How to speed up your Android Device in Settings

We all have days when we need our phone for something important, but what happens when your phone is slow? Of course, an old processor or ten pages of apps will make it slow, but don't give up hope yet!

If your Android phone is running slow and you are out of ideas from others and your own ideas, make sure you have tried this one, powerful step that may help some or a lot.

1. Go to your Phone Settings.

2. If you haven't already enabled "Developer Options", do so by going to "About Phone" or "About Device" and find your build number. This is normally on the list of device information or under another tab, possibly a "Software Information" tab.

3. Once you have found something called the "Build Number", go ahead and tap it rapidly and fast. While your tapping the Build Number, you will find a note appearing at rhe bottom of your screen that says something like "Your 2 more steps away from Developer Options!" And keep tapping until it says "You are now a developer!".

4. Now go back to your main screen for your Phone Settings.

5. Go down to the bottom near where you found "About Phone" or "About Device" and select Developer options.

6. When your in Developer Options, go down to the bottom of the whole list and find something similar to "Show all ANR's" (App Not Responding) or Don't Keep Activities. These settings are some that will speed up your device.

7. Now change it to your liking, make it more strict the more slow your device is. If your extremely slow choose Don't keep activities and make Background process limit to 1 Background Process or No background Processes.

NOTE: If you want to know of all apps that are crashing or slowing down your device in the background, then choose "Show all ANR's".

What do all these settings mean?
Don't keep activities is very simple and explains itself. This means every app you open would normally stay open in the background when you press the home button, so you can come back to it later. This setting is giving your device permission from you to close apps when pressing the home button and not keep them running in the background. Note this will not allow you to continue where you left off when you press home, and this is set.

Now, background process limit is similar, except not completely. This setting tells your device how many apps it is allowed to run in the background at once. You may choose 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 in the list. For slower devices, set 0 or 1. Medium speed select 2 or 3. If your device just needs a little boost choose 4. If your device is perfectly fine, then don't read this article or set it to "Standard Limit". The standard limit is usually 20-50 apps at once. Very fast devices can normally set the standard limit to 100+ apps  by default.

Finally, Show all ANR's. First, what is ANR? Well it is simply App Not Responding. Show all ANR'S makes your device show all apps that don't respond or slow down your device in the background. Normally, when an app isn't responding on most devices, it is a dialog box that comes up and says "Sorry, (app name) has stopped." Or "Unfortunately,  (app name) has stopped." And both give an OK or report button.

If this still doesn't speed up your device, animations can also impact your device. Check out my other article "How to disable or slow down Android Animations in Settings".

~Andrew Vinson