How to Speed Up a Slow iPhone

BY Gautam Prabhu

Published 2 Jan 2018

How to Speed Up a Slow iPhone

Is your iPhone slow? If you’re facing performance issues with your iPhone, then here are some tips to speed up your slow iPhone.

#1. Check iPhone Battery Health

You probably know by now about Apple’s controversial decision to introduce power management feature in iOS 10.2.1, which could impact the performance of older iPhones to prevent unexpected shutdowns during peak workloads.

The power management feature currently affects iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone SE (iOS 10.2.1 or later), iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus (iOS 11.2 or later).

If you’ve one of these iPhones then you should check your iPhone’s battery health. They are several ways to check iPhone battery health. You can check our post if you need help on how to check iPhone battery health.

The power management feature works by looking at a combination of the device temperature, battery state of charge, and the battery’s impedance. So it is important to note here that iOS’ power management feature will only slow down your iPhone if these variables require it, it won’t slow it down because your iPhone’s battery health has degraded.

If your iPhone’s battery capacity has degraded below 80% then you may need to replace the battery. But I would recommend waiting for Apple to release the iOS software update in 2018, which will give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, and get a confirmation if its condition is affecting performance.

#2. Restore iPhone

Older and degraded battery may not be the reason your iPhone has slowed down. If your iPhone is slow all the time, then it is possible that there’s something wrong with it other than the battery.

Several users like Michael Glenn have discovered that restoring their iPhone resolved the slow iPhone problems. Michael Glenn discovered that restoring his iPhone which had a battery with 83% capacity, resolved the performance issue.

In fact, I would recommend setting it up as a new iPhone, to see if it solves the performance issues. We have seen several performance issues after a major iOS update getting resolved after readers have restored their iPhone. In the case of older iPhones like iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus, they would have gone through at least one or two major iOS updates, so restoring may help especially as a new iPhone, which could get rid of some bad data that might be causing an issue.

It is a bit time consuming, but the wipe and restore won’t cost you anything, so it is certainly worth trying to see if it fixes the slow iPhone problem before you visit an Apple Store to get the battery replaced.

There are other ways to speed up the iPhone like speeding up animations, clearing app caches which we’ve described in this post, but if the performance problems are an old iPhone, then I would recommend one of these solutions.

Is your iPhone slow? Did you try restoring your iPhone? Did it help resolve the performance issues? Let us know in the comments below.