How to Speed up your Smartphone by preventing Apps to run in the background?

Within a few days of buying a new Android phone, users in most cases encounter a gradual slowdown of their all new device. Well, that apparently due to the extensive background processes being run by the apps they have installed onto their smartphone. While the background processes of a handful apps are useful, most are utterly worthless and hog the memory of your device.

What is a Background Process?

Before proceeding further with the solution for this issue, it better to understand what this background process is in the first place. Basically app developers tune their apps to run various background process like auto sync (for apps like Gmail, WhatsApp, Facebook etc.), provide location data (for cab hailing services like Uber, Ola etc.) But the main issue creeps in when apps run background process which it can easily do without.

How to find the apps which are slowing down the phone?

Well, that pretty easy actually. In fact, you anytime can find out how much processing power the app is consuming at a given time. Simply follow the following steps:

• Go to Settings > About Phone > Build Number
• Tap Build Number as many times until you are notified that Developer Options have been enabled.
• Go back to from About Phone to the Settings Menu
• Tap on the Developer Option > Processor Stats
• Then select any of the installed app to find out how much memory they are using.

Disclaimer: The process may slightly vary in devices running company made Custom ROMs. For example, in MIUI 7 you need to tap on the MIUI version multiple times to enable Developer Options.

Which apps generally consume memory the most?

While there no hard and fast rule on which apps are generally the most memory consuming, there are still a selected few culprits.

These include social networking apps like Facebook, Messenger; installed games which you rarely play; music players which you never really use for example the Google Play Music. Just in case you are unaware a recent report by Guardian state that the Facebook apps consumes about 20% battery of your device.

How to stop running these apps in the background?

Once you have selected the apps you want to stop running in the background, follow these few easy steps to 'prosecute' them!

• Go to Settings > Apps/Application Manager > Installed Apps/Downloaded
• Then tap on the App you want to disable, for example Amazon in this case. Thereafter tap on Force Stop.
• Alternatively, you can also uninstall the apps in case you feel that you wouldn't need them anymore.

However, it's worth noting that there a few company fitted bloatware which won't show the Uninstall option. For those all you need to do is to tap on the Disable option. Unfortunately, some companies don't allow to disable them too. So the only option available is to keep them Force Stopped forever.