If your phone is slow as a snail, your apps may be to blame. We don’t always think of our apps as capable of causing much mischief, and if something goes awry with our iPhones, we tend to believe it’s a hardware problem. You may even take your phone to the Apple Store and ask a Genius Bar technician to have a look at it before finding out the phone itself is totally fine — it’s the apps you’ve downloaded that are causing a strain on your device.
When you can’t take it anymore and need to speed your phone up, try deleting these six apps that could be causing mayhem. Doing so may just result in a quicker, more efficient iPhone.
Blame Facebook’s constantly streaming videos for one of the major reasons why the app is slowing down your phone. Resource-intensive apps are what they sound like — they do a lot. And doing the most means taking away from your phone’s battery power. You can minimize the damage by deleting the Facebook app altogether or, at the very least, heading to the Facebook app > Settings & Privacy > Settings > Preferences > Media and doing the following: lower the video quality and turn off autoplay so that you have to manually choose to play a video to see its content.
Is it any wonder that Instagram, which is opened by Meta (same as Facebook) would also do a number on your battery, given the fact that it’s all videos, reels, and photos, all of the time? If you don’t want to delete this app, you can minimize its impact by going to Settings & Privacy > Data Usage and Media Quality > Use Less Cellular Data. Enable this feature to keep Instagram from preloading videos while you’re using a cellular connection.
Twitter
Are you sensing a theme here? Social media apps are among the biggest battery drainers. Twitter may not be as bad as Facebook and Instagram, but it still plays videos, which is the source of battery drainage. You can change your settings here by going to Icon > Settings & Privacy > Accessibility, Display, and Language > Data Saver.
Netflix
Streaming services like Netflix and Hulu are great fun, but their only purpose is to deliver videos, which is why they will consistently drain your device of battery power. One step you can take to minimize their impact is to select Low or Medium quality streams if you’re watching Netflix on cellular data and turn off downloads.
YouTube
YouTube isn’t always at the top of everyone’s minds when they think about streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu because its format is different. But that doesn’t make it any less of a vampire on your battery. Yet again, we see that an app that plays videos is going to drain your battery more than one that does not. Deleting the YouTube app and only assessing it via your browser can help, but so can turning off autoplay. To do this, go to your profile > settings > make sure autoplay is toggled off.
Apps You Haven’t Updated
Whether the app in question is a social media app, a streaming apps, or a seemingly innocent app that isn’t very resource-intensive, if you aren’t keeping your apps updated, they could turn around and become a source of battery drainage. App developers update their apps when they discover bugs and errors that could limit your usage or experience using them. Prevent them from messing with your phone by always checking for updated and downloading them ASAP.
