Plenty of apps in the Play Store are poorly coded, while a small few are scammy, spammy, or just designed in a way that hogs resources. Rogue apps can wreak havoc on your system, severely affecting your Android phone’s performance. Problematic apps will hog resources and stay awake in the background, sucking away valuable resources from your RAM and battery. If your phone is slow and you’re the kind of user who downloads a lot of apps without checking their trustworthiness, it can be a good idea to rule out certain applications that might be the culprit.
One trick to identify out-of-control apps is to look in your battery settings, where Android will show you what percentage of your battery usage each app is responsible for. If one app is showing a significantly higher percentage than others, especially if it’s an app you don’t spend much time in, that’s a sign that it may be to blame for poor performance.
Next, you can boot your phone into Safe Mode, which will launch Android with only the stock apps. If your phone suddenly has more pep in its step when running in Safe Mode, that indicates your problem is being caused by an app you installed. To boot into Safe Mode, turn your phone completely off, then hold down the power and volume down keys at the same time until the phone boots into Safe Mode, with the words, “Safe Mode” appearing at the bottom of the screen.
If the problem does appear to be an app, and you’re having trouble narrowing down which one, try uninstalling your most recently installed apps one by one, testing the phone after each uninstall to see whether or not speed has improved.
