Does downloading a lot of apps slow down your phone?

[jamesino]

Does downloading and installing (although not necessarily running them all at the same time) a lot of apps from Play store slow down your phone?

 

[blade22222]

Some apps run all the time in the background. So yes it could.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Android Central Forums

 

[Soundtrack to Chaos]

I have over 250 apps installed I believe, hasn't slowed me down

Sent from my Google Nexus 7 running aokp 4.1.2, because there is no PacMan rom for the nexus

 

[Lanhoj]

Depends what the Apps are - if they're all always constantly syncing then yes. If not then no.

I've got 145 installed without any lag whatsoever.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Android Central Forums

 

[Soundtrack to Chaos]

Depends what the Apps are - if they're all always constantly syncing then yes. If not then no.

I've got 145 installed without any lag whatsoever.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Android Central Forums

This

Also depends how many are doing background processes, because it will decrease your ram. But apps like ram booster and ram manager fix these issues if implemented properly

Sent from my Google Nexus 7 running aokp 4.1.2, because there is no PacMan rom for the nexus

 

[Yeag3r]

Holy cow! I only have 67 apps and I thought I had a lot!

Sent from my ADR6400L using Android Central Forums

 

[funkylogik]

Lol i have like 350 (including skins etc and after a full wipe and installing a rom and Quadrant speed test, the phone was faster before i restored all apps.
Id imagine widgets are the worst?

What id like to know once and for all is do live wallpagers use ram/battery while not on homescreen?
Im guessing no?


Unbranded international rooted s3 with Official 4.1.2 JB. Paisley, Scotland, Western Europe :beer:

 

[Kelly Kearns]

Lol i have like 350 (including skins etc and after a full wipe and installing a rom and Quadrant speed test, the phone was faster before i restored all apps.
Id imagine widgets are the worst?

What id like to know once and for all is do live wallpagers use ram/battery while not on homescreen?
Im guessing no?


Unbranded international rooted s3 with Official 4.1.2 JB. Paisley, Scotland, Western Europe :beer:

Just stepping in for a sec to say..glad to see you back!

 

[BryEDS]

Does downloading and installing (although not necessarily running them all at the same time) a lot of apps from Play store slow down your phone?

My gosh, people don't read what the person wrote. Yes, downloading and installing a bunch of apps ALWAYS slows down my phone. Having them on my phone has no effect on the speed, but what happens is with having more and more apps, they update more and more frequently, increasing the frequency of more downloading/installing, which slows it down! My crawls when its updating and installing apps ... or when re-syncing my apps from the store ...

 

[funkylogik]

My gosh, people don't read what the person wrote. Yes, downloading and installing a bunch of apps ALWAYS slows down my phone. Having them on my phone has no effect on the speed, but what happens is with having more and more apps, they update more and more frequently, increasing the frequency of more downloading/installing, which slows it down! My crawls when its updating and installing apps ... or when re-syncing my apps from the store ...

Updating was hardly the question tbh
You can choose if and when you update apps :beer:

GS3, Neat Rom by Salesale, aroma v1.5A. Paisley, Scotland, Western Europe :beer:

 

[funkylogik]

Just stepping in for a sec to say..glad to see you back!

Aww thanks

GS3, Neat Rom by Salesale, aroma v1.5A. Paisley, Scotland, Western Europe :beer:

 

[seldombeaton]

in your answer you stated you keep your widgets in drawers, what are drawers? I know how to organize my widgets in folders, what are drawers?

 

[Deadly_Poison630]

I would say so. Some apps (like facebook) run in the background and slow it down and suck your battery dry.

 

[meyerweb#CB]

Does downloading and installing (although not necessarily running them all at the same time) a lot of apps from Play store slow down your phone?

The OP asked this question 3 months ago, and never came back to comment on the answers, but let's look closely at what he said, and the possible situations:

1. He says "does downloading and installing" slow down your phone. Although one previous poster answered that yes, the phone slows down a lot while downloading apps, I don't think that's what the OP was really asking about.

2. He says "not necessarily running them at the same time." This leads me to think he's asking if simply having a lot of apps installed on your phone slows it down. And the answer to that is absolutely, completely, "No." Apps are installed to ROM storage. Running apps run in RAM. Those are completely different, separate things, and one has no effect on the other. You could fill up 15.5 Gig of your 16 GB of ROM storage and it won't slow what running in RAM at all. The only catch might be if you run an app that attempts to write data to storage, and there's no free ROM to write to. In that case you'd get an error of some sort.

3. Does having lots of Apps in RAM slow things down? It depends. If you get a tool that lets you look at what's in memory (I highly recommend System Panel) you'll see that apps that are in RAM can be Active or Inactive cached) apps. Inactive apps are in memory so that if you want to access them, they are available immediately. They use no CPU, no battery, and don't slow things down at all, except in one situation: If you start a new app, one that isn't in memory, Android will flush existing app(s) out of memory to make space for the new one. There is a measurable, but hardly noticeable, delay in loading the new app while that happens.

Active apps may or may not be using CPU at any given moment. If you've recently used an app, it will show as active, even though you're not using it at the moment. Eventually, if you continue to not use it, it'll move into the inactive (cached) category. Some active apps may be running in the background, performing actually processing activities (such as downloading a web page while you're looking at another app). That does use CPU, and will slow other things down. Most apps don't really do much of this, however. Some active apps are just sitting there, doing nothing but waiting for a request from the OS to do something. Their cpu usage is minimal, and any impact on performance also minimal.

Unless you have an app that's doing lots of background processing, which is pretty rare, I think, having a lot of apps running doesn't have a serious impact on performance either.