By Tony Chung on 14 September 2009 ~ Comments

How to Speed Up iPhone 3G or 3Gs

apple tech tips

Have you noticed a lag in the speed at which your iPhone 3G or 3Gs loads SMS text messages or web browser pages?

Here’s the solution.

apple-iphone-3g

Remember that your iPhone is basically a small computer, it runs an operating system just like Windows XP or Mac OS X. And just like those systems, there are background tasks running that may slow down the performance of your iPhone. So in order to speed up your iPhone, you should properly quit the applications that you are not using.

Important note (common misconception):

When you press the ‘Home’ button on the front of the iPod Touch, you are not quitting the application. You are simply closing it, but the application is still open and running in the background.

Suppose you open a game that you downloaded or an application on your iPhone that constantly updates via the internet. But you don’t use that application often. Then it is smart to quit those applications so it is not hogging the bandwidth (speed) of your iPhone in the background.

So, in order to properly quit these applications on iPhone 3G or 3Gs, perform the following steps:

  1. Open the application that you wish to quit by pressing its button on the home screen.
  2. Once the app opens, hold the power button (on the top of the iPhone) until the ‘Slide to Power Off’ with a red button shows up.
  3. Then let go of the power button and press and hold the ‘Home’ button on the front-bottom of the iPhone.
  4. When the interface returns to the home screen, you have successfully quit the application.

Perform steps 1-4 on any applications that you don’t use often. This will speed up the performance of your iPhone.

Bonus: Clear the cache of your Safari browser regularly by doing the following:

Home Screen > Settings > Safari > Clear Cache.

This will help speed up the performance of Safari when surfing the web.

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Tony Chung is a 25 year young music and web lover based in Silicon Valley. He has a BSEE, released an album in Asia, and starred in a film. This blog is about his passion for Apple products, music, and financial investing. (more...)
  • Tom
    Just confirming for those who are curious: the methods described here do not make much/any difference to your iPhone. This is because the apps do shut down when you close them already. iPhone OS does not currently allow multitasking - all apps are shut down when they lose focus (you close their window by pressing the home button). Apple's built-in apps don't even run in the background; they simply use pre-made processes built into the OS to continue certain functionality while you do other things. This is about to be expanded with iPhone OS 4.0 which will allow 3rd party apps to use the same processes and many new ones for much more of a multitasking 'feel'. It will still not be true multitasking, which you can currently get by jailbreaking your iPhone and installing the necessary apps. When truly multitasking, iPhone apps pop into and out of existence immediately with no delay, but your RAM usage will be insane. Luckily, there are plist-related 'mods' available to both increase the clock speed of the iphone's processor and bestow upon it virtual memory to allow for more apps to be open at once. The jury is still out on whether even these work; as many people say they do as they don't. For me, it seems the overclocking at least has led to some improvement. my 3G can nearly keep up with a 3GS, although only nearly - the required hardware to match it just isn't there.
  • Oscar
    bravo
  • I didn't really think about doing the above with my 3Gs In fact I didn't know how, I guess practising this could help me alot lately Safari has been locking up on me randomly not too often though but it's a pain when it does happen. Maybe the ram gets used too heavily. Thanks for the post
  • The ones I recommend quiting like this are YouTube, Mail, Safari, and Music. Those are the main ones which will use up your ram.
  • Tony Chung
    No problem Polprav!
  • Hello from Russia!
    Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
  • Yes Otto is correct.

    Tony, when you press the home button certain apps save their exit state so that, when opened next time, they look exactly as though they had been running in the background.

    It saves memory, processing power and most importantly battery power - something the iPhone is not the best at, currently.

    Regards.
  • Tony Chung
    Is that right Otto? Interesting, but when I open certain apps the second or third time, they open in the same state as when I closed the app. I don't think the application is 100% quit when simply pressing the home button to return to the home screen.
  • I'm sorry, but this is inaccurate. Apps do not run in the background unless they're special Apple ones.

    If you've jailbroken your phone and installed development or other backgrounding type of tools, then you'd be able to see exactly what is going on, but the gist of it is that while it's *possible* to run an app in the background, Apple specifically forbids it for all App Store applications.

    There are no applications in the App Store (that I've found) which run in the background. There's several ways to run jailbroken apps in the background, and some can do this. But official ones do *not*.
  • Tony Chung
    From the Recession Apps website,

    'Apple has demanded that we remove the feature to Free Memory from all our apps. We have decided to remove our existing Free Memory 1.5 and MemoryInfo 1.1 apps from sale. We have instead submitted Free Memory Lite and MemoryInfo Lite without the Free Memory feature.'

    http://www.recessionapps.com/Free_Memory.html
  • Tony Chung
    Sam, yes power cycling the iPhone will do the same thing, but seeing that it takes 5-6 minutes for the entire power cycle process, it can be somewhat tedious to do it frequently. Some iPhone users power cycle their phone once a week.

    Herb, I'm not seeing Memory Info when I do a search query for the app in the app store...
  • The information here was worth reading. I learned a lot. Thank you for the details on how to speed up the processing time of iPhone.
  • Do you know if the apps that free memory (e.g., MemoryInfo) do the same thing?
  • sam
    My qn is, Cant you not acheive the same goal by just power cycling the iphone? especially if you have more than 20 apps?
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