My Android is slow: 5 things you can do to speed your phone back up

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By Jerry Hildenbrand | Oct 02 2014 | 9:36 am  | 131 Comments
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Make your Android fast again — it is possible

We've all been there. You have a fancy, new, highly complex Android-powered computational device that can do everything from checking your email to surfing the web to controlling your microwave so your popcorn doesn't burn. It's shiny, and screaming fast while doing all the things we wanted it to do. Everything is roses all around.

Android Central BasicsFast forward a year down the road, and besides the shiny wearing off, things aren't as zippy as they used to be. Apps take longer to open and run. Transitions between screens take longer to redraw than we would like. The speed demon that your device once was is starting to get a little frustrating to use. Your Android is slow.

Don't fret. This happens to every computer, even the Android one you carry in your pocket. The good news is that there are a few things you can do to alleviate your pain and get back to Speed Racer mode again. None are difficult, and we're going to take a look at the five best things you can do to "fix" a slow Android.

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Jerry Hildenbrand

Jerry Hildenbrand Cowboy

"Fascinated by things that go beep."

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My Android is slow: 5 things you can do to speed your phone back up

131 Comments
thatguy97

Well if you have a phone like Samsung Galaxy s1 or HTC thunderbolt God forbid than ya but a lot of ppl out there have s3s and one xs and nexus 4s and note 2s and I can go on and on and this is also who thus article is targeted for

Posted via Nexus 7 2013 or Galaxy S5

mike340t

I actually have a S5 but still choose my S3 for my daily phone! It's just comfy, set perfect and has never let me down..

rkirmeier

S4 with 5 inch screen is no larger than an S3 with the 4.8 inch screen. I did always prefer the more rounded edges on the S3...

Impulses

This is true, he referenced the S5 in his comparison tho, which went up in size, like virtually every other flagship this year, sadly. The few that didn't, had already grown last year... And/or grew even more this year.

rkirmeier

Never liked the S5 at all and that's coming from a S2, S3, and S4. Also don't care for the M8, if LG didn't release the G3 I would still be on the S4.

mike340t

The naked shape of the S3 is perfect to me, but the biggest reason I choose my S3 over S5 is memory! no 32GB or more option!! I like keeping lot's of data with me. I have been looking forward to the ginormous odd Note Edge though as it's gained my interest.

mike340t

LOL SD cards is not enough!.. Stupid habit.. I save every picture I've ever had and always download to the new card, I just like having EVERYTHING with me. It's great when with old friends and family, they love going through my old pictures. I'll probably sell the S5 for the Note Edge..

rkirmeier

Crazy that a 64GB card is not enough. Current gen phones can use 128GB cards. I thought I was bad as I have about 15GB of sat imagery for my Locus mapping app downloaded... :)

rkirmeier

Crazy that a 64GB card is not enough. Current gen phones can use 128GB cards. I thought I was bad as I have about 15GB of sat imagery for my Locus mapping app downloaded... :)

rkirmeier

Really? I did prefer the shape of the S3 but highly prefer the thin bezels and larger screen in the same size phone. The screen on the S4 was also much better, no comparison...

mike340t

I initially dropped my phone s3 many times because of those corners (only a few scratches remarkably), especially after a few good drinks, but it grew on me more than any phone. Now I quick draw my phone like one draws a pistol lol

JR_394

Never mind the s1, I have the Ace 2. The OS can't even update from Android 2.3.6. I'm aiming to buy an s5 in the near future.

zr2s10

I threw my Galaxy S3 at the floor out of frustration one day. Dang carpet and the incredibly tough Incipio dual shell case saved it's life though. So no new phone for me. On the plus side it did seem to run a little better after that. I may have scared it straight, lol.

mike340t

Rule Number one should be "Don;t download sh!tty apps" . I had some gal complaining about phone being slow, battery dying fast, and data being always over. Looked at the phone holy mother effing notifications... Nothing but sh!tty mindless games that's always running, popping up notifications..

planoman

+1000, I met a lady once she had a S3 same as I did and she was carrying around her plug in charger. We chatted about the phones and she mentioned she loved it except battery life. I told her I could go 12 hours at least and she said no way and showed me her phone...I could not believe all the stuff she had turned on and running in the notification area. I just handed her phone back to her and said, good idea to carry your charger around...

ryanmtech

Yep, thats normally every person's battery issues.

Also, "let me keep on my wifi, bluetooth, nfc, gps, this, that, whatever else feature on constantly and use face recognition to unlock my phone.. oh, oh... and keep my brightness all the way up and not on automatic"

and you wonder why you get no battery life??

anonymous-bot

You should not need to disable or cripple your phone's features just to get good battery life. It partially defeats the purpose of having a smartphone to begin with.

mike340t

Turning off Auto Brightness is technically disabling a feature... Downloading a hundred crappy games/apps that constantly run/download advertising/popup notifications is not a feature either.. That's just as bad as folks who click on everything and download viruses and wonder why their PC "no go fast"..

bigguh

Agreed, but keeping Bluetooth on when you hardly use it doesn't make sense. The same with wifi.

Posted via Android Central App

TenshiNo

True.  And you really shouldn't have to.  I generally leave Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS turned on 24/7 without issue on my Note 3, with the exception of times when I am specfically trying to stretch out power a little longer.

A big one I always tell people is to go into your WiFi settings, then go to Advanced settings, and turn off that "Scan for open WiFi" option.  That makes the phone scan for WiFi networks every 5 minutes.  Personally, I'd rather check manually *if* I need a WiFi connection.

Also, make sure your WiFi sleep is set to "Never" if it's a device that has a cellular radio.  I know it sounds counter-intuitive, and some people think that setting it to sleep when the screen is off will save power, but it actually doesn't.  When the WiFi shuts down, the cellular data radio turns back on, and that generally uses *far* more power than WiFi.  In my experience, the only time the WiFi sleep feature is useful is on a WiFi-only device.  Even then, I set it to "when screen off and not plugged in".

Impulses

Keeping Wi-Fi, BT, NFC, and GPS on actually has little impact on battery life... Most of those things are power gated at the hardware level ands intelligently shut down at the software level even if left on...

Wi-Fi might be the one exception, since it loves to scan around too much sometimes. GPS should never be an issue unless you've got rogue apps accessing it left and right, but shutting it off to solve that is a pretty ham fisted approach.

NFC & BT were both designed from the start to have a negligible impact unless used. Max brightness will absolutely crush battery life tho, since the display is the number one factor in battery use.

TenshiNo

I had a coworker with an S4 complaining about battery life, so I offered to look at her phone.  She had auto-brightness turned off (with the screen brightness on max, of course) and had set her screen timeout to like 10 minutes.

I tried to explain why that was bad, changed the screen timeout to 1 min and introduced her to the Lux app for customizable auto-brightness (since she said the reason she had it turned off was because it was always a little too dim).

She now says she makes it through a day easily, whereas before her battery was dead by lunch.

Just_Some_Nobody

Same people who would complain about Windows being slow. You look down at the tray and they have 50 apps running. You look at their browser and they have browser bars out the wazoo.
When it comes to technology, the average person is a bloody hoarder!

Hans Pedersen

Nice advice, but, one obvious one that I think you missed; open the multitasking screen and close all apps you're not using.

Hans Pedersen

Apps can control priorities themselves too, meaning that poorly written apps tends to keep taking processor time when they're in the background.

KidCuda

I agree with both, except I see that Facebook likes keeping the location locked on until you swipe it closed.

sloked

Actually, Golfzing is an app I use regularly and unless I don't close it in my app switcher, it will continuously use my GPS looking for my location and eat my battery.

bigguh

I noticed that link bubble continues to run even after I'm done using it.

Posted via Android Central App

TenshiNo

That's a poorly written app, and you should uninstall it and give it a bad review in the Play Store.  Force closing all your apps will create its own set of battery problems.  The reason Android leaves apps cached in RAM in an "inactive" state is because it uses far less battery to hold them there than is does to reload them form the NAND memory, especially if it's an app that you use frequently or has to frequently "wake up" and perform a sync operation.

Force closing all apps because of one badly written app is like the old addage about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

If you suspect you had a "bad" app, trying System Panel from the Play Store.  The paid version ($3) will allow you to track battery drain and CPU usage over time, going back 1 week, and will also give you a list of which apps have used the most CPU power over that period.  You can even compare and specific CPU usage to the overall system usage on an app-by-app basis.

Another good app is Wakelock Detector, although you will need root permissions to really get the full benefit of that app.  It will allow you to see which apps are keeping the device "awake" and causing extra battery drain.  Just recently, I noticed increased battery drain and discovered on of my apps had "woken" the device something like 160,000 times over a 6 hour period, so I uninstalled it.  It was an older app that they had apparently shutdown the server that it used to sync, so it was *constantly* trying to reconnect.

One place I will fault Android is that there are not good, built-in tools to help users identify poorly written apps, especially since the change that requires root permissions to view wake-lock history.  Hopefully, this Project Volta stuff in Android L will help that situation.

baldypal

Not true. Android does a great job already of multi tasking without user intervention. It can manage the RAM very well all by itself. Doing what you said is the same as using one of those older now obsolete Task Manager apps. Your fighting against the OS and it's built in management algorithms.

Hans Pedersen

And clearing the app cache, doing a factory reset and the other things in the list above don't? :)

Android handles multitasking excellently, when the apps are properly designed. For all other occasions the user has to fix it themselves. Killing active apps is a really easy way to fix that. Noticing that performance or battery consumption is always affected whenever you leave one app running is an easy way to tell you to uninstall that app and find a better alternative.

Synycalwon

Yup, that's why as a matter of principle I always go into Application Manager and force stop an app (ex. Sunday Ticket, SiriusXM, etc.) when I'm done with it just to ensure it isn't running anymore and I don't have to worry about it. Those apps are NOT running anyway after boot up (they're not set to autostart at all), so why let them continue to run when I'm done with them? It's a different story for apps that will just keep restarting themselves after you force stop them.

In the end, I wish Android were more like Windows, when you close an application it actually stops running and no longer shows up in Task Manager.

Hans Pedersen

I can sort of understand why they let them keep running on Android. Having a close function in the app would require it to have two ways to exit, which would clutter things up a bit. A way around it could be to use a bit of all of that unused space in the on-screen buttons. There's plenty of room there to put an X in the far right to allow you to close the app.

TenshiNo

Understand that, for apps you use often or that need to "wake" and perform sync processes, force closing them can actually do more harm that good.  Android leaves apps cached in RAM because it requires less power than re-loading from NAND storage each time you use them.  Whenever you leave an app, Android sends the app a "status changed" event to let the app know that it should go to sleep.  If you've got apps not doing that, you should 1) give it a bad review in the app store and 2) look for an alternative.  I understand, though, that it does suck for apps for which there is no alternative.

9ersfan3

Believe me, there ARE applications that if left open WILL eat your battery alive. androids aggressive ram usage and management aside, they exist

Moo Cow

NFLST is a killer (and was mentioned earlier.) I used it to catch the Niners' last preseason game (yep, fan since knee-high in early 80s) since the Android app worked live but the desktop login didn't. Weird. But anyway, that app was chewing up something fierce because there was absolutely no way my Droid Maxx battery should have gone down that quick. But a check of the battery icon showed, yes, NFLST was the culprit.

suavehouse

I beg to differ. There have been times where my M7 has shown lag. First thing I do is check my open apps. I kill off a few of them and everything runs fine. It's archaic, yes, and sometimes not needed, but I make sure my RAM is not hosed because I'm running too many things at once. Facebook and Youtube are usually the only 2 I need to close to bring my phone back to its snappy self though. There are others, but these 2 are the hogs.

Impulses

I think the point many are making is that it isn't Android's fault devs write apps that become hogs. Android is built, just like recent versions of Windows, to use your RAM. Unused empty RAM is a waste when it could be cache'ing a frequently used app for quicker accesses. However if there are apps that don't allow the OS to dynamically make use of that extra RAM and take it away when needed, well, that's another story, but it's the app's fault and not the OS.

Just_Some_Nobody

Horrible advice.
Let Android do this.

Edit: If an app is designed well, Android will put it to sleep but cache it. That way the next time you need it, Android doesn't have to go to storage to start up the app. it's much more battery efficient this way.
If you have apps that don't sleep, it is best to find an alternative app or simply go without.

Hans Pedersen

So... Basically you agree with the horrible advice... ;)

In a perfect world, you wouldn't have to do anything written in the advice above or what I said. Unfortunately, apps are created by humans, and it's human to error.

planoman

1 year? Keep it in mint condition, sell it on SWAPPA at 6 months and move to the next device! No slow downs!

davinwv

When my phone acts weird / runs slowly, I always boot into recovery and clear my cache partition.

Posted via Android Central App

sdreelin

I would check what is running in the background as well. You could find weird apps that are always running for some reason (such as geo tracking) that take up memory. I deleted some of those apps to free up working memory and made a huge difference on my anemic Galaxy Nexus. Facebook was one always running and since I really don't use the mobile app for anything other than sharing a photo on the go, I deleted that and just use the mobile website (which works better IMO).

sumitmehta

I have somehow found out a solution to speed up atleast Samsung Galaxy phones. My Samsung Galaxy S3 also became too sluggish since last few months. That was really irritating. What I did is:

1. In recovery mode (i.e. restart samsung galaxy phone while pressing Vol Up + Home Button + Power Button) clear cache partition. This will immediately make my phone responsive.
2. Disable the a) Samsung Push Service, b) ChatOn, c) S Voice preloaded apps. You wont believe this step will improve the samsung galalxy battery life considerably.
3. If you don't want to disable S Voice, disable the double tap Home button short cut for S Voice. This will improve responsiveness of Home button. Also if you are not using voice commands, disable wake up key word "Hi Galaxy" for S Voice and "Ok Google" for Google Now.

Whatever written in the article, but as far as any Samsung Galaxy phones are concerned, in my experience, disabling sumsung push service, chaton and S Voice is the key for improving the responsiveness and battery life. Please do what i suggested and let me know.

CeluGeek

Trim is pointless. With no way for the user to control it, or even to see when it happens, you have to believe by faith that it is taking place.

Impulses

TRIM seems to work just fine on Windows with no user intervention whatsoever, that's kinda the point of TRIM.

Jesse Dietderich

If you are going to suggest a factory reset, then why not go one step further?

If you are a tech savvy Android user who wants the speediest experience without buying a new device (after throwing it out the window), then look into alternative ROMs for your device. Many older (slow) devices have people in the ROM community looking to slim down ROMs for their preferred devices. These bloat-free alternatives can really give a phone a new lease on life.

AmethystAndrew

If you've picked a popular device, you'll get an even wider selection. Sometimes it's nice to swap out UI or the like, beyond a launcher. GPE device on Verizon? Yes please!

Posted via Android Central App

mostlyDigital

My son and I had S3s. I had installed CM and he had left his stock because he needed the camera features. When he saw how responsive mine was he was completely blown away. Now we both have CM on OnePlus Ones. Alternative ROMs are the best and cheapest upgrades.

rovex

And they can introduce 40X as many new bugs and problems. I gave up using custom ROMs, even modded stock ones, a while ago, they tended to cause more issues than they solved. Now i just remove bloat and change settings on my own. More control, better results.

Synycalwon

Good tips! Another one is to simply reboot/restart the device. Sometimes things get updated in the background (ex. Google Play services) that end up affecting performance until a reboot puts things back in order.

onixblack

Glad that I read this, forgot to clear my cache and it took up about 2 gigs of space. We'll see if it makes my Galaxy Nexus faster

Brandon Peters

Guys, too many ads, no clear distinctions between the ads and the articles, and the page does not even scroll smoothly, I suspect because of the amount of ads all over the page

This is on a PC with a 6 core CPU with 8 GB of ram and chrome resides on an SSD (in before someone comes in to blame my computer)

anneoneamouse

Agreed. I sent a comment in to the the "general suggestions" about this yesterday. It's become annoying to read this site these days.

larrygeary

This. Android Central has become horribly slow, even on a fast gaming PC with SSD and 32Gb RAM. Forget about my older machine - it just groans in agony when I load the site. And the page header takes up almost the entire screen at 1920x1080! The app is more pleasant to use than the website now.

larrygeary

I have to modify my comment. I tried the AC website on my phone and on my faster PC, and neither had any real issues. It's only on my old desktop/server that the site grinds and groans. This page took 31 seconds to load. Still, only one or two other sites I visit cause problems for the old computer. The machine isn't exactly a slacker: dual hyper-threaded 3.06GHz Xeon processors, 4Gb RAM, SCSI disks. I use it for development and as a database server.

Sorry for the OT.

TenshiNo

I'm not seeing any of this problem.  I have a pretty speedy machine as well (i7 quad-core, 8gB RAM, SSD, ATI Video) but the site runs just fine for me in Chrome.  Have you guys tried updating your video drivers, maybe?

As for the page header, the top bar on the home page takes up about 1/3 of the screen, but that's only on the home page, and it scrolls up normally so it's not a big deal.  The header on pages like this is pretty tiny and disappears when I scroll down.  If you're seeing the "blue" navigation bar on these pages take up a lot of space, I would recommend that you check your browser settings for things like zoom and font size.

mmark27

If its a Samsung phone, head into the recovery (power off, hold home+volup+power) and "wipe cache partition", then reboot. Will usually fix any quirkiness and slowdowns.

sumitmehta

I have somehow found out a solution to speed up atleast Samsung Galaxy phones. My Samsung Galaxy S3 also became too sluggish since last few months. That was really irritating. What I did is:

1. In recovery mode (i.e. restart samsung galaxy phone while pressing Vol Up + Home Button + Power Button) clear cache partition. This will immediately make my phone responsive.
2. Disable the a) Samsung Push Service, b) ChatOn, c) S Voice preloaded apps. You wont believe this step will improve the samsung galalxy battery life considerably.
3. If you don't want to disable S Voice, disable the double tap Home button short cut for S Voice. This will improve responsiveness of Home button. Also if you are not using voice commands, disable wake up key word "Hi Galaxy" for S Voice and "Ok Google" for Google Now.

Whatever written in the article, but as far as any Samsung Galaxy phones are concerned, in my experience, disabling sumsung push service, chaton and S Voice is the key for improving the responsiveness and battery life. Please do what i suggested and let me know.

Mister Android123

Haha that I can agree with. I was just saying thank god I have a Nexus and don't have to deal with that stuff. Sounds like an issue for OS with skins.

Posted via the Android Central App

Joe Goodwin1

Next article: "how to get a better camera and battery on a nexus phone"

Solution: there is none!!

Muhahahahahahahahah!!!!!!!

Posted via the Android Central App

rovex

Oh really. Load up a nexus with apps and it starts to jitter and lag just like any other phone. frankly the notion they are lag free even when fresh is a lie.

work4crown

I started using the Greenify app on my Samsung S3 recently. Once Facebook is forced to hibernate my phone is suddenly as fast as lightning. I also use Du speed booster.

williamworlde

Very timely just when you (=me :-)) want to go out and get the latest, greatest. But then again it would be at any time of the year, not just the holiday season.

I still really very much love my 3-year old GNex. I tried various ROMs and though they were generally pretty, they slowed my system down so I went back to stock. The thing is, when you load up that new stock ROM, your system just flies! BUT, you start throwing in your apps – and their inevitable, increasingly large, numerous updates – and you simply CANNOT escape the Slowdown Monster; no matter WHAT you do.

It's a good-sized phone unlike the new gigantuous ones, and its amoled is simply stunning. (I like the G3 for size and features, but it's so washed out!) If only there wasn't a conspiracy by manufacturers to cause devs to keep making their apps more and more complex to keep up with the operating systems... Oh, I can here you say, "Ah, but that's the price of progress." Not really though. Shouldn't we be so smart, so advanced as to make things JUST WORK – no matter how complex – with "the push of a button"? But hey, we were supposed to be paperless too! Ha!

krijmo

This article is like kindergarten for smart phones. Really? Why didn't you tell them to turn it off and turn it back on? None of those things will do anything major.

terry doran

Why no mention of 3rd party launchers? I had amazing lag on my G3 with LG home, installed Nova launcher and now it's the fastest phone I've owned.

Posted via the Android Central App

codiusprime

My M7 has been killing me lately. I keep up with all this stuff and I've already performed a factory reset, not doing it again.

Posted via the Android Central App

GameBoi

Great read. I'm surprised that I knew most of this just buy playing around and lurking the OS. Also don't be afraid to downgrade if your "upgrade" isn't as smooth.

michael jeacock

yes you could go through all the unnecessary steps above for removing programs, cache data and junk or you could just install a program like clean master to do it all for you.

Chex313

6th thing...Become a Dev ;)

Than go in { } Developer Options. Then reduce the 2 Animation settings to .5X and Animator "Off" You'll speed everything up...Some games may animate so fast you'll have to slow them down a little...So then try 1X

bigguh

Just tried this and just coming back into the AC app was super speedy...noticeably so! I'll definitely have to see how this goes. Thanks for the tip!

Posted via Android Central App

larrygeary

I've tried most of these things. I even fast-booted the phone back to stock. It works, but only for a few days in my case. My phone is going on 3 years old, and I seriously wonder if there is an aging process going on with the silicon that causes this.

Lately I've noticed that some apps take a HUGE amount of memory. The Android Central app was consuming 250Mb of RAM one day, and Dolphin browser was up to 150Mb with just a couple of tabs open and no plugins. On my old phone with 1Gb RAM and maybe 150-250Mb free, it can take half a minute to swap programs like these. The phone all but freezes for minutes at a time.

One thing that would really help is if Android would stop "helping" me by loading into RAM programs I have not and will not EVER use. I've used an app called "Autostarts" to unhook the event handlers that cause unwanted programs to be loaded, but even then some of them just keep getting loaded up. Services I'm not using, stock keyboards I've replaced, bloatware that I just can't get rid of, all of them add up. I know you've said that having free RAM isn't as necessary as on a PC, but I just don't see the point of having useless apps in RAM that have to be swapped out, then swapping them back in again later. It's crazy.

But thanks for the tips. I'll give them all another try.

goldfndr

Have you looked into Greenify?

Posted via Android Central App on my HP TouchPad (Schizoid PAC-ROM 4.2.2)

larrygeary

I tried it for a while, but it ultimately didn't help the situation. I think it does what I was doing manually with Titanium Backup (freezing apps) and Autostarts (unhooking event handlers).

TenshiNo

More than likely, these apps are loading as part of a scheduled sync process.  If it's really a problem, you could always root and use something like Titanium Backup to "freeze" apps you don't want loading.  I've done that for a lot the Samsung bloatware on my Note 3.  Just be careful about freezing system apps.  If you're not sure what they're for, trying Googling them to determine if they're safe to freeze.

nitemancometh

You know you'll rue the day when you uninstalled dog whistle simulator 3000. There will be a time when you need it most and your head will be thrown down in disappoint. Trust me....you'll rue the day!

Matthew Osterlund

Hey Jerry, While clearing cache on my moto x i noticed a Misc. file right below the cache file(it shows up on the picture you posted in the article) which has files from all kinds of apps, it allows you to check one at time or check all and delete them. Is this ok or recommended?

carraser891

Is it bad to have an SD card from 2010 in your 2013 smartphone? Its a 16GB class 2, and also would i benefit from getting a newer 16GB card? Haven't had any problems yet and the card is filled with apps, music, and pictures.

kjjb0204

These tips are great for the enthusiasts like us, but for 99% of android users out there, they will see the lag as having a slow phone and blame it on the phone and Android. That's one area iOS seems to trump android - there just aren't many people I know with iphones that complain about their year-old devices getting slow. Everyone I know with a year-old android phone complains. Especially Galaxy owners. My wife and I both had S3's for a while and they both got laggy and slow compared to when we first got them.

Posted via Android Central App

ecs180

1) Download Nova Launcher
2) Go to Nova settings look and feel
3) Change scroll speed to fast and animation to faster than light
4) Stop complaining about touchwiz
5) Gigidy

Atul Langdon

I encrypted my SGS3. Big mistake! encryption slowed down everything on the phone and exhausted all my patience.
Plan A:
I'm decrypting the device. Hope this brings my device back to life!1
Plan B:
Factory Reset

thunderx2000

I remember watching a Galaxy S3 review video on Youtube, where the reviewer did a speed comparison between the S3 and an iPhone 4s or 5. He bashed the S3 because of the huge amounts of lag he was experiencing. He based his opinion solely on the web scrolling and page switching on the home screen. Then he did the dumb thing that proved he was an Apple fanboy. He went into his recent apps to scroll through open apps in that to prove his point on the S3 being laggy. Unfortunately for him, that little stunt bit him in butt because he had a lot of apps open and everyone knows that our choice of smartphones that we buy have a specific amount of memory, every app uses memory, and what happens when you max out that memory.

aviotron

Also, better to skip heavy background apps like facebook etc. Use their web version in chrome browser, put the bookmark on homescreen. Moreover, no need of updating the app too :)

RenoD2010

Bummer, I knew all this stuff already (was hoping for a new nifty little nugget). Still, a good article for all Android users.

Richard_M

You missed the option flashing a custom ROM, or (even better) the Google Play Edition ROM, if available.
Since I switched to the Google Play Edition on my Galaxy S4 it's really blazing fast!
Even though, I had to drop some Samsung specific featured.