With time, most Android devices slow down greatly mainly because of poorly designed apps running in the background and taking precious resources. In a perfect world, most Android apps would automatically unload themselves from the memory thereby freeing up precious resources. Sadly, this rarely happens and most apps keep running in the background. Killing apps using a task killer is not a solution since they will restart right back, thereby doing more harm than good. The solution to this problem is to use Greenify, a very popular app among users with root access on their Android devices. Instead of killing apps, Greenify forces them into hibernation which helps in freeing up resources and improving performance and battery life.

The recent update for the app allows it to work without root access, instantly making it a must-have app for all. If you have not used Greenify before, below is a quick guide on how to use it properly.

Step 1: Fire up Greenify after installing it on your Android device. Tap the + symbol at the bottom to select apps that you’d like to hibernate.

Step 2: Once you have selected all the apps, tap the tick mark on the top right. Only greenify those apps from which you will not be receiving any kind of push notification. For example, if you end up greenifying Hangouts or Gmail, you will not be notified instantly of new emails or messages.

Step 3: In non-root mode, Greenify will not be able to hibernate apps automatically after they are started manually by the user once. The workaround to this problem is to place the ‘Hibernate All’ shortcut on your home screen and tap it every once in a while.

Step 4: If you have root access on your Android device, you can install Xposed framework and then use Greenify’s Xposed module. The module allows Greenify to hibernate system apps and even let Google Cloud Messaging/Push based apps to work correctly when hibernated. You will need the donate version of Greenify to use the Xposed module though.

Give Greenify a couple of days and you will definitely notice a improvement in overall system performance.

P.S. – *Definitely* Greenify Facebook for Android, if you have it installed on your Android device.