[Android] Phones get slower over time and bog down... what do you do?

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Question 1: Do phones get slower over time?

My take: I do think that over time after installing app over app and having your storage folder littered with a bunch of junk folders/files does slow down phones. Over time, I feel like bootups are slower as there's so many junk apps to run. I treat my phone like a computer. It needs a cleanup over time.

Going off a slight tangent, I play with my gf's SGS3 and my friend's Galaxy Nexus and they both feel laggy/bloated. I'm not even sure why the Gnex looks as slow as it does. Probably a bunch of junk installed on it or something? They commented on how "fast" my SGS2 feels on CM10. I'm not even that impressed by my own SGS2 once held next to my Nexus 4.

Question 2: What do you do over time to clean things out?

My take: I'm a flashaholic and I flash CM nightlies several times a week. Every once in a while I do a full wipe and install apps over again. Dirty flashing tends to cause bugs, FCs, reboots over time. I feel that even wiping the /sdcard folder might help as that folder seems to fill up and makes it hard for me to navigate.

Do you guys clean your phones out? Do a reformat? I do the same with my desktop every year or so. It always feels blazing fast afterward.

So how does this matter?

I seem to think that cleaning out your phone works well (correct me if I'm wrong), but how is the average consumer supposed to know this? My iDevice has not been cleaned out since 2011. It's loaded with 8 pages of apps, a bunch of jailbroken crap, and is still on iOS 5. I cleaned out the iPod touch the other day and loaded iOS6. After being jailbroken, it still feels the same self. I may be incorrect, but I feel like iDevices behave the same way after you install a bunch of apps, take a bunch of photos. There really isn't a need to do a clean wipe. Perhaps those on iOS and Android can comment.

I'm talking to my friend who has the Gnex and she claims her phone is slow and she's ready to dump it for a SGS4. To me the SGS4 would be a nice phone, but even if it's like an HTC One with boosted specs (camera, SAMOLED), I still find the ability to load AOSP ROMs onto a GNex far more comforting. If I were her I'd wait for the next Nexus, but that's just me. To me there's no reason to want to ditch a GNex over performance at this point yet. It's a fixable phone.

 

[Deeko]

1) Always have for me. A lot of Android apps have background services, the more of them you install, the more will be running. Similarly with widgets. The problem is less severe than it used to be, but it still does seem to happen.

2) Factory reset

3) With extra power and flexibility comes extra risk. That's life, really.

 

[notposting]

I bought a Windows Phone nearly 2 years ago. Still fast (on Nexus One/Droid Incredible era hardware). Had been trying to keep my OG Droid running decent but just threw in the towel after awhile.

*wild speculation* perhaps it is the approach -- Android seems to be jamming a desktop OS into a phone. iOS and WP seem far more tailored for mobile, and are more limited because of that. But performance over time is more stable.

 

[ponyo]

The only Android phone that slowed down for me was the Samsung Vibrant. But I think that was due to the crappy files system Samsung used.

No slow down with stock Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7. Then again I don't mess with custom roms so there's nothing to mess up.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

The only Android phone that slowed down for me was the Samsung Vibrant. But I think that was due to the crappy files system Samsung used.

No slow down with stock Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7. Then again I don't mess with custom roms so there's nothing to mess up.

well if slowdowns are a real issue, it should happen on custom roms or stock roms. my friend's gnex is pure stock, yet she complains about it all the time.

when i took a look at my gf's incredible 2 and the # of apps installed/running it looked like a computer loaded with spyware/junkware. You know those computers where you look at the tray and you see 50 colorful items? Yeah. The # of notifications she gets from apps like Pulse, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Whatsapp, is ridiculous.

 

[lopri]

Why not get her an iPhone? That's what I do. Can't speak for slowdown myself because my experience of Android is way too short, but I tend to recommend iDevices for seniors and juniors while recommending Android devices for my peers.

Edit: Didn't mean to say that your gf is a senior/junior, my bad. Sorry that's not what I meant.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Why not get her an iPhone? That's what I do. Can't speak for slowdown myself because my experience of Android is way too short, but I tend to recommend iDevices for seniors and juniors while recommending Android devices for my peers.

Edit: Didn't mean to say that your gf is a senior/junior, my bad. Sorry that's not what I meant.

Well they're technically competent individuals, so they want Android. However they won't root nor install custom ROMs, and I'm not sure if it's wise for me to step in to beef up their phone.

However, this is like almost all computers. People naturally will complain about computers after 2-3 years. It's usually due to the amount of junk that gets installed over time. I have an 8 year old laptop that I use to surf the net in my room. It won't do 720p Youtube, but it surfs just great for everything else. Secret? Keep Windows cleaned up and in a minimal state. I did a reformat in 2011, and it's been great to me since as it's a light use laptop now. Hell I did a good portion of my Master's Thesis on it. It's even good for Office 2010.

But most people will tell me their XYZ computer is slow and they're looking for a new one. My gf just threw out her 2008 laptop? I asked her why? I use my 2004 Dell and my 2008 MacBook Pro just fine. If you keep a computer well maintained, there's no reason you cannot use it for surfing/chatting.

Anyway, what I'm saying is a good chunk of complaints that XYZ computer/phone is slow can be mostly resolved if you do a full wipe.

 

[lopri]

Well, maybe we need a community that rate Android apps, independently from Google's influence. Since google's egalitarian approach to developers isn't in an of itself a bad policy, that's probably one way to go about it as a community.

While I haven't experienced first hand, I did see heavily carrier-skinned Android phones running slower than they should on displays. Reviewers can contribute informing consumers of such, instead of be obsessed with market share and margins.

 

[Zaap]

My Droid X would slow to a crawl after a few days of use. But a simple reboot would bring it back to life.

No such slowdown on my SGS3.

 

[Red Storm]

My iPhone 4 began to slow down after a while. Same thing happened with my Droid X. I haven't kept any other phone long enough to notice any slow down.

 

[Mopetar]

Some of it is probably actual slowdown due to the file system getting full and stuff being put all over the place, which even with flash memory is going to have a little impact. Updates for the OS and Apps aren't going to be as good as clean install over time and probably become more demanding of the hardware as they gain features and become more complex. There's also the other side, where after using anything else that's remotely faster, even for a brief while, whatever you have is just going to feel slower, and when you get a new device yourself, it's going to feel blazing fast in comparison, but after a while that becomes the new norm.

I remember when I used to be on dial up internet and it would take 10 - 20 seconds for a page to load, but it didn't bother me much. Now if a page isn't loading in 2 seconds it feels ridiculously slow, even though that page is full of flash, java script, and other fancy stuff that makes it more difficult to load and render. Now that I have an SSD, anything that takes more than 10 seconds to boot or doesn't launch apps almost instantly would feel like it was crawling along.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

stuff gets corrupted as well. the keyboard stopped working with stock browser on my droid x, works fine with boat

hardware wearing out (like digitizers) and more crowded networks can also make phones seem slower

 

[bigrash]

Factory reset. It'll speed things right up.

 

[vshah]

i used to notice eventual slowdowns on my gnex when i had 200+ apps installed. i realized that i never used some of them. now it's around 45 apps, and i keep an eye on wakelocks etc. that may be introduced by new apps. probably helps that I have a nexus 4 now, but I don't notice any slowdowns. android is great in that apps have a lot of freedom in what they can do and when they can do it, but you need to be vigilant or you'll end up with the equivalent of 30 icons in your systray.

i flash nightlies every day as well, but i just dirty flash. CM install scripts wipe cache anyway, any additional wiping you're doing isn't really doing much. (unless you're wiping data and restoring from titanium backup every time. i'm too impatient for that).

one thing I do is disable notification services on any app that I don't really need it on - google+, facebook, twitter etc.

also check out the autostarts app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.elsdoerfer.android.autostarts&hl=en
can see and control what runs at startup.

i also run fstrim every few weeks on the cache and data partitions, seems to help:


on the iOS front, you'll never have this problem because apps can't run in the background, save for a few system-managed services. compare to android where you can have 10s of apps running services in the background at the same time, and all initializing on startup. can definitely make a phone feel slow.


at the end of the day though, i think we're at the point with hardware with phones like the nexus 4, where even if you have a ton of apps installed, i haven't really noticed any problems. i have 2, one is kept stock. no problems on either.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

Factory reset. It'll speed things right up.

what does a factory reset do. does it cause you to lose all you settings/photos/etc...and reinstall an earlier android version?

how about if you downloaded updates, would those be included after a reset

what if files/apps were corrupted, would that fix that?

 

[Chiropteran]

I bet 90% of the time it's just apps. Uninstall apps that run in the background and the phone will seem fast again. If all else fails, do a factory reset.

 

[WelshBloke]

I bet 90% of the time it's just apps. Uninstall apps that run in the background and the phone will seem fast again. If all else fails, do a factory reset.

I'd put my money on this as well.

 

[Stone Rain]

I have a 7" tablet that bogs down and gets really slow after around 3 weeks, nothing short of a factory reset fixes it.

 

[s44]

None of my devices have had this problem. I'm guessing that as the number of apps goes up, the odds of getting the device-hog one multiply. Of course, a friend had this happen to her the very first week of owning the i4S...

There may also be a trim issue; there was an app for that but I've lost the link.

 

[PowerYoga]

happened to the stock samsung rom for the S3 for me. I flashed it with a custom one and never saw it happening again.

I'm inclined to say it's a problem with stock roms since they're not particularly designed well (especially verizon ones), but of course the evidence is anecdotal.

 

[WelshBloke]

happened to the stock samsung rom for the S3 for me. I flashed it with a custom one and never saw it happening again.

I'm inclined to say it's a problem with stock roms since they're not particularly designed well (especially verizon ones), but of course the evidence is anecdotal.

I'm running a stock SGS3 ROM (well sort of, its got a custom recovery and kernel and its rooted) and I've never had this problem. Stock ROMs dont really behave any different to custom ones with respect to how things run in the background. (they may have less stuff running originally though thats giving you more leeway)

Obviously if you install a butt ton of apps that all run in the background and poll data regularly youre going to have some impact on performance but just uninstalling unneeded apps solves that. Its not like Windows where even if you uninstall stuff it chokes up the registry. Those orphaned folders don't do anything but take up some room.

 

[s44]

Here's the trim app.

 

[PowerYoga]

I'm running a stock SGS3 ROM (well sort of, its got a custom recovery and kernel and its rooted) and I've never had this problem. Stock ROMs dont really behave any different to custom ones with respect to how things run in the background. (they may have less stuff running originally though thats giving you more leeway)

Obviously if you install a butt ton of apps that all run in the background and poll data regularly youre going to have some impact on performance but just uninstalling unneeded apps solves that. Its not like Windows where even if you uninstall stuff it chokes up the registry. Those orphaned folders don't do anything but take up some room.

Here's the thing though: I used the stock rom for a month or 2 and installed a fair bit of stuff on it before it started slowing down. Then I flashed a new rom, installed ALL the same stuff plus a bunch more, and it never slowed down. It's been at least 3-4 months now and still no slowdowns.

Unless the rom has built in features to manage these running apps and the stock verizon rom doesn't I really don't see any other explanation.

 

[WelshBloke]

Here's the thing though: I used the stock rom for a month or 2 and installed a fair bit of stuff on it before it started slowing down. Then I flashed a new rom, installed ALL the same stuff plus a bunch more, and it never slowed down. It's been at least 3-4 months now and still no slowdowns.

Unless the rom has built in features to manage these running apps and the stock verizon rom doesn't I really don't see any other explanation.

Like I said its probably more to do with what was originally installed in the stock ROM (any carrier bloat) taking up some resources in the first place.

Apps is Apps and they work the same on a stock ROM as a custom one.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I am big on flashing ROMs and I usually wipe data on either the fourth update of the same ROM, or for new ROMs which I average about one a month. I just bring all my favorite apps back via titanium.