Your phone is brimming with junk—old photos, old emails, all kinds of useless data adding unnecessary drag to your sleek digital frame. These things are slowing your phone’s CPU to a crawl and draining your battery dry. Thanksgiving is less than a month out; do you really to be forced to engage with that other half of your family when your phone fails? In this political climate? Purge your phone now, before it’s too late.
Deal with Facebook. The Facebook app is both a power and storage hog. There are several ways to deal with it, from disabling location services to clearing the cache to disabling the automatic app refresh—but many users seem to recommend deleting the app entirely and using the mobile web browser version, which you can drop on your main screen as a bookmark. You’ll lose all those instant notifications, but did you really use them? For that matter, does anyone actually like Facebook Messenger?
Aspire to inbox zero. There are a number of web apps that will make the tough email-purging decisions that you can’t, including Mailstrom (mailstrom.co), which analyzes your reading habits to sort your emails into neat batches for deletion or unsubscription, and Unroll Me (unroll.me), which automatically sorts your emails into bulk “digests.” But if you’re a Gmail user, I strongly recommend Inbox by Gmail (google.com/inbox), which archives huge batches of emails with one touch and rewards you with a tranquil, blue-sky image when your inbox is completely emptied.
Archive all those photos. There are so many cloud backups now available, it’s not unusual to have more than one on your phone. (I recommend having more than one, actually. You really should store all your important photos on redundant clouds/drives, both online and off. No telling when one might fail.) Nearly all the popular online backup services—Apple’s iCloud, Microsoft’s OneDrive, Amazon Prime Photos, Google Photos, Dropbox—offer some kind of free service (usually capped by storage size: iCloud caps at 5GB free, while Google allows free unlimited storage as long as the photos are compressed.) And they’re all pretty much automatic; just set it and forget it. Then clear out the unwanted originals, and you’re ready to load up your phone with even more junk.
Delete Twitter. See above about uncomfortable political conversations with the family wingnut.
