Keep your battery last longer

 

Brand new phones are a wondrous thing, but over time your shiny new phone slows down and becomes sluggish.

Switching between apps becomes a frustrating experience and your battery won't get you through a day.

If this sounds familiar, there are a few things you can do to take back control of your device and improve the situation, and one of the easiest things to do is get control of your apps running in the background.

Control your background processes

The best way to gain control of your processes is to have a dig around under the hood using the monitoring tools built into Android. Exactly how this process screen looks, how you access it and what it's called will vary depending on which company made the device and what version of Android you're using.

In some cases, before you can start, you need to enable developer options.

In versions of Android before Marshmallow, this involves going to Settings > About and then tapping Build number about seven or so times.

You'll get a notification telling you that Developer options have been unlocked once you're done and you can stop tapping.

For many handsets, the next thing you need to look for is a setting called Processes or Process Stats.

You can find this in Settings > Developer Options > Processes.

That option takes you to a list of running processes showing how much RAM each is using.

Obviously, it'll be tempting to stop the most RAM-hungry apps from running in the background, but you'll want to pay some attention to what you're stopping before you go ahead.

Stopping some apps might crash your phone.

If you're using a recent Samsung phone, like the S7 Edge, you'll want to head to Settings > Developer options > Running services to find the list of apps using RAM.

You can also tap the settings option when in the Services/Processes menu to switch between running processes and cached processes.

Some phones, like a Meizu M3 Max we tested with, won't allow you to access the developer options by tapping the build number and have their own specific method.

The best thing to do in that case is Google the model of your phone and the words 'unlock developer options'.

In the case of Meizu, that involved entering ##6961## on the Dialer  and then looking in Settings > Accessibility > Developer options > Process statistics.

And if you're using a stock Android build of Marshmallow or newer, you can find the same options and some more detailed information at Settings > Memory > Memory used by apps. From there you can choose to stop them manually.