Disable Startup Apps To Speed Up Android Boot Time and Performance
Recently, my phone started taking too much time to boot up and stayed almost unusable for 5-7 minutes after booting up with slower overall performance. I knew it had something to do with apps affecting the bootup process and running in the background. After some tinkering, I found that most of my installed apps were starting up with phone boot-up and heavily slowing down my phone in the process.
Most apps work in the background to update information, track phone usage, or at least send an occasional notification. All of these apps must start with your phone to do their thing in the background. Therefore, the more apps you have, the slower your phone becomes.
However, most apps don’t need to run in the background to do their job, but they will still eat up resources and slow down your phone. I found 7 such apps that I occasionally used for specific purposes but never required any real-time service. Disabling them made my phone instantly usable after booting up and there is a noticeable performance improvement as well.
If your phone seems to be slower with overloaded apps and you can’t uninstall the apps, then disabling startup apps should speed up your Android phone. In this post, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about disabling startup apps on Android and how to do it.
The ins and outs of disabling startup apps
Before I tell you how to disable startup apps on Android, it’s important to know its limitations and possible downsides. To start with, disabling startup apps will only speed up boot-up time and the usage period during which you haven’t used the disabled apps. Once you use one of the disabled apps, it will open up its processes in the background and keep them open until you restart the phone or manually kill the process in the background.
Furthermore, you should not disable all of the startup apps as some of them need to start up with the phone to work properly. For example, apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, Gmail, etc. need to start up and work in the background to offer on-time updates. On the other hand, your ride-hailing app will only be used when you want to hire a ride, so you can safely disable it.
A simple way to find which apps to disable or not is to ask the question “Does this app give me any service when I am not actively using it on my phone?”. If the answer is “No”. then most probably it will be ok to disable it.
How to disable startup apps on Android?
Now that you know which startup apps to disable and what benefit you will get, let’s see how to disable startup apps on Android. You need to get help from a third-party app to view startup apps and disable them. Although there are many apps for this purpose, I like the free Assistant for Android app for ease of use.
It’s a phone booster app, but it comes with a reliable startup manager that we will be using. Here’s how to use it:
After installing the app, open it up and move to the “Tools” section. Here, tap on the “Startup Manager” option and you’ll see all the startup apps listed under two sections, “User” and “System”.
Under the “User” section, you’ll find all the third-party apps that you installed. Tap on the slider next to an app to disable it and on your next boot, the app will not start up.
I will not recommend you disable apps in the “System” section as they are required by the system of your phone. However, the apps already installed in your phone by your phone manufacturer are also listed under this section, such as Google Photos, Facebook, and other bloatware that are made for the user and not the system. If you want to disable such an app, then you will find it under the “System” section.
Once you have disabled the required apps, restart your phone and you should notice faster boot time and overall phone performance.
Ending words
I so far had no problem disabling unrequired startup apps and the performance boost is very much noticeable. Of course, my phone does slow down after opening the disabled apps, but I am happy with the faster boot time and the initial performance that doesn’t require continuous monitoring.
Do let us know in the comments if disabling startup apps helped speed up your Android phone.
