Tricks to free up RAM memory on iPhone (and iPad) without external apps, to speed up the phone when it goes slow
The iOS operating system on the iPhone has excellent RAM memory management, so we will rarely have to intervene to fix the situation, however there are cases where the iPhone slows down due to too many apps open in RAM memory or due to some poorly optimized app that it tends to use more memory than it should.
So if the iPhone seems to be a bit slower than normal and if trying to open an app it doesn’t start immediately, we will show you in this guide how to free up RAM memory on iPhone quickly and quickly , without complicated or difficult procedures . to understand.
In this way we will be able to make the iPhone snappy even with many apps installed (very common scenario if we have been using the iPhone for many years without ever manually optimizing the RAM memory).
READ ALSO: Speed up iPhone and optimize iOS
Free up RAM on iPhone
The methods collected below can be applied on all recent iPhone models that have iOS 12 or later releases as the operating system. If we do not have at least version 12 of iOS, we recommend that you proceed with the system update (if available) or buy a new iPhone.
Use the Home key on the close screen
For iPhones equipped with a physical Home button and still supported by Apple (iPhone 7 and iPhone 8), we can quickly free the RAM by pressing and holding the shutdown button when the screen is unlocked and, as soon as the slide Swipe to shutdown appears , press and hold the button Home at the bottom until the request for the unlock code appears.
If you now go to press the Home button twice to see the running applications, you will notice that they are still present but that, trying to open one, it will be reloaded from scratch as it would be by pressing on its launch icon. The only caveat to note is that the iPhone must already be unlocked otherwise, holding down the Home button, Siri will be activated. In this way the RAM memory of the iPhone will be reinitialized immediately and we will therefore be able to benefit from a higher speed than before.
Close unused background apps
Just like on Android, iPhone also allows you to access apps left active in the background, so that we can manually close them when we notice an excessive slowdown of our phone. To do this, press the Home button twice (up to iPhone 8) or scroll from the bottom edge to the center of the screen and hold down (on iPhone X and later) to open the switcher with all the apps active in the background.
From this menu we scroll left and right to view all the apps, then swipe upwards (starting from the app window) to close it permanently. To empty all RAM memory we will have to repeat the steps for each window in the switcher, but this could result in a delay in receiving notifications from messaging apps: therefore we only act on the apps that are really unused , avoiding to close all the apps without criteria as happens on Android (where there is often a Close all button ).
Prevent background apps from running
To prevent one or more apps from remaining in RAM even after closing, we will have to act in the iPhone settings to correct this type of behavior. We open the Settings app , tap on the General menu and finally press the Update app in the background item .
We can act in two different ways: completely block the execution of the apps in the background, by setting the item Refresh app in the background to No , or remove the check marks from the apps that we consider superfluous and therefore we do not want them to always remain active in memory (choose which we recommend).
Another way to change background app behavior is to open the app Settings , scroll to the bottom of the screen, click on the menu with the name of the app and finally remove the check mark next to Update in the background .
Obviously we will have to act wisely , to avoid that even useful apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and Facebook fail to stay active in memory and send us notifications.
Uninstall unused apps
If we no longer use one or more apps, instead of deactivating the execution in the background it is advisable to remove them completely, so as to save RAM memory and internal memory. To uninstall an app, simply hold down with your finger on one of the apps on the Home screens, then press on Rearrange apps then tap on the X symbol on the top left corner of each uninstallable app (which in this phase will vibrate).
The iPhone can automatically uninstall unused apps, so as to free up the RAM memory by itself when necessary; to enable this feature, open the Settings app , tap on the iTunes Store and App Store menu,.
After activation, the iPhone will uninstall apps that have not been opened for a few months, so as to leave the RAM memory only for the apps we use frequently.
Restart the device
As a last resort we can free up RAM memory on the iPhone by turning the device off and on again, so as to be able to free the cache in memory and prevent the apps from starting in the background that we had already optimized. To turn off the device, press and hold the Power button for a few seconds, then slide the swipe Scroll to turn off to turn off the device. We wait 2 minutes, then press the Power button again until the Apple logo appears.
If not even restarting solves the slowness problems of our iPhone, we advise you to proceed with a factory reset, as already seen in our guide on how to factory reset iPhone and iPad by deleting and restoring data .
Conclusions
The iPhone is a very optimized smartphone and hardly needs to free up the RAM memory to speed up the device (especially on the most recent models). However, if we have an old iPhone that is still supported and we notice some slowdown (even sporadic), we apply one of the methods seen above to free up RAM memory on the iPhone and make the device go back snappy again as at the first start.
