I got a Nexus 6 last year after my Nexus 5 took a swim in a pool. (Not sure how that happened; crazy little guy was acting on its own recognizance.) I've enjoyed using it quite a bit, but it's had a decent amount of frustrations, too: apps would load slowly, the battery life didn't seem to match up with what reviews and other users would claim, the camera would crash or be unresponsive when I wanted to take a quick snap of something, etc. Nothing insurmountable, but definitely a lot of slight annoyances that would pop up at inopportune times.
I'd heard that the Facebook/Messenger apps were the cause of some slowdowns on Android devices, but I didn't realize precisely how bad it was affecting my phone until I took the plunge this week and uninstalled both of them. It's almost like I just got a whole new phone: almost every action I perform feels far more snappy and responsive than it did just a couple of days ago. That's especially true of the camera. Opening up the camera from the lockscreen is accomplished in a couple of seconds now, whereas before it could often take ten or fifteen or more seconds for the camera to actually respond to input when I opened it, at which point my precious puppy would often be on his way out of my life forever. Scrolling through the photo roll is also way faster than it used to be. I'm not sure what the Facebook app was doing in the background to affect the camera that badly; I assume that face-scanning every picture and uploading all that data to the NSA must have been a bit taxing on it. Even the games that I play have much quicker startup and load times than they did before.
All of this is purely anecdotal, of course; I didn't measure and compare any concrete times with benchmarking apps or anything. But even so, I can confidently say that uninstalling the FB and FB Messenger apps have made a huge difference in the performance of my phone. You don't even really lose much by uninstalling, either; attaching a bookmark to the mobile Facebook site to your homescreen is easy enough, and if you give it notification permissions you'll still get the usual notifications for messages and all the other crap.
I know this all sounds like ONE WEIRD TRICK TO IMPROVE PHONE PERFORMANCE, but it's really been a crazy night/day difference since I dumped those apps. Try it and see!
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