Years ago the mobile phone just made calls, can you imagine that? Today almost everyone has a smart phone that keeps them connected to the internet, social media and many other apps. Can you imagine a world without your phone? What would you do? For most of us our phone is one of the most important possessions we own. Check out these 7 things you should stop doing with your phone…
1. Forgetting to update the phone
Yes we all have very busy lives, sometimes it’s easy to forget stuff even more so when it’s a chore or it interrupts your life. Your phone reminds you to update but you don’t want the downtime or the time it takes to install or restart your trusty connection to the world. But trust us you should ALWAYS update your device as soon as you can. Both Android and IOS updates not only contain important security updates to protect your phone they also usually include great upgrades or new features that will make your life easier. So next time your phone pings you to update, take some downtime have a drink and update it, you will regret it eventually if you don’t!
2. Forgetting to restart your phone once in a while
Even a 5 minute break from our devices can seem like an eternity right? But phones running for weeks or months without a restart can slow down with the sheer amount of background apps and cached data they are working with. Why not make it a weekly habit to restart your phone and clear out all this background data and apps? For 5 minutes of your time you will see a vast improvement.
3. Downloading apps insecurely
We all want the best apps, our friends tell us about a great new app and it costs a lot of money.. We all know you can download these apps from the internet and install them on your phone and save money right? NO this is a very bad idea, hacking your phones to save money will only lead to big problems. Some of these apps have been tampered with giving hackers your personal details and data or even worse can put viruses or malware on your phone. Stick to the phone app stores, the apps there have been checked and verified by the store operators.
4. Installing battery optimisation apps
You’ve seen them in the App Store, apps that claim to double battery life or give you more valuable time on your phone whilst on the move. But many of these apps just kill all the apps running in the background in the hope to lengthen your battery life. The truth is this actually reduces battery life the load of constantly killing apps as soon as they are closed actually puts more load on the battery than if you let the phone itself manage these background services.
5. Installing those fake apps
They are no use whatsoever and can cause damage to your phone. Apps that claim to offer features your phone currently doesn’t have are always fake. Apps that claim to offer “fast charging” to a phone that doesn’t have it will only damage batteries or even worse permanently damage the phone. The manufacturer of the phone didn’t put the feature on the phone for a reason so don’t install or give apps permission to do things the phone wasn’t made for.
6. Killing the recent or background apps
We all do it, we open recent apps and swipe them all to close them hoping to gain more speed or a longer battery life. Believe it or not this isn’t making the phone faster and it could actually cause damage to your phone. This puts strain on the battery and could shorten its life. Do yourself a favour and let the phone manage background processes itself, the manufacturer designed the OS to do this so trust them!
7. Downloading antivirus apps
Again there are many apps claiming to keep your phone virus and malware free in the app stores. Whilst on computers this is a good idea to do, this is not the case on phones. As long as you download your apps from trusted sources such as the official app stores there is no real need to install an antivirus app on your phone. If you do install one of these apps it will add extra load to the phones processor and of course reduce the battery life.
