The Android operating system is the undisputed king of smartphones. According to the latest data from Kantar Media, Android continues to enjoy a solid lead in market share. Companies and individual users alike are turning to Android as their principal OS for their devices.

Despite the success of this operating system, we have all complained about our smartphone at some point or other. Maybe the battery doesn’t last an entire day on a single charge, or it’s drained our mobile data usage too quickly, or it’s running low on storage space. Yes, we should all probably take a breather and stop complaining so much, but it’s also good to know that in most cases it’s not the phones themselves that are lagging, but rather the apps that are the main drivers of smartphone performance issues.

Snapchat, Spotify… even Clean Master

You can check for yourself which applications are most detrimental to the performance of your device. Accessing the Settings menu of your mobile, you can consult the consumption of each app in Power Saving Mode, look at the RAM that each application consumes in Memory or consult the amount of space they occupy from the option Internal Storage.

Be warned that there are some applications in particular that will hamper the productivity of your phone. These include social networks, such as Snapchat, the rising star among millennials, or the dating service Tinder. Spotify, the music streaming app par excellence; Line, a rival instant messaging service to WhatsApp; or Amazon Shopping, which conveniently lets you make purchases from the ecommerce behemoth, are other famous services that cause our phones to slow down.

Google Sheets, the spreadsheets application that many companies use to share and edit documents in a collaborative way, also figure among them. You’ll probably be surprised to hear that Clean Master, which is designed to clean out and optimize your phone, also consumes a lot of resources. Of course, other famous apps that we couldn’t live without also consume large amounts of battery or RAM, as is the case of Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps.

Some tricks to improve performance

There are some steps you can take to improve the speed of your Android phone. One is to uninstall the apps you do not use from the Application Storage menu. You can also delete the data that the application has downloaded or clear the cache to speed up the processes.

Another, somewhat more cumbersome, alternative is to enter the Android developer options from the Settings menu, About Phone and Software Information (you’ll have to press Build Number seven times) and disable animations.

On your business phone, make sure you are using applications in a way that does not needlessly consume resources and that you are protecting your device with the cybersecurity solution that best suits your business.