Improving low-end Android device performance.

[|tera|]

I've got a Xiaomi Redmi Go.
It's quite slow in general, even with less background apps and tasks.

It's got Android Go edition and I've done the following to increase the speed quite noticeably:

Under developer options, under Animation Scaling, I've disabled all Animations.
This gave me an instant UI improvement.

Using an alternative launcher such as Nova had no effect for me.

I've also installed Memory Booster Lite, which allows me to close some background tasks and apps, to improve general speed. It did make a difference also.

Weirdly enough, my battery lasts almost two full days at a time.
This I achieved by using the Night Light feature and having my display brightness at a lower level which suits me.

I also disabled all Andoid specific apps and services from battery optimization. I did the same for my most commonly used Apps.
This is weird, but definitely helped with extending battery life.

I'm running Adguard on my phone, the real Adguard, not the crappy one in the Play Store. It has a slight learning curve, so I suggest using it only if you are familiar with technical terms and configurations.
It blocks hundreds of trackers and all ads in my Apps, except for my browsers. The data it saves me is quite a lot.

This is my short list to improve your low-end device performance.

Happy tweaking

 

[CranialBlaze]

Adguard is nice but I went with the more extreme route of hosting a pothole, blocks ads across my entire network, incl browser. Costs me R35 a month to run the server.

Its scary sometimes when u look at the logs and see that on some days as much as 45% of your requests are tracking and advertising scripts. Every now and then I need to jump in to add a new admiral url to block the ad blocker blocker.

Been meaning to switch to the Adguard server solution as it's got dns over https out the box, setting that up on a pothole is more effort than I care for.

 

[|tera|]

Adguard is nice but I went with the more extreme route of hosting a pothole, blocks ads across my entire network, incl browser. Costs me R35 a month to run the server.

Its scary sometimes when u look at the logs and see that on some days as much as 45% of your requests are tracking and advertising scripts. Every now and then I need to jump in to add a new admiral url to block the ad blocker blocker.

Been meaning to switch to the Adguard server solution as it's got dns over https out the box, setting that up on a pothole is more effort than I care for.

Good stuff. Adguard saved 2Gb data on my phone in the last 30 days, if I read the stats correctly. That's quite a chunk.
AFAIK the tracker and ad definitions get updated regularly as well.
Do you have to use your pothole solution on your local network, or does it work with mobile data as well?

 

[CranialBlaze]

Good stuff. Adguard saved 2Gb data on my phone in the last 30 days, if I read the stats correctly. That's quite a chunk.
AFAIK the tracker and ad definitions get updated regularly as well.
Do you have to use your pothole solution on your local network, or does it work with mobile data as well?

I am of the paranoid sort so all my devices run a VPN permanently and the VPN allows me to define a dns server. A VPN is the only way to currently specify a dns server for mobile data.

If your device is not rooted then adguard is creating a VPN connection in order to work.

 

[|tera|]

I am of the paranoid sort so all my devices run a VPN permanently and the VPN allows me to define a dns server. A VPN is the only way to currently specify a dns server for mobile data.

If your device is not rooted then adguard is creating a VPN connection in order to work.

Thanks for the explanation. The Adguard VPN seems to be like a local VPN though, or am I wrong? It just starts and connects fast and I haven't seen that with other Android VPN apps.

 

[CranialBlaze]

Thanks for the explanation. The Adguard VPN seems to be like a local VPN though, or am I wrong? It just starts and connects fast and I haven't seen that with other Android VPN apps.

Yeah, it has a file that is basically a blacklist which it loads into memory and compares against for every request, if that list gets too big you will start loosing performance.

In rooted devices it follows the same approach but uses the devices host file to create a sort of blackhole. It's a bit faster but same cost if it gets too big.

Back when I used those on Windows 2mb was the tipping point, after that you go into safe mode and delete the file, system would not boot with that many records.

One of the reasons a prefer a server records are in a database and request results are cached for 24hrs from last request, so something like googles analytics will be cached almost indefinitely but 1 of the thousands of admiral urls will expire after a day, limiting active memory usage.

 

[backstreetboy]

Use a launcher like kiss launcher it's only 250kb https://kisslauncher.com/
For ads use a VPN with adblock build in like Windscribe or use https://blokada.org/index.html
Don't clear your memory https://www.androidpit.com/ram-management-on-android

Having full RAM isn't a bad thing, and is even desired. As Android has its roots in Linux and Unix, the Linux system kernel has set rules for memory management. And these rules follow the philosophy that free internal memory is wasted memory.

 

[|tera|]

Use a launcher like kiss launcher it's only 250kb https://kisslauncher.com/
For ads use a VPN with adblock build in like Windscribe or use https://blokada.org/index.html
Don't clear your memory https://www.androidpit.com/ram-management-on-android

I will try kiss and report back.
I prefer Adguard though. Works fine for me and my configuration is perfect at the moment.
I didn’t know about the memory issue. I'll uninstall the memory booster and see if I see a difference.
Thanks

 

[|tera|]

Use a launcher like kiss launcher it's only 250kb https://kisslauncher.com/
For ads use a VPN with adblock build in like Windscribe or use https://blokada.org/index.html
Don't clear your memory https://www.androidpit.com/ram-management-on-android

Kiss borks my phone. It gets stuck and stops the launcher and even 'Android System'. Switched back to Mint and everything works. I did uninstall the memory booster though.

 

[|tera|]

Just a correction.
I have had to restore Animation Scaling due to some Apps requiring it.
Apps don't load as they should.
Sorry for giving bad advice on that.