How can you speed up your older iPhone or iPad?
Reboot your device once in a while
Remember that your iOS device is in fact a computer, so any reboot refreshes its memory and all the underlying services, which are reinitialised. It’s a good idea to turn off your device completely and reboot it regularly - this may produce a (slight) improvement in speed. Closing apps won’t help as iOS sees to it that inactive apps don’t consume processing power or memory.
Fewer screen effects
From iOS 7, your iOS device comes with several extra visual effects. Fortunately, you can disable them easily in order to gain speed and increase battery life. How? Open the Settings app, go to General ; Accessibility and enable the Reduce Motion option. This disables the “depth effect” for icons and notifications as well as other animation effects such as screen transitions. Also check out the Increase Contrast option and enable Reduce Transparency . This reduces the transparency effect of the screen.
Remove apps and free up space
If your iOS device is running out of storage space, this may slow it down as iOS requires at least 1GB of free space to save temporary files, amongst other things. The simplest method of freeing up space is to remove the apps you no longer use. Launch the Settings app and, in General ; Storage and iCloud Usage ; Manage Storage check how much storage your apps use and which ones can produce the largest storage gain. In some cases you can gain storage within an app itself, for instance by deleting cookies and other data in Safari ( Settings app, scroll to Safari and tap the Clear History and Website Data button). Also check whether you can delete any superfluous photos or music.
Keep apps from refreshing
Apps that constantly check the background to see if any new e-mails or messages have arrived keep your device occupied. You can disable this feature too: launch the Settings app, go to General ; Background App Refresh and decide whether you wish to disable this feature entirely or only for individual apps (e.g. Facebook). Note. You will obviously have to open the app concerned manually from now on in order to check whether anything new has come in.
Use Apple apps
Third-party apps that aren’t built in typically require more from your device. If you find that such an app is becoming sluggish on your old device, try switching to the Apple equivalent (e.g. Safari instead of Chrome), as these built-in apps have obviously been developed optimally by Apple for its own devices.
Don’t upgrade to the next iOS too fast
People tend to think that a more recent iOS will improve the performance of their device, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Because of its age, each iOS device at one time or another reaches a point where its hardware can no longer keep up with the latest iOS. On older devices it’s therefore advisable to wait a while before installing the next update. Tip. Find out online what other users experienced after upgrading.
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