Speed Up Your iPhone 6 After the iOS 11 Debacle

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video — I’m doing a quick public service announcement for all the iPhone 6 users who experienced a slow down after installing iOS 11. 

I still have an iPhone 6.  iPhones are expensive and there had been really no reason to upgrade. EXCEPT that I downloaded iOS several months ago and my phone slowed to a crawl.  Did this happen to you?  My iPhone is not my primary device — I use my iPad much more, but I use it while I’m out and about to check texts, make appointments, and check my to do list. All of these activities became so slow that it was almost pointless to even use my phone for anything other than taking phone calls. Here are some real timing that I clocked:

• 19 seconds to open iMessage to view a text 
• 22 seconds to open Google Calendar, even longer to actually edit or add an appointment 
• Up to 30 seconds to open a note in Evernote
• Incoming calls would ring on my connected car speaker, but it wouldn’t show up on the phone display to answer the call for 6 or more seconds. 

SO IRRITATING!  Of course, I read that Apple was deliberately slowing down older iPhones to “preserve battery life.”  There was also — eventually — a update fix coming. But, until then, I had to do SOMETHING — my phone was basically unusable even for basic functions. So, I tried a couple of things:

• Manage Storage - I have a 64GB phone.  If you are using too much of your storage, you can experience a slow down.  Go to Settings, General, then iPhone Storage.  Offload your photos to iCloud, or Google Photos.  I take mine off my phone every 3 months. Delete videos, media attached to texts, etc. Look at these recommendations given by Apple.  You can review and delete your text message attachments right here from this screen.  Once I did this, the largest amount of storage is taken up by apps, so next I went to . . .
• Delete Unused Apps - I did a giant spring cleaning of my phone and iPad to delete unused apps and organize the ones I kept. You can view my video on that.  You can also . . . 
• Turn off Background Refresh - check to see which apps are updating even when you are not using them. This could slow down your phone.

But in the end, even though these actions DID helped to clean up my phone, they didn’t do very much to speed things up. 

So, here is the thing I did that actually helped quite a bit.  I ordered a new battery. You can order a replacement battery from Apple for $30, have it sent to an Apple store, and they will install it without an appointment.  Batteries used to be $80, but they lowered the price by $50 as a concession for making our phones unusable. Here’s what you do to order a new battery:

• Call 800-275-2273 to talk to Apple customer support. This might take a while. I was on hold for almost a half an hour.  BUT, once you get them on the phone, they will figure out exactly which battery you need for your phone type and place the order for you.  You’ll also need to tell them which Apple Store that you want it sent to.  And then you wait. Mine took 4 weeks to arrive, my friend’s took 3 — not sure why the difference.  At any rate, once the battery reaches the Apple store
• the store will call you to let you know it has arrived. They will give you something like 5 days to come to the store to have your battery installed. If you can’t make it in that timeframe, they will send it back.  You don’t need an appointment, but you will need to block off a couple of hours. Next, 
• Show up at the store, they will take your phone for an hour or 2 while you wait.  They will charge you $30 afterwards for both the battery and installation.

And I will tell you right now — IT IS WORTH IT.  $30 is a bargain to get a working phone back. Now it takes 3 seconds to open up iMessage rather than 19. It takes 5 seconds to open a note in Evernote, down from 30. Google Calendar still takes too long, but that is it’s own issue.  It’s definitely not as fast as it once was, but it makes my phone useable again, which buys me some time before I feel Iike I have to upgrade. 

Apple did come out with the “fix” that they promised in iOS 11.3. I’ve downloaded this update, but since my battery is fully healthy, I don’t need to use this beta feature. For those of you who don’t have a new battery, once you install iOS 11.3, you can go to Settings, scroll down to Battery, then Battery Health (Beta). You can see mine is at 100% capacity, but if yours is lower, you’ll see this option, which allows you to disable Apple’s slowdown feature or as they call it “performance management.”

Let me know what has worked for you!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!