What Makes Smartphones Slow?

16 September 2017
 Categories: , Blog

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Do you have a brand new smartphone, such as a newly-released iPhone model, or even last year's model fresh from a new box? Even among other major smartphone brands, these devices aren't cheap and should be performing fast enough to bring up apps in seconds, websites at the speed of available internet, and shouldn't crash unless the app is written poorly. To understand why a smartphone isn't running as fast as you'd like, here are a few ways to isolate the cause of the problem to the phone, then fix the phone's issue--unless a repair or replacement is needed.

It Could Be The App

What exactly is moving slow on your phone? Is it a specific app, or is it everything? Even if that app is the only reason you have a smartphone, you need to make sure that the app isn't the problem. If the app is at fault, not even switching companies can fix the problem.

Not all apps are designed by programmers with years of professional experience and a focus on customer support. Just as many people across the world have smartphones and new ways to explore the internet, many new app developers found their programming passion overnight. You're essentially dealing with a new age of artists and engineers that may not be following conventional programming or business rules.

Has the app always performed well until recently? Go to the app store and look for any reviews that talk about recent performance issues. Find out if a new update or patch happened, as these changes affect the code of the app and can make it work incorrectly. Even if you didn't have a problem with an old version, some security or performance issues you never noticed may have needed a fix, and that fix could have broken the way you use the app.

Device Overload And Cleanup Options

Smartphones are handheld computers with the "phone" function as a small feature. Just like desktop computers and laptops, they have a processor, memory, storage drive, and other components that apps (and the phone's operating system or OS) use as resources.

If there aren't enough resources, apps will either run slowly or not run at all. If your phone is new, how could there not be enough resources? It could be an issue of an app developer creating too many demands or not controlling how an app requests resources, but the more likely cause is having too many apps running at the same time.

Do you close apps when you're done with them? Are your apps designed to run in the background? Having too many apps calculating things and essentially doing their jobs at the same time--even if they're not on the screen--is a big cause of performance issues.

The problem gets more complicated if the app developer doesn't know how to program an app to run on reduced resources in the background, or if there's an error causing it to be stuck open. If you need an app that has one of these performance issues, you can get an iPhone repair professional to help you contact the developer with the information needed for a fix.

If your smartphone is more than 2 or 3 years old, you could be working with older, slower hardware. As new phones hit the market, app developers have to play a game of using the newest resources available without alienating too many old devices. At some point, you'll need to upgrade.

If you're not sure when upgrades are needed, contact an iPhone repair Company, like Refurb Kings, to get even more targeted guidance.