5 Ways You Can Improve Your Android Phone Efficiency

Android phones usually run a little slower each month, and the battery drains faster than it did when brand new. Many Android users don’t know they’re only using about 30% of the optimization features their Android already has built in.

The built-in settings on your phone can extend battery life by around 30% and make everything run noticeably faster – and the best part is that you don’t need any third-party apps or technical knowledge. Just a handful of small changes to your battery and storage preferences will bring a slow phone right back to how fast it was when you first bought it. Digital Wellbeing tools complement these adjustments very well and help you to get more out of your device.

Let’s talk about some practical tips to make your Android phone run faster and smoother!

Improve Your Battery Life with Android Settings

Android phones have earned their reputation for mediocre battery life, and if yours dies before getting home from work each day, you’re definitely not alone. Android ships with a few battery management tools built right into the operating system. But most users never even know these features are there. These tools can add hours to your phone’s daily battery life though you do need to know where to find them and how to configure them properly.

Adaptive Battery is probably the smartest battery-saving feature that Android has built in. The system uses machine learning as it watches how you actually use your apps over time and slowly builds up a profile of the apps you open every day versus the ones that just sit there untouched for weeks. After the AI gathers enough data about your habits (which takes around 2 weeks of normal phone use), it starts limiting background activity for the apps you never open. Google’s own tests show this feature can improve battery life by 15% to 30% and it works out to a few extra hours of use for most users.

Most users never get the full benefits from Adaptive Battery and a few reasons explain why this happens. For starters, the feature is buried pretty deep in the settings menu and let’s be honest – most of us don’t dig around in there very much. But the bigger problem is that even when users do turn it on they usually switch it back off after just a couple days because the improvements aren’t dramatic right away. The machine learning needs about 2 weeks to learn your patterns and start making a difference. During those first 2 weeks the battery life might not seem any better at all.

Android also gives you 3 different battery management modes and each one serves a different purpose. Adaptive mode strikes the best balance for daily use and allows your phone to work well while it conserves power where possible. Restricted mode becomes useful when your battery drops dangerously low and you need to stretch those final percentage points as far as possible. Unrestricted mode essentially removes all limitations and it makes sense only when you need absolute maximum performance and have a charger nearby.

Much of the conventional wisdom about smartphone batteries has become outdated. But these myths persist and actually cause users to damage their batteries unnecessarily. The old advice about completely draining your battery before charging applied to nickel-cadmium batteries from decades ago. But if you follow it with modern lithium-ion batteries it actually speeds up wear and cuts down on its lifespan. Along the same lines, the habit of always force-closing apps to save battery tends to backfire – Android’s memory management works more efficiently if you let it manage apps on its own terms and repeatedly closing and reopening apps uses more power than leaving them in the background.

Free Up the Space on Your Phone

Android actually doesn’t like it when your storage drops below 10% of what’s available. At that point, the system has problems with even basic file management tasks. Everything slows down because Android is frantically moving data around to make room for new information. The apps take ages to load and your camera can completely freeze right when you need to take a photo. The whole phone grinds to a halt.

Apps like Instagram and TikTok usually turn out to be the main offenders – and I’m talking about a few gigabytes of cached data that’s been quietly accumulating without anyone realizing it. Every time you scroll through your feed and watch videos or view photos, the app saves copies of that content locally on your device. The idea is that it’ll load faster the next time you want to see it, except that these apps almost never bother to clean up their own mess.

Google’s Files app recently revealed something interesting – the average person has around 2.5 gigabytes of duplicate photos just sitting on their phone. We’re talking about all that storage space taken up by photos that are identical – maybe you tapped the shutter button twice by accident, or your camera app saved the normal and HDR versions. WhatsApp tends to be especially problematic in this department. The app automatically downloads and saves every photo and video that anyone sends to you, from memes from your cousin to blurry screenshots from group chats. It all gets stored permanently unless you specifically go in and delete it.

Automatic cleaning apps sound convenient, and tons of them out there claim they’ll free up space with zero effort from you. The big problem is that these apps have to run non-stop in the background and they’re always going through your files and checking on how much storage you have left. All that background work ends up eating up more of your phone’s resources and it’s the exact opposite of what you want when you’re trying to speed your phone up. Manual cleaning lets you stay in charge – you can choose what gets deleted and when you want to do it.

Remember to check your downloads folder while you’re at it! Those old work PDFs, instruction manuals that you downloaded 6 months ago and random files you saved and forgot about are probably still taking up space. Android doesn’t automatically delete these downloads after a certain period – everything stays there indefinitely unless you actively remove it yourself.

Turn Off Background Apps on Your Phone

Most users would be shocked if they counted up the apps that are always active on their phone even when the screen is off. Go ahead and check your settings now – you’ll probably find somewhere around 40 or 50 apps that have permission to run in the background. Every one of these is a little program that can wake up your phone at any time just to check for updates or refresh its content or do whatever else it wants.

The annoying part about this situation is that Android does actually give you pretty decent controls for managing these permissions. The phone manufacturers seem to deliberately hide these controls way down in the settings menu where most users will never find them. You usually have to dig around in something called Advanced Access or maybe App Permissions or some other vague category in your app settings. It takes a few extra taps and a bit of patience to find what you’re looking for and that’s probably not accidental on their part.

Very few apps actually need background access to work right. Your messaging apps obviously need this permission because otherwise you wouldn’t receive texts when they come in. Email is another one that makes sense. Shopping apps and games don’t need to be checking all the time for new deals or achievements or whatever else since you’re not even using them. Some users are reluctant to restrict these permissions though. Missing an important notification can feel risky. Once you limit the background activity for most of your apps you’ll probably find that you can focus much better on the activities that actually need your attention. All the important messages still come through just fine and you waste way less time responding to random alerts that could have waited until later.

Android 12 did make this whole situation somewhat better through its new restriction system. The operating system now pays attention to how you use each app and then automatically adjusts permissions based on those patterns. The system still needs some work and it’s not going to catch everything. It does help to cut down on the constant load on your phone’s processor and memory without requiring you to manually adjust each app yourself.

Speed Up Your Phone’s Animations

Your phone feels sluggish. But the processor itself is actually working just fine. What’s actually causing all that frustrating lag has nothing to do with hardware at all – it’s those little animations that automatically play every time you open an app or switch between screens. Android builds these visual transitions into the system deliberately because they want everything to feel smooth and polished. The problem is that each animation takes about 0.5 seconds to finish and the phone won’t let you do anything else until it’s done.

Developer Options is where you can control these animation speeds and you can even disable them if you want. The name might sound a bit technical. But it’s just a hidden menu with extra settings that Google hides from the main interface. Once you’re in the menu you can adjust the animation speeds from the default 1x down to 0.5x for faster transitions or turn them off completely if that’s what you want.

Change all 3 of these settings to 0.5x and the difference is immediate. Your phone will respond twice as fast to each tap and swipe that you make. Apps will open immediately and menus will appear without any delay whatsoever. The hardware hasn’t become any faster. But your phone will respond as if it’s brand new.

This adjustment is actually great if you get motion sickness from the default animations and it’s perfect for power users who want their device to line up with their navigation speed. Google buries these options in the settings menu because they’re focused on making Android feel the same on every device right out of the box. But once you know where to go you can adjust your phone to match your preferences and make it work the way that feels most natural to you!

Use These Digital Wellbeing Tools

Your phone is always refreshing apps in the background. Recent research found that the average user checks their phone about 96 times throughout the day. Every single check triggers your apps to refresh themselves even when there’s nothing new to show you.

Digital Wellbeing has a feature called Focus Mode that solves most of this unnecessary processing. Enabling Focus Mode for specific apps completely suspends them from running at all. We’re talking about a possible reduction in background processing of 40% that translates directly into better battery life and smoother performance. Those suspended apps literally can’t do a single activity until you manually unsuspend them.

Wind Down mode works in a very different and targets a different problem completely. At whatever time you schedule it for each night, your entire phone screen switches over to grayscale. Without any colors on the screen, your phone gets much less interesting to stare at. Casinos have known about the power of color for decades – that’s why they use bright colorful screens everywhere to keep customers playing longer – and your phone manufacturers use the exact same psychology.

App timers work well when you actually respect them. You set limits for the apps that usually suck up most of your time and once you hit that limit, the app pauses itself and gives you a gentle reminder to take a break. Many users skip these features because they’re worried they’ll miss something big that’s happening online.

Your phone use with real focus changes everything about how you look at content. The mindless scroll sessions disappear and you give genuine attention to what’s actually worth your time. These usage management tools work hand in hand with the technical optimizations you’ve already set up on your device. Your phone will run much smoother when you use it deliberately throughout the day instead of letting apps churn away in the background for hours straight.

Trade Your Old Phone for Cash Today

These Android adjustments are actually much easier and once you learn how to make them, you’ll never have to put up with a sluggish phone or a battery that dies halfway through the day again. What’s nice about these fixes is that they cost nothing at all – no new phone needed, no expensive apps to download, no technical expertise necessary. Using these changes together will usually stretch your battery life 30% to 50% longer than it does now and your phone will respond to every tap and swipe without any of that annoying lag – it’s the difference between always hunting for chargers throughout the day and actually having battery left as you crawl into bed at night.

The whole process is much easier when you take it step by step too. You could change your battery settings in the next 5 minutes as you finish reading this, then maybe spend 20 minutes this weekend clearing your old storage and slowly work through the rest of the adjustments whenever you have a few spare minutes over the next week or 2. Your phone will start to feel brand new again and pretty soon you’ll be the friend that everyone asks whenever anybody in your circle complains about their phone acting up.

Each month you can squeeze out of your existing phone is another month that your device stays out of an electronic waste facility and those months do matter for the environment over time. And passing these tips along to friends in your life multiplies that effect as you help them save more money in their pockets too.

On the subject of maximum value from your devices, at ecoATM we have an easy way to help once you do eventually upgrade. We have more than 6,000 kiosks scattered throughout the country which means you can probably find one nearby, walk up with your old phone, get an instant evaluation and leave with cash in hand or an electronic payment you can put toward your next device. The whole transaction takes just a few minutes, you’re doing something beneficial for the environment and you get paid for a phone that would otherwise collect dust in a drawer. 

You can check what your phone is worth at a kiosk near you whenever you’re ready!