Phone Cleaners or Phone Killers?

By David Wilson

​Perhaps you’ve been browsing the internet with your device when all of a sudden a pop-up ad appears, advertising an app that promises to boost the speed of your device! While this may seem promising, many of the apps that promote benefits for your phone end up doing more harm than good. Furthermore, your phone has a lot of these cleaning features built right into your device’s standard software. The purpose of this blog is to talk about different ways in which you can maintain your device without the addition of the buggy applications

Storage

For many who have had their devices for a long time, storage space begins to become an issue. In order to prevent this problem, I recommend doing a spring cleaning by deleting unnecessary content and applications from your device. The easiest place to start is by going through your applications and deleting ones that you don’t use. This can be done by selecting and holding on the app until an option comes up for you to uninstall. On iPhones, this will show up in the form of a circle with an “X” inside. Next, I would head to your gallery and look through your pictures and videos to delete ones that are duplicates or no longer needed. Videos take up much more space than photos so deleting those can free up lots of room. If you don’t want to delete your pictures, you can also transfer them off of your device to your computer or a cloud server. If you have an Android device, most phones have the capability to expand their memory via an SD card. Unfortunately, Apple phones do not have this ability. 

Speed

Many believe that the speed of their device can be improved by simply closing background applications. Unfortunately, this actually does more harm than good for your devices speed. Engineers at both Apple and Google confirmed this in an article from Wired, published in 2016. If you have an app that is constantly running when you don’t want it to be, the chances are you don’t want or need that app on your device. Just delete it! The main reason phones begin to slow after having them for a couple years is because technology is just advancing at such a high rate that the old hardware wasn’t designed to handle all the new applications. Thankfully, with this fast advancement of tech, upgrading to a newer device is cheaper than ever. With how much you use your phone on a daily basis you should really have something that is more helpful than frustrating.

Battery Life

Just like a car never gets the gas mileage it did when it was new, your phone will also not be able to remain charged as long as it once did. This is simply due to the natural degradation of the battery. Thankfully, this tech has improved a lot in recent years making it not as noticeable. Many will try to combat this occurrence by utilizing different charging techniques. Personally, I recommend all my customers simply charge their phones as needed. It makes no sense to adjust your phone charging habits to minimally impact the life of your battery. If you are curious of the health of your battery, most devices have an option under the Settings tab that allows you to see how it is performing. Similar to the performance section, you actually negatively impact the battery life of your device by exiting background apps. The only things you can really do to help this is delete unnecessary apps and lower your screen brightness. 

Conclusion 

I hope you take away from this blog that you should never install an app that promises to increase the speed or battery life of your device. As stated, these will actually end up doing more harm than good. Take the strategies listed above and use them to ensure that your device is performing at its peak capability. If it seems confusing on paper, take some time to stop into your local mkCellular and let an associate walk you through the best practices of maintaining your device. In my opinion, stopping in is the best thing to do so we can customize the maintenance to your device.