Your Samsung Phone Could Perform Better If You Disable These Features

Samsung Galaxy smartphone displaying One UI settings with performance optimization options for improving speed and battery efficiency.


Someone spent months blaming their Galaxy S24 Ultra for being sluggish — apps restarting, notifications arriving hours late, multitasking feeling sticky — before realising the hardware was fine. The software defaults were the problem the entire time.

This is a more common Samsung experience than people talk about publicly. You spend a significant amount of money on a phone with a flagship chip and plenty of RAM, and it still occasionally hesitates, still sometimes drops you back to a reloaded app instead of resuming where you left off, still feels like it's working slightly against you rather than with you. The processor isn't to blame. One UI's default settings are configured in a way that trades raw responsiveness for battery savings and background services you probably never asked for — and several of them are switched on the moment you unbox the phone.

Here's what to disable, where to find each setting, and why it makes a difference.

1. RAM Plus — Virtual Memory That's Slower Than No Virtual Memory

This one has a name that sounds like an upgrade. It isn't.

RAM Plus is Samsung's virtual memory feature — it takes a portion of your internal storage and uses it as overflow RAM when your actual RAM starts filling up. On paper, that sounds useful. In practice, your phone's internal storage is significantly slower than dedicated RAM hardware. So when RAM Plus kicks in and starts swapping app data between real memory and virtual storage, the result is the phone feeling slower rather than managing memory more gracefully.

If your Galaxy has 8GB, 12GB, or 16GB of actual RAM — which covers most phones sold in the last two years — you almost certainly don't need virtual memory on top of that. The phone handles multitasking perfectly well without it, and disabling RAM Plus means the system stops reaching for that slower storage fallback.

To turn it off: go to Settings → Device Care → Memory, scroll down, and toggle off RAM Plus.

2. Samsung's Aggressive App Killer — The Reason Your Apps Keep Restarting

This is the default behaviour that causes the most frustration and gets blamed on the hardware most often. One UI is configured to aggressively shut down background apps to conserve battery — which sounds reasonable until it starts killing your alarm app over the weekend or delivering WhatsApp notifications three hours late because the app wasn't awake to receive them.

The specific setting causing this is called Background Usage Limits, found under Settings → Battery → Background Usage Limits. Inside, you'll see a list of apps Samsung has already decided to put to sleep or restrict. Any app you depend on for timely notifications — messaging apps, alarm apps, calendar reminders, navigation — should be removed from this list and set to "No restrictions."

While you're in the same area, tap the three-dot menu and check whether Adaptive Battery is switched on. This feature uses AI to predict which apps you'll need and restricts the rest, but its predictions are frequently wrong in ways that are genuinely annoying — it can decide your navigation app doesn't need to stay active on a Tuesday morning commute simply because you didn't use it last Tuesday. Turning Adaptive Battery off makes app behaviour predictable again instead of unpredictably "intelligent."

Also in Settings → Device Care, tap the three-dot menu and go into Settings to find Auto Optimisation — a feature that periodically restarts your phone and force-closes background apps on a schedule. Useful for people who never restart their phone manually. Worth disabling if you'd rather control when that happens yourself.

3. Edge Panels — Convenient Once, Running Constantly

Edge Panels have been part of Samsung's interface since 2014, and they're genuinely useful for some people — a swipe-in toolbar giving you quick access to favourite apps, contacts, and tools from any screen. But if you don't use them regularly, they're consuming RAM continuously in exchange for a shortcut you're not taking.

The honest question to ask yourself is whether you've opened an Edge Panel on purpose in the last week. If the answer is no, or if you're not entirely sure what this feature is, that's a reliable signal that it's sitting in memory for no particular return.

To disable it: go to Settings → Display → Edge Panels and switch the toggle off. Everything the Edge Panel offers — opening apps, switching between tools — is achievable through your normal home screen and app drawer without the persistent background overhead.

4. Nearby Device Scanning — Bluetooth Running in the Background for No Reason

This one is easy to miss because it doesn't announce itself. Nearby Device Scanning uses Bluetooth to constantly scan the area around your phone for nearby devices — earbuds, smart TVs, trackers, other Samsung hardware — primarily to make SmartThings pairing faster and surface suggestions for connecting to devices it detects.

If you're not using SmartThings actively, or if you don't have a house full of Samsung smart home hardware, this feature is using Bluetooth and background processing continuously for a benefit you're never receiving. Bluetooth scanning in the background is a small but persistent drain on both battery and system resources.

To disable it: go to Settings → Connections → More Connection Settings and toggle off Nearby Device Scanning.

5. The Home Screen News Feed — Refreshing Itself Whether You Read It or Not

On most Samsung Galaxy phones, swiping left from the main home screen takes you to a news feed — either Google Discover or Samsung's own news panel, depending on your setup. This panel refreshes its content in the background on a regular basis, pulling new articles, updating thumbnails, and consuming both data and processing cycles to stay current.

The issue isn't that the feature exists — plenty of people genuinely use it. The issue is that it refreshes constantly whether or not you ever open it, and for anyone who'd rather just open the Google app when they want news rather than having a feed running behind their home screen all day, that background activity is pure overhead with no return.

To remove it, long-press on any empty area of your home screen, swipe to the leftmost panel showing the feed, and look for a toggle at the top of the screen to disable it entirely. On some One UI versions this toggle appears as soon as you swipe to that panel in edit mode.

6. Customization Service — Data Collection You Agreed to Without Realising

When you first set up your Samsung account, buried in the setup process is a toggle for Customization Service — Samsung's built-in data profiling system. It tracks which apps you use, how often, what you search for, and layers in your contacts and call behaviour to build a profile that Samsung uses to serve you personalised ads, promotions, and recommendations across its own apps.

This doesn't directly slow your phone down in the way that RAM Plus does, but it does run continuously in the background and it does feed data to Samsung's advertising infrastructure without most people ever consciously deciding that was something they wanted. Most people who know about it turn it off.

To disable it: go to Settings → Samsung Account → Security and Privacy. Turn off "Get news and special offers," then go into Customization Service and disable that toggle too. While you're there, head to Security and Privacy → More Privacy Settings → Ads and turn off Ad Topics, App-suggested Ads, and Ad Measurement to stop Android's own ad personalisation running in parallel.

7. Animation Speeds — The Fastest Fix That Feels Like a Hardware Upgrade

This last one requires one extra step to unlock, but it makes a more immediately noticeable difference than almost anything else on this list.

First, enable Developer Options by going to Settings → About Phone → Software Information and tapping Build Number seven times in a row. A message will confirm Developer Options are now active. Then go to Settings → Developer Options and find three settings: Window Animation Scale, Transition Animation Scale, and Animator Duration Scale. All three default to 1x. Set all three to 0.5x.

The result is immediate and striking. Every animation on your phone — opening apps, switching between screens, pulling down notifications — runs at half the duration. The phone doesn't actually process anything faster, but the time between tapping something and having it respond is cut significantly. It's the same principle behind reducing animation speeds on stock Android, and it's the single change that makes a Galaxy feel most like a different, snappier device without touching any hardware at all.

Start With RAM Plus and the App Killer

If you only make two changes from this list, make it those two. RAM Plus and Samsung's aggressive background app management are responsible for the specific type of sluggishness that makes expensive Galaxy phones feel like they're underperforming their specs — apps reloading, notifications arriving late, multitasking feeling heavier than it should. Everything else on this list helps, but those two address the gap between what your phone's hardware is capable of and what its software defaults actually let it do.

Also read: Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 release details

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