Though iOS 8 has tons of great new features and so many improvements, the release has not been entirely trouble-free for some users, and certain iPhone and iPad devices may feel as if their performance has degraded after the update. The extent of the speed issue seems to vary, ranging from random and generally sluggish iOS 8 behavior, to just stuttering animations, or, sometimes the worst scenario, where the entire iOS experience feels suddenly outright slow when compared to how it performed under the prior version.
Having experienced and then resolved some of the performance issues with iOS 8 and iOS 8.0.2 on an iPhone 5, we’re going to share a few tips that helped. The first two are quite simple and don’t require much effort, and so if you’re experiencing minor issues, try those first. The third trick involves a complete reset and restore of the device, and is intended only for situations suffering consistent performance problems that otherwise seem unresolvable.
iOS 8 Feels Slower Sometimes with Random Sluggishness & Sporadic Slowdowns?
If the performance degradation is occasional or sporadic, or things just feel like they’re slower when doing something as simple as opening an app, you may be able to easily correct it by simply hard restarting the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. This is often the case for a device that was upgraded to iOS 8 but hasn’t been rebooted since, and a hard restart (sometimes called a reset by Apple, which, somewhat confusingly but critical to differentiate, is not the same as resetting the iPhone, which actually clears everything off of it completely).
Hard restarting an iPhone or iPad is just a matter of holding down the Power button and Home button concurrently together until the Apple logo appears, signifying the forced restart. This takes 10-15 seconds or so to initiate. Once you see the Apple logo, you can let go of both buttons.
iOS will take a little longer than usual to boot, and when it does things may be snappier and back to speed.
iOS 8 Animations Seem Choppy and Laggy
If the only speed complaint with iOS 8 you’ve experienced has to do with motion, animations, and related frame-rate drops or choppiness, you can get around that by disabling the animation effects. It’s not quite a resolution, but it does work simply by enabling the alternate fading effect, which not only ditches the choppy animations, but also makes the iOS device feel faster.
Turning off the motion animations is easy, just go into Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion > and turn the switch ON.
The effect is instantaneous, no more motion and zipping animation effects in iOS, you’ll have the fading effect and transitions instead. This may be more of a perceptual change than much else, but it really does make every device feel faster, even the already blazing fast iPhone 6 line.
iPhone / iPad Always Feels Much Slower? Time to Wipe & Restore iOS 8
If everything feels much slower after updating to iOS 8 (or iOS 8.0.2), with every single action feeling much slower and sluggish, from opening apps to interacting with things, to slow or unresponsive gestures and swipes, you may want to go with the most extreme route: wipe and restore iOS 8.
You’ll need to back up the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch before doing this, so either back it up to iCloud or iTunes, or both, and then you can go about the process of resetting the device to factory settings, a simple procedure that deletes everything from the device and gives you a blank slate.
Once the factory reset has been completed, you can then choose to restore the iPhone or iPad from the backup you made, moving all of your stuff back to the device without missing a beat.
The wipe & restore procedure is a bit of a nuisance, but it’s fairly easy, and it really does work to speed up most devices that are experiencing performance degradation post-update.
What if iOS 8 Feels Fast, but Wireless Internet is Really Slow?
A completely separate issue that has impacted some users is a peculiar set of wi-fi issues, either manifesting as abnormally slow wireless connection speeds, or dropping connections. We’ve discussed both of these problems and found a few solutions that work to resolve them, give those a try if you haven’t done so already.
Finally, Don’t Forget to Install the iOS 8 Updates!
It’s important to note that if there are actually problems with the system software that are causing performance issues, Apple is almost certainly aware of them and would be actively looking to resolve those type of performance problems. Accordingly, it’s really important to regularly install the updates when they become available through Software Update. The major performance changes tend to arrive in the form of the dot releases, say iOS 8.1, but some of the smaller updates can help things out too. For example, there are reports of some iPad users who installed iOS 8 and discovered a slower device, but then regained their iPad speed back to normal after installing iOS 8.0.2. This also means you should be on the lookout for major updates to iOS, that means getting in the habit of installing updates, or you can follow us for updates on when new iOS versions are available to install.
Does iOS 8 and iOS 8.0.2 feel faster, the same, or slower to you? Let us know what kind of experience you’re having with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running the latest iOS version, and if you found a solution to fix it, be sure to let us know of that too.
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