How to Make Your Old Phone Look Like a New One
Phones age like bananas or relationships. Our culture forces us to spend money on the newest and best (phone, not banana). But there are many ways to make your current phone new, cheap, or free.
Speed up your old phone
The most serious way to improve an old phone is to make it work better. Phones slow down over time because their designers prioritize getting them to perform really well for the first two years and then shift their focus to newer, cooler phones that you don’t have yet. It sucks. You can fight this.
Remove apps
Too many apps slow down your phone by running in the background. Remove the ones you are not using. A useful way to do this is to sort them roughly by the last time you used them.
Free up hard disk space
Older phones have less storage space. If you are faced with limited storage often, it can slow down your phone.
First, uninstall (or remove from your phone) any apps and files you don’t use. Especially video files and long or high quality audio files i.e. music and podcasts.
Clean the media. Remove any bad frames from your photos. If you store a lot of streaming music and videos locally, bring some back to streaming.
On iOS, make sure you don’t automatically take a Live Photo every time you use the camera; they take up unnecessary space. (Plus, if you send someone a live photo, they might touch it hard to hear the sound from now on. Confusing.) You can also convert existing live photos to regular photos to free up more space with Lean applications .
Clear memory cache
On Android, app cache files can get corrupted and slow down. Follow these instructions to clean them up (after saving any unfinished files and backing up everything).
Refresh all
If you’ve postponed any app updates, start them. If you’ve postponed any OS updates, do a Google search for reviews of those specific updates , then if the reviews don’t contain many of the phrases “This slowed down my phone!” then run them.
Maybe, maybe , and very carefully , do a factory reset and fresh install of everything on your phone. But it’s only after you’ve made a backup that everything is in sync, and definitely remove all responsibility for two-factor authentication from the phone before erasing it. You will still inevitably lose something this way, like saved game progress.
Upgrade some hardware
Fix and replace
Your phone won’t feel new if it’s physically broken. You can pay a lot less than a complete phone upgrade to replace your battery, screen, camera, or other component. But only visit authorized repair shops, which you can check through third parties. Many cheap unauthorized stores are installing crappy parts like a new screen that stops working after a few days. It’s better to live with a cracked screen than to ruin your entire phone in a store you don’t trust.
Always contact your phone manufacturer’s support before paying money, even if your warranty has run out. Answer their questions honestly and chances are they will help you. Apple is especially known for giving its support staff some leeway when they repair or replace a device that is not covered by warranty.
Buy a shiny accessory
One of my favorite iPhone updates is one that Apple shouldn’t force you to buy separately: a faster wall charger .
One of my other favorite updates is the wireless charger, which is sometimes slower , but provides a much more convenient way to charge your phone on your desk or on your bedside table. It’s nice to just put your phone on the cradle instead of looking for a power outlet. In addition, you are less likely to accidentally block the plug in the wrong way and break something.
If you haven’t switched to wireless headphones yet, give it a try; they’ve gotten pretty cheap, and if you mainly listen to podcasts and streaming music, you won’t notice a drop in audio quality. Seriously, if your headphone cord gets caught on a doorknob, turnstile, or corner of a table more than once, wireless headphones will make you feel like an unearthly seraph floating around unhindered in this dark world.
Get or get rid of the case
The cheapest shiny new accessory is a phone case. Remember to choose not only for appearance, but also for thickness and texture. Get a lightweight and slim body that makes your phone physically feel new. Doesn’t look like a very durable cement brick. Buy one with a pocket if you like it. Add physical functionality.
Or – and this is really silly, but it worked for me – remove the case you were using. If you rarely drop your phone, or if it’s insured, or you’re a goth, take off your phone case and let it ride for free. This is especially nice if you carry your phone in your pocket. Note that your bare phone may be smoother (that’s the point) and slippery (that’s not the point), and you might need to hold it tighter. If your phone is more than two or three years old, its old materials may also be prone to scratches, but at this stage the resale value has already been reduced.
Refresh the interface
Redo everything
This tip is taken from the Life Pro Tips subreddit where editor Samurai_Saint says :
[Change] background and download a theme that will change your icons and fonts. It will look like a different device and may scratch that itch and buy you a couple more months.
Rearrange apps by category, color, or icon theme. Put everything in folders. Leave only four apps on the home screen. Change your mail attachments. Put everything in dark mode. Increase the size of the text so that everything is easy to read; reduce the text size to make the screen larger.
This is all a bit silly, but you spend $ 1200 on a new phone when your old one is still working great. There are many suggestions in this thread for other ways to customize your interface: get an app launcher, create shortcuts in iOS Shortcuts or IFTTT.
Dig into your settings
Do you know what the rules are? Realizing that the annoying mistake was just a dumb setting, you turned it off because the phone’s settings are very complex. Dig into the settings for a while, and you’ll probably discover some possibilities that your phone didn’t know about. This sounds silly until it works for the first time.
Jail break
Android users have a lot more options for customization and customization. But iPhone users can jailbreak – a risky but fun process that can free their phone from many of Apple’s software limitations. With the many settings and whole apps only available on jailbroken phones, you will definitely feel like you have a completely new device.
Someday you will need to buy a new phone. Today doesn’t have to be that day. But this could be the day you make your old phone new again.