page 2 of 3
Refining Spotlight search results is quite simple. Tap on Settings > General > Spotlight Search and uncheck every item except Applications. This will improve overall iOS performance and speed up Spotlight results. For more Spotlight tips, check out “Spotlight Search Tips for the iPhone“.
Do a Full Factory Reset
If you’ve had your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch for a long time, it has probably accumulated a lot of baggage. There are apps you don’t use. You may even notice that auto-correct has picked up some misspellings, mistaken for proper nouns. There may be some free space on your device that can’t be cleaned up. Having at least 1 GB of free space on your device is critical to performance.
It may be a good idea to do a full factory reset on your iOS device and re-install the apps and content that you really use. This will give you a fresh start. It will be like having a new phone. Just don’t expect your iPhone 4S to perform like an iPhone 6.
Be forewarned that a full factory reset is just that. All of the content on your device — apps, movies, TV shows, music, etc. will be deleted. If your content is purchased from Apple, there isn’t much to worry about. You can re-download any purchased items. If you buy content from other vendors, make sure it can be re-installed.
A full factory reset will also restore all settings to factory defaults. It may be a good idea to take screen shots of important settings and transfer them to a computer (using iCloud, iTunes or email). Your keyboard features, such as auto-correct and predictive text will have to re-learn your language usage. A factory reset is not a trivial endeavor.
Before you do a factory reset, it is a good idea to backup your device. Please read this article to learn more about backing up your device.
Update Your Apps
After iOS 8 is installed, you should update all of your apps as soon as possible. Many developers have updated their apps to work with iOS 8. They are taking advantage of new features and the updated app will offer better performance on iOS 8. As an early adopter of iOS 8, I found that some critical apps were quite slow in the beginning. The developers eventually updated them to work with iOS 8. After updating, the performance of many apps was as good or even better than with iOS 7. You can update apps by launching the App Store. Next, tap the Updates button at the bottom and tap “update all”. Be forewarned, the update process will slow down your device and consume network bandwidth.
Turn Off Unnecessary Notifications
Whenever I launch a new app, I almost always opt-out of notifications. Let’s face it — we really don’t need notifications from the vast majority of our apps. These are not only obnoxious, but can drain battery life and performance. It seems like the least critical apps are the ones that spam us with the most notifications.
Before I turned off most of my notifications, I would see my iPhone or iPad turn on automatically to show some trivial notification. When I looked at my Notification Center settings, I was shocked to find that virtually every app has notifications turned on. When your device wakes up a few times a day to display notifications, it reduces battery life. Notifications also consume network bandwidth and processor cycles. (continue…)