My five year old iPhone took ten seconds to open the camera, which is an eternity when you are trying to photograph a dog doing something ridiculous. I did not want to erase the phone and start over, so I tried the boring fixes first. The boring fixes worked. It is not a new phone, but it feels like one.

Free up storage first

A nearly full phone runs slower because iOS needs room to work. Go to Settings, General, iPhone Storage and look at the list. My top offenders:

• Messages with photos and videos. I turned on the setting to auto delete old messages and cleared the giant attachments.
• Offloaded apps. iOS can offload apps you barely use, keeping the data but removing the app. Tap Offload Unused Apps and it does the rest.
• Old music and videos. I moved my library to streaming and deleted the downloads.

Getting under the storage warning threshold was the single biggest change for me.

Turn off the background stuff

Old phones are slow because they are doing too much at once:

1. Background App Refresh. Settings, General, Background App Refresh. Turn it off for everything except the few apps that need it, like mail or messaging. Old phones do not have the horsepower to refresh twenty apps in the background.
2. Reduce motion and transparency. Settings, Accessibility, Motion, then Reduce Motion on. These visual effects are pretty and heavy. Turning them off makes everything feel snappier.
3. Close nothing, restart weekly. Force closing apps does not speed up an iPhone, but a weekly restart clears memory leaks. I restart mine every Sunday.

One more thing to check

If your phone has been through several iOS updates, the battery health matters more than people think. Settings, Battery, Battery Health. If it is below eighty percent, the phone slows itself down to protect the battery. A new battery is a fraction of the price of a new phone and it may restore the speed you remember.

My camera now opens in about two seconds. Not new, but plenty fast enough.