If you are an Android user, you must have downloaded apps, that promise to boost your smartphone’s performance and battery life, at least once. These apps include Cache Cleaners, Memory Boosters, Anti Viruses, Battery Doctors etc. But do these really help improving your device’s performance or you are being deceived here? Let’s find out.
The most used and probably the best example is ‘Clean Master.’ To explain what these apps actually appear to do is clean up your RAM and junk files stored on your device. But in reality, they actually take up a lot of RAM making your device slow eventually. On the other hand, Android already has its own RAM and Cache management system which is pretty advanced in its own sense. Android’s built-in RAM and Cache automatically shuts down background processes if they are filling up too much memory with not much usage time. Although manual cache cleaning is good for once in awhile, downloading an additional App for that purpose is not healthy.
Also, often these apps close some useful files and processes which when opened again takes ages to load. You have to understand here that ‘cache’ is basically some raw files that our device stores for faster opening up and operations of apps in future. Hence, having some amount cache stored is actually helpful. So ironically, these apps will actually make your android smartphones slow each time you clear junk. To cite an example, you must have noticed apps like Facebook, Instagram and others taking a lot more time to load (or boot) than usual after you have cleaned up the junk with these RAM and Cache cleaner apps.
Further, these apps can easily deceive people by showing up fake results every time they scan for junk files and cache, however, in reality, there isn’t that much of junk files or cache to clean. Note, we are not denying the fact that Android doesn’t build up cache and stores it unnecessarily, but it is also capable of cleaning it over time. If you really want to clean your device’s cache, head on to Settings > Storage/Memory > Cached Data > Clear it.
Coming to Battery Saving apps which promise to increase your device’s battery life and even falsely showcase the desired results, these apps actually just eats both your device’s memory and battery. An app can save up a little juice for your Android mostly when it’s built into the operating system. In other words, battery savers which are built-in to your Android device do help because they manage to limit the CPU performance. For example, smartphone manufacturers like Samsung, HTC, Huawei, Xiaomi all are already selling their devices with built-in battery savers (or optimisers), so installing an external app to do the same job would naturally require more power as well as memory and on top of this they deliver sub-par results.
Another issue with these apps is that they bring annoying unwanted ads which are literally forced on users. A great example of this is again ‘Clean Master’. The app asks users to enable ‘Charge Master’ on the device which it claims will charge your device faster. However, the app then takes over your lock screen and displays random ads. Apart from that, these ads are present in almost all sections of the apps.
To sum up, deleting junk files or cache will surely free up some space on your device but that would then require your device to load up pictures, apps and games from scratch eventually making it slower. The additional adware which accompanies these spam apps further adds up to the list of reasons you should not have these apps installed on your Android smartphone. In other words, your Android smartphone is smart enough, don’t outsource the operations which can be more efficient if done in-house.