What the Tech? Smartphone New Year’s resolutions

(ABC 6 News) – A new year means a chance to make a fresh start. Many people make New Year’s Resolutions to get in better shape, stick to a budget, or spend more time with family.

The beginning of a new year should also mean a fresh start for the device you use more than any other.

If your smartphone is feeling sluggish, there are a few things you can (and should) do to give it a fresh start.

• Open storage on an iPhone or android device. Review large attachments taking up space. These are videos and photos in text messages you’ve received in 2022 and farther back. This iPhone has over a gig and a half of attachments I can probably delete. Android recommends what you should delete to free up space.
• Look through the old text messages and delete any that aren’t important.
• Review which apps use a lot of storage. Social Media apps can take up a lot of space. Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram are using space for no reason. The easiest way to free up that space is to delete the apps. I deleted TikTok and the 613 megabytes of data it doesn’t need. Once you delete the app, reinstall it and sign back in. You won’t lose anything and it’ll run faster.
• Delete apps you don’t use. Particularly the free ones that constantly track your activity and drain the battery.
• Clear the cache, also known as history and data. Think of cache like a junk drawer where lots of stuff from searches and browsing winds up. Stuff you don’t necessarily need. In the Chrome browser, you’ll find clear browsing data under privacy and security. In Safari on an iPhone, go to settings>Safari and look for Clean History and website data. You’ll have to sign back in accounts you’re logged into. You should actually do this every couple of months but only some people ever do it.

It’s also a good idea to restart your phone, back it up to a computer, and change passwords. If your phone is really bogged down with a lot of junk you don’t need, you can back up the phone to the cloud or a computer and then reset the phone using the backup you just created. This will make your phone work faster, and clean out everything you don’t need