When was the last time you bought yourself a new phone? Do you remember the things that excited you about it? The software, the design, the display, the camera, general performance, and the battery. You held it and appreciated the freshness, shininess, and the newness it had to it – inside and out.
Fast forward you’ve now used it for a while or even years and it no longer feels top form as it once was. That is, your apps take longer to open/don’t work properly, can’t add a new app without deleting an old one, out of space for your new pictures??? This could be due to a number of reasons that build even over the shortest of time periods such as GPS services, Bluetooth, cookies, and ad networks that you access daily starting up problems in your device background. The phone then gets overloaded with fragments of data from these different apps affecting performance. This all takes away from a focused phone user experience and definitely calls for one thing – a good deep-cleaning to help restore the phone’s luster. Listed below are some of the ways;
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Freeing up space
One thing about smartphones is the more of your storage you use, the lesser your performance. Therefore, ensure that at any one time not more than 75% of your storage is used up. Check your device storage to identify how much is used and what apps/files are using up the most of it.
To free up space, open Settings > Storage> ‘Free up space’ option to identify the apps you haven’t used in the past 90 or so days/no longer use and delete them accordingly. The same applies to downloads. For photos, storage over Google Photos can be enabled to allow for deleting them off the phone after upload.
Clearing cache/app data
During the running of apps, they create cache files which make them run faster. The challenge, with continuous app usage, the cache files continue to build up to a size that can be over 10X that of the app. To save space, open Settings> Storage > Other to view your downloaded apps in order of storage they take up. Click on any app to see how much space is taken up by the cache. Select the “Clear cache” to clear up the storage.
Factory reset
This is the method of last resort if the ones above didn’t help with app performance. With this, you lose everything from data, to apps, to photos and saved settings. To reset, open Settings > System > Reset options > Factory Reset. This makes the phone new and brings it back to its initial speed.
After doing that inside clean, it’s only right that you as well give a boost to your phone’s outside appearance and restore that sturdy feeling in your hand. This is done on;
- Phone screens. These can be cleaned through the use of scratch-free wipes for smartphones to wipe the phone clean.
- Charging ports and speakers. These have no covering and can easily get clogged by dirt and debris. This brings about inhibited charging while for the clogged speakers, the muted output. These should regularly be cleaned by a professional to blast the holes with compressed air to help clean them out.