Before you delete your vacation photos or think about buying a new phone for 800 euros, know that the problem probably doesn’t come from there.
There’s nothing more frustrating than a smartphone that starts to lag when it was working perfectly a few months ago. Our phones have become extensions of ourselves, and when they slow down, our entire daily life is impacted. They have in fact replaced our diaries, our cameras, our music players and even act as a games console or extra computer. Faced with this constant demand for performance, it is entirely logical that the hardware eventually runs out of steam. But contrary to what one might believe, a drop in performance is not necessarily synonymous with a material problem or irreversible planned obsolescence.
When the first slowness appears, the majority of users instinctively adopt the same reflexes. We start by restarting the device, hoping that a simple “reset” will be enough to reset the counters to zero. If that doesn’t work, we then attack the storage by frantically deleting photos, videos or applications that we consider unnecessary, thinking that full memory is the only culprit. Some even go so far as to fear infection by a virus or resign themselves to the idea that they will have to buy a new model. However, there is a gray area in the management of the system that many ignore and which is often the real source of this digital congestion.
To give your phone an immediate boost, all you need is a simple cleaning of the application caches. This is a buffer where applications and websites store a multitude of temporary data such as images, scripts or preloads to display faster the next time they are opened. If the initial intention is good, the accumulation of these thousands of files ends up having the opposite effect by overloading the system. So, by emptying these caches, you free up valuable space and reduce processor workload without erasing your personal data, passwords or game saves. Result: the phone regains a fluidity close to its first days.
To clear the cache on Android, all you have to do is go to your phone’s settings, look for the section dedicated to storage or applications, then select the most demanding software one by one to click on the cache storage option. Unfortunately, this freedom of management is not offered to iPhone users, because the iOS system does not allow this manipulation application by application. On Apple devices, the only effective manual action to regain some speed will be to clean the browsing data of your web browsers, whether by clearing history and site data in Safari settings, or by deleting browsing data directly from the internal menu of the Google Chrome application.
