Tips and tricks for speeding up your Android device

We often talk about ways that you can increase the performance of your device and we’ll take a little bit closer look at different ways you can boost and optimize any Android smartphone or tablet. From the HTC One M8 to the Nexus 4, here are a few tips and tricks you can try to get more oomph out of your device.

For most of the options, you will need to have Developer Options enabled on your device. To do this, head to Settings > About Phone/Tablet and then tap on the Build Number until a message pops up that indicates that developers options are now enabled.

Sure, having the animations on is a nice thing for those who enjoy the visual appeal, but they can slow down the system. Thankfully, you can slow down the animation or even turn them off if you so chose. Head over to Developer Options and then scroll down until you get to Window Animation Scale, Transition Animation Scale, and Animator duration scale. For each of them, you can scale down the animations to 0.5x from 1.0x or even just turn them off. When you do this, you’ll notice that menus and transitions will appear faster.

The cache is basically a pool of information that a browser draws upon to help quick load webpages that you’ve visited before. However, as time goes on, the cache can become unwieldy in term of size and can have a bunch of old data that isn’t even being used by the browser anymore.

Whatever browser you use on Android, you can clear the cache. In general, this option is given to you in the Settings of the browser and in whatever heading controls the privacy and browsing history. On Firefox,  it’s here:

Android does have a power management system built in, but it’s not always the smartest. The downside to this is that applications and processes tend to stay active and hog memory long after they’ve stopped being useful. As such, you can see slowdowns on your device as these apps continue to chug away in the background. You can easily delete the cache and stop app processes for those that are of no use for you from within the Apps portion of settings. Do be careful with what you stop/delete: don’t touch anything that has to do with Google Play or Android Services. 

Again, be careful with what you’re choosing to clear with this option. If some applications are having a harder time launching or they stop working when before they worked just fine, you may have a problem with the app cache. You can easily empty the cache and start from scratch by heading to Apps > Selecting the app in question and then  hitting Clear Cache. This will delete all saved login information, so for apps that require that, you’ll need to re-input your credentials before being able to use them again.

This might sound a bit silly, but updates bring improvements in general to apps that you have download and can help them run smoother, provide security updates, and more. You can manually check for app updates by heading to the Google Play Store, heading to My Apps, and then click on Update All. If any apps require additional permissions due to updates, you’ll be warned beforehand and will have a chance to review them before accepting the update.  You can also enable automatic updates from the Google Play Store, so that you don’t have to manually update each and every time.  Do this by heading to the Settings in Google Play and checking off Auto-update apps.

You most likely have widgets on your home screen, but how many of them do you actually use? If there are some widgets that are just taking up space on the home screen, get rid of them. As well, if you have any unnecessary home screens that only have a few apps on them, make sure to organize them onto other pages and then delete the empty pages.

A new launcher will not work miracles, but you might find it adds a little speed over whatever stock launcher you’re currently using. Some launchers are made for customization and allow users to change a ton of options on them, others are optimized right off the bat for speed. Depending on what you actually want, check out our previous article on our top ten launchers for Android.

If you have any other tips for boosting your Android smartphone or tablet, please let us know in the comments.