Make an Old iPhone Instantly Faster on iOS 16 by Turning Off Just 2 Features

Your old iPhone holding you back on the latest iOS 16 update? Don’t worry, you can just turn off two features to make everything slightly better.
Gain Some Precious Performance Back on Your Old iPhone Running iOS 16 by Turning Off Just a Couple of Features - Widgets and Shared with You
iOS 16 is packed with a bunch of amazing features for the iPhone. But with all those great new things come an extra burden on your phone’s processor. It might not be that noticeable on something newer like the iPhone 14 or iPhone 13, but if you have a phone like the iPhone 8 or even the iPhone X, then you might not be fond of iOS 16 that much.
There are a couple of features that you can turn off to gain some performance back and keep your RAM free so that apps don’t have to load over and over again. And I’ve chosen just two features because these are likely the ones you don’t care about at all so it’s best to just throw them away into the bin.
Delete All Your Home Screen Widgets - Yes, All of Them
Believe it or not, widgets can actually slow down your phone a lot. It’s basically a snippet of an app that keeps on refreshing from time to time in order to provide the latest information, such as weather. This also means they keep themselves in the RAM and may eat into other stuff, forcing some apps in the background to shut down, especially if you have too many widgets on the Home Screen.



When I mentioned that you should delete all your Home Screen widgets, I really mean all of them. This includes the ones that are accessible from the Lock Screen and the ones you have placed under the Lock Screen clock. Make everything mega vanilla otherwise you’ll be bleeding memory away for no reason at all.
Removing widgets is easy. Put your iPhone’s Home Screen in edit mode by tapping and holding on a widget or app icon and then tap on Edit Home Screen. Now simply tap on the “-“ button on the top right of the widget to remove it.
Turn off Apple’s ‘Shared with You’ Feature



This one’s a no-brainer and something which you probably never bothered with. Whenever someone shares something with you in the Messages app, iOS 16 will show you the shared thing in the relevant app so that it isn’t forever lost in the message thread. For example, if someone shares a podcast episode, you’ll see the shared episode inside the Podcasts app, same goes for photos in the Photos app and so on. It might be handy (for some) but you’re only making your iPhone do extra work for something that you probably don’t use at this point.
You can turn this feature off by going to Settings > Messages > Shared with You. See that Automatic Sharing toggle switch at the top? Just turn it off.
Bonus Feature for Removal - Screen Time



The one feature that is slightly eating away your battery life and performance is Screen Time. Sure, it’s a great way to keep track of apps and how much you use them, but a good amount of processing power is being consumed in the background. Unless you’re very serious about using the data in order to shape up your digital life, leave the feature turned on. Otherwise, it’s best to turn it off.
Go to Settings > Screen Time, scroll all the way down and then tap on Turn Off Screen Time.
I turned off these features on my trusty old iPhone 8 and it actually did wonders. With these features turned on, the apps running in the background would unexpectedly quit and reload from scratch which was in turn eating away battery life and performance. The thing that were really slowing down my iPhone were Home Screen widgets, especially the Weather one as it refreshes over and over again every single time you unlock your phone.
Written by Uzair Ghani