My Samsung Galaxy S3 Skyrocket is running sluggish. Advice to speed it up?

[AC Question]

Yeah, yeah... I know everyone is going to say to upgrade it to the S5...lol.
My keyboard when I type is just slow. I type a word and it takes awhile for it to catch up. My whole device just seems sluggish. My software is up to date. I delete apps that I don't use. I use 360 Security app that says it boosts your cells performance. Does that stuff really work? Is there a better junk cleaner app out there?
How can I get my phone running up to par again?

Thanks, Amy

 

[anon(5600632)]

I'm not a fan of cleaners and security apps - I think they consume resources of their own and create new problems. Just go to settings-storage, touch on cache and it will clear it across all apps. A reboot into recovery mode and a cache partition clear should help. I don't know your exact phone model so you'll need to google the procedure - it should be very easy. Probably holding home, power and volume at the same time.

I found Samsung S3 very slow; the free version of Nova launcher helped considerably.

 

[anon(5600632)]

You can also reboot into safe mode (i.e. no downloaded apps) and compare - this can help you zero in on whether certain apps are the culprit.

 

[Rukbat]

A "junk app" is an app that's on your phone that you don't use. No "cleaner" can make that decision for you. What's junk to me may be absolutely necessary to you.

Go to the battery page in Settings/General. Press Cache (after it finishes calculating). It'll clear system cache the same as rebooting into recovery will, and a lot easier. (And you'll also know how much hunk was in the cache.)

I agree that Nova is great - that's the first thing that goes on any phone of mine - but it only makes the launcher (the homepage and app drawer) faster, it has no effect on how fast any other app runs. Uninstall any apps you'll never need. ("Never" is one of those words that doesn't work, so back the app up to a PC or cloud account before uninstalling it - so when you do need it again, and the new version was "improved" to the point that the app is useless, you can restore the old version.) First force stop the app, then clear cache and data, then uninstall. Having more free storage sometimes speeds things up.

And stay away from any app that claims to remove "unneeded" or "unused" processes or apps from memory. Android knows which processes have to be in memory. Removing one that Android needs just slows the phone down (and wastes battery) when Android has to load it again. (That's why you can kill some apps, only to have them pop up again - Android needs them running.)