How To Make iPhone Faster

Is your iPhone lagging, slowing down, or just plain refusing to work in some instances? While Apple is known for producing stellar phones that last longer than Androids, iPhones tend to slow down like any other device. However, there are ways to make your iPhone faster too.

In this article, we’ll go over how you can make your iPhone faster and ensure that slowpoke never gets to experience slowdowns again!

Turn Off Background App Refresh

Background App Refresh constantly checks for new notifications for each application. This can significantly drain your battery, especially if you have an older device already low on battery health.

Besides battery drain, constantly checking for notifications in the background can significantly slow down your device. Therefore, turning it off can help make your iPhone much faster. Here’s how you can do so.

Free Up Your Storage

A device with no extra storage can get extremely slow simply because there’s no more place to store temporary files. Besides that, it is much easier for your phone’s internals to find a file it needs from a cluster of 1000 as compared to 5000.

After a certain point, having your storage filled to the brim can be highly detrimental to your device. This issue is alleviated in newer iPhone (12+) models with faster storage. But, for most, you’ll need to clear up some storage.

Generally, we recommend that your iPhone always has 20-25% of its total storage free at all times. We don’t suggest keeping tons of files on your phone. For instance, having 30,000 images, no matter how small their size, can be quite debilitating for your CPU.

Replace Your Battery

Apple purposefully underclocks your iPhone if it has low battery health or if the battery is faulty. With an underclock, your device will perform much slower than its advertised speed and therefore be highly laggy and choppy.

There’s no easy way to fix this issue; in most cases, you’ll need to bite the bullet and replace your battery with a newer one. As soon as you do, you’ll notice a dramatic increase in speed, and your iPhone will be much faster.

To check if your battery is the culprit, head to Settings > “Battery” > “Battery Health” and see whether you get a “Service Needed” message. If you do, your battery is the reason your phone is slow, and you should change it quickly to get your iPhone back to the races again.

Turn On Reduce Motion

Animations can place a lot of strain on your iPhone’s CPU, especially if it is older. By turning on “Reduce Motion“, your phone will run considerably faster due to two reasons. Firstly, animation adds a little delay to the premise of opening or closing an application. With the feature disabled, you won’t have to deal with that.

Next, as we mentioned earlier since there will be less load on your CPU, your iPhone can allocate its resources to more urgent tasks, thereby increasing its speed. We recommend turning on “Reduce Motion” on iPhones 4-5 years old.

Here’s how you can do so.

1. Open the Settings application on your iPhone.
2. Head to “Accessibility” and turn on “Reduce Motion“.

Turn Off Low Power Mode

“Low Power Mode” underclocks your iPhone’s CPU to conserve battery. On newer iPhones like the 13 Pro and Pro Max, the mode also reduces the phone’s refresh rate and disables some background notifications.

You can manually turn on “Low Power Mode” or have it automatically activate as soon as your iPhone hits below 15%. Sometimes, you might not have noticed that the mode is activated, which might have caused your iPhone to slow down.

To turn off “Low Power Mode”, head to Settings > “Battery” > “Low Power Mode” and change the toggle. After doing so, you’ll notice a massive change in your iPhone’s overall speed. 

Reset Your iPhone

Your iPhone may have tons of temporary files/storage that might be hard to clear manually. In these cases, a reset can help with your iPhone’s speed. The caveat is that you cannot restore your iPhone from a backup after resetting; otherwise, it will return to the same state.

We recommend starting from a blank slate to test whether your iPhone has gotten old or whether it was needless processes bogging it down. After resetting your phone, install only the essentials and keep clutter to a bare minimum.

If, with these applications, your iPhone runs fine and is considerably faster – then it was all the clutter slowing down your device in the first place. If your device remains slow even after a fresh reset, then the chances are that it either is a bad battery or your iPhone has just gotten too old.

Switch to the Cloud

With the advent of cloud-based applications that can perform tasks like desktop-grade applications, their use has skyrocketed. With a slow iPhone, the worst thing you can do is to keep placing more load onto it, and eventually, it’ll slow down to a complete halt.

To increase your iPhone’s speed, take all the processing off-site and keep all your files, music, and videos in the cloud. This way, your iPhone won’t have to churn as much data or process and will act as a mere display, input, and output device rather than the processing powerhouse it once was.

For instance, instead of using Photoshop on your phone, you can switch to a web-based application like Canva and let it handle the grunt work. Moreover, instead of storing photos and videos on the iPhone, you can use Google Drive, iCloud, or Dropbox to view all your photos and images from their respective applications.

With so much processing and storage load taken off your device, you’ll see a moderate increase in your iPhone’s overall speed. 

Conclusion

There’s no one-size-fits-all method to make your iPhone faster. However, from turning off background refresh to freeing up your storage, that’s pretty much all you can do to ensure you get an iPhone back to speed!