Tweaks to make all iPhone running iOS 13 faster in performance, more battery optimized and have better privacy

Either you are using a brand new iPhone or older models of iPhone, these are tweaks to make your iPhone runs not only faster in performance but also more battery optimized and better privacy

All the tweaks mentioned here should also works for iPad and iPod Touch

iOS 13 has been officially launched to the public since September 2019 ago. I, myself, have been using it since Apple released it as public beta back in June 2019.

Based on my own experience using iOS 13 myself, there are plenty of tweaks and things you can set and apply on iOS 13 to make it perform not only better but to its full performance while at the same time saving and maximizing the battery life and save you from privacy nightmare.

Android Speed Up Tips and Trick jilaxzone.com
Off we go! Tweaks for all iPhone running iOS 13. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.org

Without further ado, here they are.

For recent posted iOS tweaks, do refer to this link.

Tweaks to speed up and optimize your any iPhone running iOS 13.

iOS 13 tweak #1: Turn on dark mode

[Battery Tweak]

One of the notable differences between iOS 13 and previous version of iOS is the introduction of iOS 13. If you are using iPhone with OLED display (such as iPhone X, iPhone XS and XS Max, iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max), turning on dark mode, making the screen appear dark and black is definitely saving the battery – because black in OLED means no light getting turned on at all, which means no power being consumed. So if you are using OLED-based display iPhone, turn on Dark mode. Even if you are not using OLED-display iPhone, dark mode still looks great.

system wide dark theme iOS 12 settings jilaxzone.com.png
iOS Settings app seen on Dark Theme. Awesome view!

Here’s how to turn on dark mode:

a) Go to Settings, then Display and Brightness.

b) Under Display & Brightness, you’ll see new section called Appearance. Default is Light.

c) Tap Dark to activate Dark Mode on iOS 13.

There’s alternative way where you can activate Dark mode from the Control Center, take a look at the article below for more details.

iOS 13 tweak #2: Use black or darker wallpaper

[Battery Tweak]

This is practically same with dark mode, OLED display shall consume less battery when lesser pixel getting turned on and one way to get the pixel to turn off is by using black (most recommended though ugly) or darker color wallpaper.

Here’s how to change iPhone wallpaper:

a) Go to Settings, then Wallpaper.

b) Tap Choose a new wallpaper to change wallpaper.

iOS 13 tweak #3: Turn off AirDrop

[Battery & Privacy Tweak]

Since iOS 11, Apple made AirDrop turned on by default. The same thing is still happening on iOS 13 too. Unless you need to airdrop every minutes, best is to keep AirDrop off. Not only it saves your iPhone battery, it also saves yourself from getting hacked. Check my article below which is explaining how letting AirDrop turned on is the same as exposing yourself to hackers around you.

iOS 11 AirDrop jilaxzone.com Receiving OFF
Turning OFF AirDrop by selecting Receiving OFF

Here’s how to turn off AirDrop:

a) Go to Settings > General > AirDrop.

b) If it’s not Receiving Off then that means AirDrop is turned on and shared either to contacts only or to everyone. Switch to Receiving Off to turn off Airdrop.

iOS 11 AirDrop jilaxzone.com Turn off AirDrop from Control Center
Turning OFF AirDrop from iOS 13 Control Center

Alternatively, you can check from iOS 13 Control Center.

c) Bring down the Control Center (on iPhone X or later) or bring up the Control Center (for iPhone 8 or before)

d) 3D Touch on the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth section

e) When the section expanded, find AirDrop icon and see if the icon is colored blue. If it’s blue color, means your AirDrop is turned on. Consider turning it off by tapping on AirDrop icon and tap on Receiving Off.

iOS 13 tweak #4: Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

[Battery Tweak]

Since iOS 11, Apple made it difficult to turn off completely Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Turning them off via iOS Control Center won’t really turning them off, but instead disconnecting you only from the current network.

Here’s how you can completely turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and avoid iPhone to keep reconnecting to nearby Wi-Fi (makes iPhone slow).

iPhone X jilaxzone.com Bluetooth and Wifi Control Center
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi entries at Settings

Here’s how to properly turn off Wi-Fi:

a) Go to Settings > Wi-Fi

b) Find Wi-Fi, slide it off.

Here’s how to properly turn off Bluetooth:

a) Go to Settings > Bluetooth

b) Find Bluetooth, slide it off.

iOS 13 tweak #5: Turn off flash while taking photo

[Battery Tweak]

Especially during the day. Do you really need to use camera flash each and every time you snap a photo? If not, turn it off. Turn the flash on only when you need it. It will save your iPhone battery a lot.

Here’s how to turn off flash while taking photo:

a) Open the iOS Camera.

b) On the top left corner, tap on the lightning icon, ensure you see the lightning is crossed (means the flash shall be off).

iOS 13 tweak #6: Disable auto brightness and reduce brightness

[Battery Tweak]

Same like camera flash, do you need to have your iPhone screen glaring so bright? Reduce it whenever possible to a comfortable level for your eyes. Not only your iPhone battery will thank you for reducing brightness – yes it does save battery, in fact screen brightness is one of the factor consuming iPhone battery the most – your eyes too will also be thankful for it.

iOS 11 hidden Night Shift Mode jilaxzone.com 3D Touch Display and Brightness
3D Touch the Display and Brightness to open hidden menu

Here’s how to turn off auto-brightness:

a) Go to Settings then Accessibility then Display & Text Size.

b) Find Auto-Brightness and turn it off.

Here’s how to reduce the screen brightness:

a) Activate the Control Center.

b) Find the screen brightness control (the one with sun logo), tap on it to reduce the screen brightness.

iOS 13 tweak #7: Activate Low Power Mode

[Battery Tweak]

Low Power Mode is battery saver. It will try to reduce unnecessary things so that you can get maximum battery life.

a) Go to Settings then Battery.

b) Find Low Power Mode and turn it ON.

You can create a shortcut to turn on/off Low Power Mode from the Control Center. Follow the guide below, though it was made back for iOS 11, but it still works for iOS 13.

Article continues below.


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iOS 13 tweak #8: Shorten Screen Auto-lock period

[Battery & Privacy Tweak]

How long your iPhone screen keep turning ON until it finally turned OFF? If it’s more than one minute, do consider to shorten the auto-lock period to max 1 minute. The shorter you set, the more battery life you can save and the better privacy you can get. Imagine if you forgot to turn off the iPhone screen while you are away and you put the iPhone, unlocked, on your desk, someone else who are curious enough may able to see your iPhone contents. My recommendation is to set it to 30 seconds.

iOS iPhone Security jilaxzone.com enable auto lock
Enable Auto-Lock with the shortest time period to avoid people peeking at your iPhone when your left it unlocked

Here’s how to set screen Auto-Lock and shorten the period:

a) Go to Settings > Display & Brightness.

b) Find and Locate Auto-Lock.

c) Choose either 30 seconds or maximum 1 minute, unless you have good reason to keep your iPhone screen alive and idle for more than 1 minute.

Your app, such as YouTube or Netflix won’t get disrupted by setting the Auto-Lock to 30 seconds or 1 minute, because watching YouTube or Netflix are not considered as “idle state” thus the screen won’t turn OFF while you are actively watching them.

And in case you left your iPhone idling somewhere, people won’t be able to use it after auto-lock has been activated and the screen turned OFF.

iOS 13 tweak #9: Check battery performance setting to identify battery hogging apps like Facebook

[Battery Tweak]

Introduced back on iOS 12, now the same feature is available on iOS 13, Apple has detailed battery performance and usage report which you can FREELY use to see which apps and games are hogging your iPhone battery so much, especially those apps/games you are not intensively using but still draining your iPhone battery.

iOS12 Battery Level and Activity jilaxzone.com
Battery performance on iOS 13

Here’s how to check battery performance:

a) Go to Settings, then Battery to see the report. In case you need the detailed feature, I have explained it on my article below.

For those apps/games found as battery hogging apps, try to find alternative apps/games, or if you can access the same contents via browser (eg: Facebook), then consider to uninstall the apps and access them via browser. Not only it saves your iPhone battery, it also save your iPhone storage and save yourself from keep getting distracted – do you know that such distractions kill your productivity? Find out below how you can avoid distractions and achieve the best productivity ever.

iOS 13 tweak #10: Don’t clear apps from app switcher

[Battery & Performance Tweak]

App switcher is also known as multitasker.

Contrary to popular believe, clearing apps from the app switcher won’t make your iPhone run faster. Unlike Android, Apple has made iOS multitasker work in such a way that apps won’t stay in RAM forever though the apps are physically on the app switcher – part of iOS memory management.

iPhone X Close App from App Switcher jilaxzone.com
iPhone X Close App from App Switcher: The Faster less Frustrating Way

Instead of running faster, clearing apps from the App Switcher will not only make iPhone to be slower but also will make the iPhone draining more battery, since for frequently used apps, if you keep close and re-open the apps, the iOS will then again load the apps from the beginning – which drains more battery power and consume more processing power. So, don’t clear apps from App Switcher! Well, except those battery hogging apps and games.

iOS tweak #11: Turn off location settings

[Battery Tweak]

Some of the apps/games installed are actively using your location to locate/track you, apps like Google Chrome for example. When you browse Google.com using Chrome, you’ll be asked to share your location to better serve you with local contents and offerings. If you think you don’t need that kind of thing, turn location completely off or switch them to “while using”. This will save you a lot of battery power.

iPhone X jilaxzone.com Disable Location Service
Consider to Disable Location Service for apps that keeps tracking you

Here’s how you can turn off location settings:

a) Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services.

b) The easy way is to completely turn off location services, however I do not recommend that. Otherwise apps like Apple Maps and Google Maps won’t be able to route you when you are looking for direction. Find apps and system services that keep using your location, if you feel that app/system services are not that important, change the location services access to “Never” or “While Using”.

iOS 13 tweak #12: Turn off background app refresh

[Battery & Performance Tweak]

This is closely related to battery hogging apps (tweak #9 above) and leaving apps in the iOS App Switcher (tweak #10 above). You should know and be fully aware that not all apps and games are created equal. While most apps and games are safe to be left in App Switcher, but not all. Certain apps or games, when you leave them on the App Switcher, they keep running in the background, consuming your battery slowly but steadily – because they can and designed to run on the background. Think apps such as Google Photos, Google Maps, Uber Driver. Although they are not being used actively, but in Google Photos case, it keeps running in the background to upload your photos.

There’s a way to stop these kinds of activities – which in turn will make the overall iOS 13 performance to run faster – which is to switch off Background App Refresh, so although you have plenty of apps in your App Switcher, but none of them draws processing power from the iPhone and other iOS 13 devices.

Speed Up Old iPhone Tweak jilaxzone.com Turn Off Background App Refresh
Speeding Up iPhone Tweaks: Turn Off Background App Refresh – No process running or data draining in the background

Here’s how you can switch off Background App Refresh.

a) Go to Settings then General, find Background App Refresh.

b) Switch it OFF.

iOS 13 tweak #13: Turn off notification including email push notification

[Battery Tweak]

As I said earlier, distraction is killing your productivity. On iPhone case, not only it kills your productivity but also kills iPhone battery. Do you really need to see every time your friends posts something on social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, or anything else or do you need to see all the games notification? Do you also really need to quickly jump to see any incoming emails?

If no, then better to turn them off. On email notification, you can switch it to manual fetch. Doing these two shall save both your day productivity and your iPhone battery.

Here’s how to turn apps/games push notifications OFF:

a) Go to Settings > Notifications.

b) On the application list, tap them one by one and on Allow Notifications do consider to turn it off.

iPhone X jilaxzone.com Mail Fetching Push to Manual
Consider to switch your email to Manual Fetching

Here’s how to turn push email OFF:

a) Go to Settings > Passwords & Accounts.

b) Scroll down until you find Fetch New Data. Tap on it.

c) The easiest way is to slide off the Push menu – however doing this, you won’t get any real time push notification for any incoming mail, or

d) You can see and check your email list and consider to switch from Push to either Fetch (good battery life) or Manual (even better battery life).

iOS 13 tweak #14: Reduce motion & Reduce transparency

[Performance Tweak]

Love it or hate it, Apple brings quite many animations and motion effects into iOS. If you are using older generation of iPhone, having all these things may impact your performance, thus reducing animation and motion effects will definitely helps.

Speed Up Old iPhone Tweak jilaxzone.com Reduce Motion
Speeding Up iPhone Tweaks: Reduce Motion

Here’s how to reduce animations and motion effects:

a) Go to Settings > Accessibility > Motion Reduce Motion

b) Turn Reduce Motion to ON

Here’s how to reduce transparency and remove blur effects:

a) Go to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text SizeReduce Transparency.

b. Turn Reduce Transparency to ON.

iOS 13 tweak #15: Backup and clear iPhone storage

[Performance Tweak]

The lesser data you keep in iPhone storage, the leaner your iPhone will be. Resulting in faster apps and in-app indexing, lesser things to be logged which in the end boosting the overall performance. Uninstall apps that you are not using in the last 3 months. High chances you will never use them anymore.

If somehow you don’t want to lose the saved data inside the apps/games, there’s a way to uninstall apps/games but without losing the saved data inside, check the link below. It’s a feature Apple introduced back during iOS 11, but also available for iOS 13.

For backing up photos, you can either use Apple solution: iCloud Photo (FREE for the first 5GB, subsequently you have to pay subscription fees) or opt to backup to Google photos offering unlimited storage for FREE (in case you are interested with Google Photo, check link below).

iOS 13 tweak #16: Turn on Airplane mode

[Battery & Performance Tweak]

Though it seems dull, but if all you need is something you can do offline (eg: playing offline game) and at the same time you want to be fully laser focus on what you are doing, then consider turning on Airplane mode. It does save iPhone battery life since all connectivity are turned off and it boost iPhone performance as well – since nothing runs in the background are exchanging data with the internet.

Play games without ads jilaxzone.com on android and iOS
Turning ON Airplane Mode for better battery life and device performance

Here’s how you can turn on Airplane mode:

a) Go to Settings.

b) Find Airplane mode and slide it on.

Tweaking and Optimizing iOS 13: Bring It All Together

With all 16 tweaks mentioned above, now your iPhone not only more battery optimized, but also run faster and have better privacy.

In case even after doing all the tweaks, you still feel your older model iPhone doesn’t run as fast as it used to be, you may want to consider to replace your iPhone battery to a new one.

Apple is known to throttle down your iPhone performance which using depleted battery, consider replacing your battery to a new one to get back your iPhone maximum performance especially if you are planning to use the iPhone or iOS devices for another year(s).


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