The Reason It’s Slow Isn’t What You’ve Been Told
Every “speed up your Android tablet” guide on the internet tells you the same things: clear the cache, close your apps, delete old photos. You do all of that, and it’s maybe a little faster for an afternoon before going right back to the crawl.
The problem is that those guides are written for tablets that are a year or two old. Yours is five, six, maybe eight years old. The bottleneck is completely different.
Old Android tablets are slow because they have 1-2 GB of RAM trying to run an operating system that expects 4-6 GB. Every background process, every widget, every notification check eats into that tiny pool. When the RAM fills up (which happens almost immediately), Android starts killing and restarting apps constantly, and everything stutters.
Storage space has almost nothing to do with it. You could have 30 GB free and your tablet would still lag, because the constraint is RAM, not disk.
So here’s what actually helps.
Disable Bloatware
This is the single most impactful thing you can do, and it’s specific to Android.
Your Samsung, Lenovo, or Huawei tablet came pre-loaded with apps you never asked for and never use. Samsung alone installs a dozen of its own apps – Samsung Internet, Samsung Notes, Galaxy Store, Bixby, Samsung Members, Samsung Health, and more. Each one runs background services that consume RAM even when you’re not using them.
You can’t uninstall most of these (they’re system apps), but you can disable them:
- Go to Settings > Apps.
- Tap on each app you don’t use.
- Tap Disable. This stops it from running, removes its updates, and frees up both storage and RAM.
Good candidates to disable: the manufacturer’s browser (if you use Chrome), any voice assistant you don’t use, social media apps that came pre-installed, and any “store” apps besides the Google Play Store.
On a Galaxy Tab with 2 GB of RAM, disabling 8-10 bloatware apps can free up 200-400 MB of RAM. That’s a 10-20% improvement in available memory, and you’ll feel it.
Turn Off Animations
Android has smooth animations for opening apps, switching between them, and transitioning screens. They look nice on new hardware. On old hardware, they just make everything feel slower.
Go to Settings > About Tablet and tap the Build Number seven times to unlock Developer Options. Then:
- Go to Settings > Developer Options.
- Find Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale.
- Set all three to 0.5x or Off.
Setting them to 0.5x makes everything feel snappier without looking broken. Setting them to Off removes animations entirely, which makes the tablet feel surprisingly fast even though the actual processing speed hasn’t changed. You’re just removing the visual delay.
Install a Lightweight Launcher
The default Samsung or manufacturer launcher is designed for current hardware. It loads widgets, tracks usage patterns, runs a news feed, and does a dozen other things in the background.
Replace it with something lighter:
Lawnchair – looks like stock Android, runs well on old devices, free and open source.
Nova Launcher – the classic. The free version is more than enough. Smooth even on tablets from 2015.
Olauncher – minimal text-based launcher, almost zero resource usage. Good if you’re turning the tablet into a single-purpose device anyway.
After installing, go to Settings > Apps > Default Apps > Home App and switch to the new launcher. The difference is immediate.
Clear App Cache (the Right Way)
Clearing cache doesn’t free up RAM, but it does fix a specific problem: cached data that’s become corrupted or bloated. Some apps accumulate hundreds of megabytes of stale cache over years of use.
Go to Settings > Storage > Cached Data and clear it. Or clear cache individually for the worst offenders (usually Chrome, YouTube, and Facebook).
The key thing: do this once, not obsessively. Clearing cache every day actually makes your tablet slower because apps have to rebuild their cache from scratch each time. Do it once, then forget about it.
Reduce Background Activity
Android lets apps run in the background constantly – checking for notifications, syncing data, updating content. On a tablet with limited RAM, each of these background tasks is competing for the same small pool of memory.
Restrict background data: Go to Settings > Apps, tap an app, then Mobile Data or Data Usage, and toggle off Background data for apps that don’t need it. Weather apps, news apps, and social media are good candidates.
Turn off sync for accounts you don’t actively use. Go to Settings > Accounts and disable auto-sync for any Google or manufacturer accounts that are just sitting there pulling data.
Disable notifications for apps that don’t matter. Every notification check wakes up the app, which loads into RAM. Go to Settings > Notifications and turn off notifications for everything except the few apps that genuinely need them.
Free Up Storage (If It’s Nearly Full)
This only matters if your storage is over 90% full. Android needs some free space to manage temporary files and swap data. When the storage is packed, the system does constant cleanup work in the background, which makes everything slower.
Check Settings > Storage. If you have less than 2 GB free:
- Delete apps you haven’t used in months
- Move photos and videos to Google Photos or a computer
- Clear download folders (old APKs, PDFs, and screenshots pile up)
- Delete offline content from streaming apps
You don’t need to free up half the drive. Just give Android some breathing room.
The Nuclear Option: Factory Reset
If your tablet is still painfully slow after all of the above, a factory reset gives it a genuine fresh start. Years of accumulated app data, cached files, and background processes all get wiped.
Before you reset: Back up anything you want to keep. Photos to Google Photos, contacts to your Google account, files to a USB drive or cloud storage.
To reset: Go to Settings > General Management > Reset > Factory Data Reset.
After the reset, only install the apps you actually need. Every app you skip is RAM you keep for the things that matter. If you’re repurposing the tablet as a kitchen display or photo frame, you might only need one or two apps total.
We have a complete guide to resetting old tablets if you want step-by-step instructions.
What Won’t Help
A few popular suggestions that waste your time on genuinely old tablets:
- “Close all your apps.” On modern Android, apps in the recent apps list aren’t actually running. They’re cached in RAM so they load faster when you return. Force-closing them means Android has to reload them from scratch, which is slower.
- “Update to the latest Android.” If your tablet can even receive updates, newer Android versions typically use more resources. An old tablet running Android 8 is often faster than the same tablet running Android 11.
- “Install a RAM booster app.” These apps claim to free up memory. What they actually do is kill background processes, which Android then immediately restarts. The “boost” lasts about 30 seconds, and the app itself uses RAM to run.
A Faster Tablet Has a Job
Once your old tablet is running more smoothly, give it a specific purpose. A tablet running one app is always going to feel faster than a tablet trying to do everything.
Check out our old Android tablet ideas for practical ways to put it to work. The speed-up guide for old iPads covers the iOS side if you have one of those sitting around too.