My older iPhone has been lagging, apps take longer to open, and the battery drains faster than it used to. I’ve heard disabling Background App Refresh can improve iPhone performance, but I’m not sure if it actually helps or just limits notifications and app updates. Has anyone seen a real speed boost from turning it off?
You can usually make an older iPhone feel a lot less awful without doing a full reset. The two things that matter most are battery condition and storage. Settings tweaks help too, but they won’t fix a worn-out battery or a phone that’s almost completely full.
Start with battery health
Go to Settings - Battery - Battery Health and Charging. If the maximum capacity is under 80 percent, that’s probably the main problem. iOS can slow the phone down to stop random shutdowns, and no animation setting or cache cleanup is going to fully get around that. At that point, a battery replacement will usually do more than any software fix.
If the battery looks okay, then it’s worth moving on to settings and storage.
Settings that are actually worth changing
There are a few changes that can make older hardware feel smoother without deleting anything:
Turn off Background App Refresh at Settings - General - Background App Refresh. Older chips don’t have much room to spare, and apps quietly refreshing in the background can make the phone feel slower when you’re trying to use it.
Turn on Reduce Motion at Settings - Accessibility - Motion - Reduce Motion. Then turn on Reduce Transparency at Settings - Accessibility - Display and Text Size - Reduce Transparency. This cuts down on animations, blur, and visual effects that older graphics hardware has to keep drawing.
If Low Power Mode is always on, turn it off when you care more about speed than battery life. It saves power partly by limiting performance, so leaving it on all the time can make the phone feel slower than it needs to.
Also clear Safari’s cache: Settings - Safari - Clear History and Website Data. That won’t magically speed up the whole phone, but it can help Safari and in-app browser views if they’ve gotten bogged down.
Storage is usually the sneaky one
A nearly full iPhone can lag in ways that don’t seem like a storage problem. The camera opens slowly, apps crash right after launch, switching between apps stutters, and everything just feels tired.
iOS needs free space for temporary files, indexing, and other background work. Once an older phone gets around 85 to 90 percent full, performance can start falling apart. Since it happens slowly, it feels like the phone is just aging, but a lot of the time it’s really the storage getting packed.
The fastest place to clean up is the photo library
Trying to delete stuff manually in Photos is painful if the library is big. Clever Cleaner makes it a lot easier, and it’s free with no ads or subscription.
The most useful order is:
- Use the Heavies tab first. It sorts files from biggest to smallest and shows exact file sizes. Old screen recordings and 4K videos usually take up way more space than regular photos, so deleting just a few can make a real difference.
- Then check Similars. It groups near-duplicate photos and picks the sharpest one from each set. This is good for burst shots, repeated attempts at the same photo, and slightly different angles where you only need one.
- Look through Screenshots too. They pile up fast, and most of them stop being useful pretty quickly. The app shows the file size before you delete anything.
- Everything is processed on the phone, so the library is not being uploaded to an outside server.
After deleting photos or videos, empty Recently Deleted in Photos. Otherwise the storage won’t actually come back yet.
The best order is battery check first, settings second, storage cleanup third. The settings changes can help right away, but freeing up storage is often the bigger improvement. Do all of it together and an older iPhone can feel much closer to normal again without wiping your data.
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Don’t keep force-quitting every app and reopening it all day, because that can make an old iPhone feel worse, not better. Background App Refresh is worth turning off, but I’d treat it as a battery and heat fix more than a magic speed switch. It stops apps from doing some work when you’re not using them, so the phone may feel less bogged down if a few apps are noisy in the background. It probably won’t make Messages or Camera suddenly open like a new phone. I’d turn it off globally for a day, then only re-enable it for stuff that actually needs it, like maps, weather, or messaging apps if you notice delays. The storage and battery points above matter more, but this setting is low risk and easy to reverse.
Whether the phone gets hot when it starts lagging matters more than the Background App Refresh switch. If it slows down after charging, using maps, recording video, sitting in the sun, or running a game, you’re probably hitting heat throttling. Turning off Background App Refresh might reduce some background work, but it won’t fix a phone that is slowing itself down because the chip or battery is warm.
The short answer is yes, it can help a little, mostly with battery drain and random sluggishness between apps. It is not the same as adding RAM or making the processor faster. iOS already freezes most apps pretty aggressively when you leave them, so a lot of apps are not doing much in the background anyway. The ones that matter are usually mail, social apps, cloud storage, news apps, fitness apps, widgets, and anything that keeps checking location or syncing.
I would not turn it off expecting app launch times to suddenly change. If Safari, Photos, Camera, or Settings take forever to open, Background App Refresh is probably not the main cause. That points more toward low storage, a weak battery, heat, or the phone being on an iOS version that is just heavy for that model.
A better way to use that setting is not “off forever for everything,” but “off for the noisy stuff.” Go to Settings > Battery and look at which apps are using power in the background. If some app you barely use is showing lots of background activity, that is a good candidate to shut down under Background App Refresh. Social apps are usually the first place I’d look. Weather, messaging, calendar, and password/authentication apps are the ones I’d be more careful with, because delays there can be annoying.
Something people forget: Background App Refresh is separate from notifications. Turning it off does not usually mean you stop getting notifications, because push notifications are handled differently. But it can mean the app is less ready when you open it. For example, a news app may refresh only after you tap it, or a podcast app may not have the newest feed already loaded. That is the tradeoff. Less background work, but a little more waiting inside some apps.
I agree with the battery and storage comments, but I’d be less enthusiastic about chasing every “speed up your iPhone” toggle. Reduce Motion can make the phone feel snappier because animations are shorter or simpler, but it does not really fix the underlying slowdown. Low Power Mode is a big one too. If you leave it on all the time, you are asking the phone to prioritize battery over performance, so judging speed while it is enabled can be misleading.
For a quick test, I’d do this:
- Charge the phone, let it cool down, and restart it.
- Turn off Background App Refresh globally for 24 hours.
- Use the phone normally, not while it is plugged in and hot.
- Check whether battery drain and random lag improve.
- If it helps, turn it back on only for apps that actually need to stay current.
If nothing changes after that, stop blaming that setting. Check free storage, battery health, and whether one app is misbehaving. If storage is tight, clean up large videos and old message attachments before worrying about tiny settings. If you use something like Clever Cleaner for sorting photo clutter, fine, but the important part is still deleting big files and emptying Recently Deleted afterward. No cleaner app is going to make a worn battery or overheated phone behave like new hardware.
So yes, turn Background App Refresh off. It is low risk and reversible. Just set expectations correctly: it is more of a “make the old phone waste less energy in the background” setting than a true performance upgrade.
Don’t expect that switch to fix a clogged phone.
Background App Refresh can reduce background chatter, but it does not control every background process on the iPhone. iCloud Photos, app installs, Spotlight indexing, system cleanup, photo analysis, and update-related housekeeping can still run. So if you just updated iOS, restored from backup, deleted a bunch of photos, or freed storage, the phone may feel weird for a bit while it catches up. In that case, changing ten settings right away can make it harder to tell what actually helped.
I’d use Background App Refresh as a quieting tool, not a speed repair. Turn it off for apps that don’t need to be current when you open them: shopping apps, social apps you check manually, news apps, random store apps, etc. Leave it on only where stale data would annoy you. If turning it off makes an app sit there loading every time, that app probably benefited from it.
The quick boring test is: restart, make sure you have some free storage, plug it in on Wi-Fi overnight, then judge it the next day. If it still lags opening basic Apple apps, Background App Refresh was never the main issue. At that point I’d suspect battery health, storage pressure, or the phone simply being near the end of what that iOS version feels good on.
Realistically, that toggle changes how much your phone does when the screen is off, not how fast it thinks when you’re actually using it. So if your complaint is that Camera or Settings takes forever to open, don’t pin your hopes on it. That’s a responsiveness problem, and background refresh has almost nothing to do with the moment you tap an icon.
@cacadordeestrelas nailed the heat angle, and that’s the part I’d push hardest on too. On older phones the throttling curve is brutal once the battery degrades, because a weak cell can’t deliver current cleanly under load, so iOS clamps the CPU to avoid brownouts. You can turn off every background setting on the phone and it still won’t matter if the battery sags every time you open something demanding. That’s why the ‘charge it, cool it, restart, wait a day’ test keeps coming up. It separates real slowdown from heat and background noise.
Where I’d slightly disagree with the general vibe is treating Background App Refresh as a battery win worth chasing. On most setups the actual drain from it is small, because iOS already batches those wakeups and won’t refresh apps you rarely open. The bigger battery hits usually come from screen brightness, push-heavy apps, and a tired battery, not from a weather app updating twice an hour. Turning it off is fine, just don’t expect your screen-on time to jump.
The thing people forget: a single misbehaving app can wreck the experience no matter what your settings say. Go to Settings, Battery, and switch to the last 10 days view. If one app is sitting at some absurd background percentage, that’s your real target. Delete and reinstall it, or just kill its refresh specifically. That’s more useful than flipping the global switch and hoping.
On storage, I agree it’s usually the sneaky killer, and Clever Cleaner is fine for chewing through big videos and near-duplicates fast. Just remember it only frees space, it doesn’t fix a phone that’s slow for battery or heat reasons. Clear the space, empty Recently Deleted, then judge the phone the next day. If it’s still crawling on basic Apple apps after that, the answer is almost always battery health or the phone simply being stuck on an iOS version that’s heavier than the chip enjoys.