I turned off these 4 Samsung features and now my phone fe…

Make your Samsung Galaxy feel faster with these quick changes.

Samsung loves to add features and tools to their Galaxy phones (many of which come at the expense of using extra storage), but sometimes they harm performance when background activities utilize spare RAM and CPU cycles, not to mention your data (especially with apps you'll never use). I've identified four features that, once disabled, have made my Samsung Galaxy feel faster. From earlier versions of One UI, Samsung has placed a news feed to the left of your main homescreen.

While this can be useful to easily access the latest news (via Google Discover or Samsung News), the reality is that these feeds refresh in the background and use system resources without your intervention. I turned this off and my phone feels lighter, and if I ever want to see a feed of news, I just open the Google app from my homescreen to see my Google feed when I want it. To turn off the homescreen feed, go to Settings -> Home Screen -> Add media page to Home Screen -> Disable.

The Samsung Edge panel first came out in 2014 with the release of the Galaxy Note Edge. This toolbar gives you access to tools and apps from any screen. While it's handy, it's not necessary, and keeping the Edge panel open at all times uses RAM. Instead, you can use Gemini to open any app from any screen (by saying "Hey Google, open X") and you can quickly take screenshots with the hardware buttons (by pressing and holding volume down and power).

You can even do AI circle-to-search from any screen by pressing and holding on the navigation bar. You don't need To Edge Panel. To kill it, go to Settings -> Display -> Edge Panels -> Disable. Samsung Galaxy's have a feature turned on by default called Nearby Device Scanning. What this does is use Bluetooth to constantly look for nearby Bluetooth devices like earbuds, trackers, or smart TVs. It was mainly designed to enhance SmartThings connectivity (that's Samsung's smart home technology) and make it easier and faster to do Bluetooth file sharing.

You can still use these features with Device Scanning turned off — you just have to manually connect devices via Bluetooth settings. It's a little less convenient, but it saves your Bluetooth from being active and always looking for things to connect to. To disable this, go to Settings -> Connections -> More connection settings -> Nearby device scanning -> Disable. Setting up your new Samsung Galaxy device?

Here are the settings you should change to get your phone working better. If your Samsung device has less than 8GB of memory, keeping this feature active might be useful. However, for most users, RAM Plus is enabled by default and partitions your phone’s internal storage to act as virtual memory when you're running low. This isn't ideal because physical flash storage is significantly slower than dedicated high-speed hardware.

Your phone operates more efficiently when it simply clears older background apps to make room for active ones. If you own a modern Galaxy with 8GB, 12GB, or 16GB of RAM, you’ll likely never exhaust your resources anyway, making virtual memory redundant. I turn this off to maximize performance, and here is how you can too: Settings -> Device Care -> Memory -> RAM Plus -> Disable. For as long as there's been Android, Samsung has been making its own Android skin, and while it's one of the best, it is overloaded with features.

Here are a few more things you should disable that will make your Galaxy feel a bit lighter and maybe even save you some battery. Samsung devices have improved immensely since the days of TouchWiz (though some of us are still not happy and thinking about switching) and thanks to a very high performance overhead with the latest processors and ample amounts of RAM, Samsung Galaxy devices generally have been a high point in the Android world in terms of performance.

But there are still many extra features that you can disable to make your phone even faster.

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