every step above preserves your data and takes a fraction of the time.
The honest bottom line
Work through this list in order — restart, storage, updates, battery, background activity — and most slow phones get noticeably better. Not every phone can be saved: a five-year-old device on its original battery has physical limits no settings screen can fix. But the gap between “feels unusable” and “good for another year or two” is usually just maintenance nobody told you to do. Your phone kept its side of the bargain; this is how you keep yours. We’ve got more of these small, practical fixes in our Tech How-To section.
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