Many of us have an old Android phone somewhere in the house, doing nothing. Rather than leaving it there to add no value to your life and work, you may find that it’s much easier than you think to resurrect it.

Look Beyond The Launch

Even though your phone may have been the greatest and the fastest when it was launched, the passage of time doesn’t necessarily mean that it has become obsolete.

Performance issues can, of course, be exaggerated by age and resource limitations, but there are some steps you can take to clean-up your old android phone and bring it back into active service. These steps could include:

• Freeing -up storage space. Begin this process by backing up the media that you have on the phone. This can be done by opening Google photos, selecting “Settings,” “Back up & sync” and activating the toggle that appears. This will allow you to back up your photos and images to the cloud. Get Google’s free Files Go app, open it, grant the app permission to access your phone’s storage, and from here you will be given suggestions for freeing-up space on your device. For example, this can include removing junk and duplicate files, removing downloaded files and large files, and deleting the photos and videos (now that you have back-up copies).
• Getting rid of unused apps. This is a good move on any phone anyway as a way to improve security. In the case of refreshing your phone, the Files Go app can show you which apps are unused and therefore suitable to uninstall. You can also regain more phone resources by clearing out your app clutter. For apps that came pre-installed (and can’t be uninstalled), look for a button to disable those apps.
• Using ‘lite’ app alternatives. Using ‘lite’ versions of the apps that you’d still like to have on the old phone e.g. Facebook, Google Maps and Skype lite, can mean that you get plenty of basic functionality, but take up less phone resources.
• Reducing background activity / check-ins by certain apps. This can make the phone run faster, and can reduce monthly bills.
• Making sure your apps are up to date. Checking-in with Play Store and making sure you have the newest (lite) versions of apps on your old phone can prevent many of the problems caused by less optimized older versions.
• Making sure the home screen is up to date and not slowing things down. You may want to use a third-party launcher e.g. the free Lawnchair Launcher.
• Keeping the software animations to a minimum. This will involve accessing the system settings ‘Drawing’ section, but could help towards speeding your old android phone up.
• Trying a ‘factory reset’. This can make the phone run faster. Again, this is likely to involve accessing the ‘System’ section (after making sure everything important is backed-up).
• Adding new, efficiency-enhancing apps.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

A succession of updated models, the need (or, being convinced by marketing of the need) to constantly upgrade to the next best model, along with a throwaway society means that there is so much wastage when it comes to devices, especially mobile phone handsets. This is why many businesses have seized the opportunity of refurbishing and re-selling them e.g. smartfonestore.com, Second-hand Phones.Com, envirofone.com and more.

There’s no doubt that smart-phones have become an important part of our lives with 78% of all adults now owning one, and with each of us checking our phone once every 12 minutes on average during our waking hours (Ofcom). Web browsing and using chat and other apps (WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger) are now equally as important as actually being able to make a call, so as long as your re-conditioned / resurrected phone has the storage space, speed, and available resources to accommodate modern apps (lite versions), you could be saving yourself money and making life easier for yourself by bringing it back into use.