Optimizing your phone for gaming in three simple steps

More people than ever before are choosing to play games on their mobile devices. The ease of access to huge libraries, and the relative performance and availability of modern smartphones, all comes together to make them the fastest growing market for handheld gaming globally. 

A survey conducted in 2019 found that, among adult Americans, 60% say they regularly choose to play games on mobile devices. The same survey found that the sample group chose to play on computers 52% of the time, and games consoles only 49%. This contrast is even starker in developing economies due to the fact that, for many people in various parts of the world, the smartphone stands in as their all-purpose computing device. 

DFC Intelligence conducted a survey on the gaming habits of various global regions and found that in Asia over half of respondents used their smartphone as their primary, or only, gaming device. A similar picture emerges from both Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. All told, gamers that live in emergent markets are 1.5 times more likely to use smartphones as their only gaming device. 

Game developers and hardware manufacturers are both exploring ways to accommodate and cater to these consumer preferences, with third parties offering add-on peripherals for enhanced gameplay, and some manufacturers making phones purely focused on the gaming experience.  

There’s plenty that can be done with your current device to get more out of mobile gaming though, without the need of investing in additional products. Whether you’re on an iOS or Android device, you can follow a series of extremely simple steps to optimize the experience. These procedures stand to benefit your gaming experience, irrespective of whether you’re playing Angry Birds 2, a classic online roulette experience, or graphically demanding games such as the MMORPG, Genshin Impact. 

All mobile games require as much available memory and processing power as they can get in order to play with smoother frame-rates and avoid crashing. Accordingly, taking steps to streamline your mobile device and improve its performance can cumulatively have a big impact.

Updating the Operating System

The first step you should take is to make sure your device is completely up to date. Do this by exploring whether your operating system has any software updates pending and if so, download and install these. 

Young man holding an iPhone 12 Pro Max in front of his desk. In the background, there's a monitor using the Big Sur wallpaper. Picture taken by Jonas Leupe (www.brandstof.cc/jonas) for Tandem Tech (www.tandemtech.be) 

There’s a variety of reasons why this is a good thing to do, both for gaming and otherwise. If your device is not up to date, it can become vulnerable to security breaches and viruses. Operating system updates are most frequently pushed out to address emergent bugs and flaws in the coding of the previous versions of iOS and Android. These flaws can trip up gameplay and lead to crashes or memory loss. By keeping up to date, you can rest assured that your system is as stable and secure as possible.

Clean up your hard drive

Our phones have limited memory capacity. When a phone’s hard drive is full, not only does this prevent the system from being able to download new games or update existing service, but it seriously decreases the speed and performance of your phone. 

Routinely scanning your device for space you can free up is a great practice, and keeps your phone running smoothly. If you have many photos or videos, consider uploading them to a cloud storage service like Google Photos or iCloud. This means you won’t lose any of your precious memories, but get to keep your device running well. We often install apps we then promptly forget about or never use. Consider uninstalling any apps you don’t use, as sometimes these can be very large and can take up a lot of hard drive space.

Get in the zone

There are a host of ways you can increase the sense of immersion while playing on mobile devices. For example, use headphones or earphones to filter out external distractions and bring your gaming to life. Most phones feature a Do Not Disturb profile setting that blocks all but the most essential notifications, messages and phone calls from reaching you. This will minimize the number of distractions you need to sort through as you play which, in turn, will benefit your ability to get into the zone of playing. 

If you’re near mains power you can also plug in your phone to prevent loss of battery from impacting your experience. If you’re on the go, consider using a power bank to achieve this same goal.