Daily Tip: How to fix a slow or frozen iPhone or iPad
iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad moving at a slow crawl or frozen entirely and trying to figure out how to get it back up to speed? There are few things that you can do try. Stay with us after the break to find out how to help your iPhone out.
- KIll recent apps in your Fast App Switcher. There might be a rogue process eating up memory.
- Restart your iPhone (soft or hard reset).
- Delete and re-install any apps that repeatedly give you problems.
- If you're jailbroken and have a ton of tweaks running, try removing them and re-adding them one at a time and see if that helps identify any problems.
- Update your iPhone to the latest firmware. (Unless you have an iPhone 3G, in which case you might want to stick with iOS 3.1.3)
- Restore your iPhone as new. This is a last resort -- you will have to reinstall everything on your iPhone after you do this. However, it can sometimes solve problems nothing else can, especially if you previously restored from a buggy or corrupt backup image.
If you have any other ideas on how to deal with a frozen or buggy iPhone, iPad or iPod, let me know in comments!
Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you'd like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it's especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we'll even give ya a reward...)
Senior Editor at iMore and a practicing psychotherapist specializing in stress and anxiety. She speaks everywhere from conferences to corporations, and co-hosts of the iMore show and ZEN and TECH podcasts.
There are 14 comments. Add yours.
Or try clearing out text messages if you never delete them, close all the Safari windows you aren't using and go to Settings, Safari and clear History, Cookies and Cache. Makes a HUGE difference on most people's devices.
Because that will free up a lot of RAM.
Um, I'm not buying into old text messages slowing my phone down. Untrue.
I cleared out a buddy of mines who had been backing them up and not deleting them since 2007 and it made a vast improvement and his messaging app stopped crashing. If you don't think that deleting something that has built up to close to 100,000 on an app that has to load all of them when it opens isn't going to help... Then you'd be wrong ha ha.
"Has to load all of them?" What? What makes you think it's loading them all? Texts are stored in an SQLite database, and it only loads the last few dozen or so. You have to tap a button to load older ones.
How about this it worked for me and is less of a hassle than a restore. Settings>Reset>Reset All Settings. It helps alot and other than redoing your passwords and a few other things it does nothing to what u have on the phone but it speeds it up drastically
Settings-> General-> Reset-> Reset all settings. :)
Please realize that doing this will toss all of your settings out.
It dumps all of your categories.
It resets all your jailbreak app settings.
Or dont buy an iPad 2, cause my iPhone4 seems so so slow now!
I was under the impression that iphones are perfect?
And I thought I was the only one...
Can any one advise me how can i find my stolen iPhone if i still have it IMEI code...I did not have "mobile me"?? If any one can help i will be very grateful
An Apple product that is buggy or that slows down? Say it isn't so! Clearly a problem with the user or someone else's created software.
In the meantime, your solutions sound a lot like those tried with, say, an old Microsoft-powered computer, rather than a state-of-the-art social icon.
Now, if only the most recent iOS patch (sorry...'update') hadn't created issues of wi-fi connectivity for so many...
I found years ago that if you manage your data on the go or everynight before you plug in such as clearing your email trash clearing unwanted browser history you will always be ahead of the game
new smartphones with a gig of ram shouldn't give you as much problems