It’s always a terrible situation when your phone starts to slow down and the day will always come when it begins to happen. As you grow into your phone, so do you into the battery, storage capacity and other resources. You have your normal tricks and apps that helps to control battery drain by activating power saving features and controlling some background processes, but on Android, they don’t always work as well as you’d like.
Thankfully there is one trick you can do with a lot of the latest Galaxy phones to help speed the OS up a little as well as speed up your data a bit for some. We were able to do this using a Galaxy S8 Plus that was slowing down and the data speed (given, in the middle of nowhere) was getting around 0.5 mbps. After this trick, the OS was responsive again and we were seeing 8 mbps (of course in more populated areas, we can get upward to around 60-80 mbps at times, but this was the best we saw in the remote location we were in). The point is, it was able to breath quite a bit of life back into the phone, bringing it back to a speedy experience.
The trick is to delete the cache partition. Doing this will not affect the phone when it comes to custom settings or apps. Everything will be just as it was before you run this. So feel safe that all should be just fine. That being said, I am required to mention the disclaimer that you take all risks upon yourself by going through with the following instructions. So that means pay close attention to what you are doing and don’t click on the wrong options.
How to do it:
- First you want to power off your device. You can do this by holding the power button until you have the three options pop up. Obviously choose, “Power Off”.
- Then, you want to press (and hold down) the “volume up” button and the “Bixby” button at the same time. While doing that, press and hold the power button. Once the Android logo pops up, you can let go of all of these buttons.
- It will begin installing a system update for a number of seconds until the Android System Recovery menu pops up. In this menu, you want to use your volume buttons to move up and down and the power button to select/choose an option.
- Scroll down to “Wipe Cache Partition” and select it. This is where Android stores a bunch of fluff from the OS and apps, and it just keeps building up and bogging down the phone. It can be wiped safely and all of your apps will still be there as well as their settings.
- AGAIN! Make sure you choose the right option!
- It will confirm and you want to select “Yes”.
- When finished, it will allow you to select “Reboot System Now”.
- You’re done!
Your phone should reboot and everything should be fast again, hopefully like you just upgraded to a new model, or at least went back in time by a year.
As I said, it should be safe to do on your phone as long as the steps bring up the same menu and option to choose. Android does not store any important settings or material within the partition, so the state of things should be exactly as they were before you run this trick. Enjoy!
