How to organise your phone and speed it up

To be usable your phone needs to be organised. If you’ve never done a little cleaning and decluttering, the overcrowding of your storage space and the lack of order can quickly make your phone hard to get around. If your phone is beginning to run out of space it can also cause slowness to the device.

Here are tips to help you declutter your phone and bring some order to the device.

Delete apps you don’t use

If you’re like most people there are apps that you have downloaded to try out but left unused afterwards. If you aren’t sure which apps you get too little use out of, both iOS and Android have easy ways to find them. You only need to look at a list of your apps and sort them by frequency of use.

On an iPhone, go to iPhone Storage under Settings and General. On an Android phone, go to the Play Store, tap on the icon that looks like three stacked lines, at the top left, and select My Apps & Games. Go to the Installed tab, and tap on Alphabetical to open up a menu that asks you how you would like to sort your apps. Select Last Used. Next delete the apps that come under Never Used. If there are apps that you rarely use you can delete those as well, and simply use the website when you need those services.

Declutter your home screen

A cluttered home screen may not slow down your phone; it can make it harder for you to find what you want. If your home screen is full of app icons strewn about, create folders by function, and put your apps into them. You only need to tap and drag one app icon into another to create a folder that holds both of them.

If you find it hard to come up with a system to organise your apps in folders, you can simply leave your apps the way they are, and change how you look for them. Rather than manually looking through all your apps to find something you need, you can simply use the Search function. On the iPhone go to the home screen, pull down the top of the screen, and type the name of the app that you’re looking for. On Android phones, you can get to the Finder by going to the app drawer and using the search bar.

Clear up some storage space

No matter how much storage you may have on your phone, the images and videos that you receive on social media are likely to fill it up before long. On Apple phones, you can instruct your phone to only keep messages on old threads for so long before deleting them automatically. Set the self-destruct function by going to Keep Messages under Settings and Messages. You can also set your iPhone to keep all your messages, but to delete attachments. Under Settings, General and iPhone Storage, go to Messages, and then select Review Large Attachments. You will see all the image and video files that you have and you’ll be able to select which ones to delete.

Unfortunately, on Android, you don’t have a setting that lets you isolate all your big attachments. You’ll have to find them and delete them manually. If you’d like to keep them, you will need to back them up to a cloud storage service or elsewhere.

Your apps can use up storage

Entertainment apps that download streaming videos, music and podcasts can hog a lot of space. Deleting whatever content you don’t need can be a good way to free up some space. Sometimes apps use up space even if you haven’t downloaded content to them. To clear out app data on the iPhone, go to iPhone Storage and select an app to Offload to delete it. Once it’s gone you can reinstall it to start fresh. You don’t need to offload anything on Android. You only need to go to Settings and Apps, and then click the name of each app to get the Clear cache button. When you click on it you get to delete its data.

No matter how capacious your phone, you’re bound to clutter things up and run out of space before long. By doing a little housekeeping every now and then is essential. You’ll find that a phone with plenty of free space is faster and easier to use.