A phone has very few user-serviceable parts and a great deal of advice written about maintaining it. Most of that advice falls into two piles: things the operating system handles better than you can — memory, background apps, caches — and things that were true of a different generation of hardware and have been repeated ever since.
What is left is short, physical, and genuinely worth doing. Almost all of it is about keeping openings clear and keeping the battery in a comfortable range.
The openings
Every hole in a phone is a hole the world gets into, and every one of them is a component that stops working properly when it fills up. This is the highest-value maintenance there is because it is the only part that reliably degrades from neglect.
- Speaker grilles
- Fill with pocket lint over months and quietly cost you volume and treble. Brush along them, run a cycle, done — the monthly routine is two minutes. This is the one people notice only after a year.
- The charging port
- The most common cause of “my cable has stopped working” by a wide margin, and almost always a compacted plug of lint rather than a fault. Dry soft brush or a wooden toothpick with the phone off, gently, straight out. Never metal, never while charging.
- The earpiece slot
- The dirtiest opening on the phone, because it spends every call against skin and hair. The proximity sensor usually sits behind it, so a blocked slot often shows up as a screen that will not turn off during calls.
- Microphone holes
- Same treatment as a speaker grille, and worth checking if people say you sound distant. Record a voice memo and play it back — that is the whole test.
- Camera lenses
- A dry microfibre cloth. The haze people mistake for a failing camera is nearly always skin oil, and it costs contrast in bright light long before it is visible as a smudge.
The battery
The one component with a genuine, unavoidable service life, and the one most affected by habits. Lithium cells age by charge cycles and by time spent at extremes — very full, very empty, and hot.
- Heat is the main enemy, not charging. A phone left on a car dashboard in summer ages its battery faster than months of ordinary use. Take the case off if it gets hot while fast-charging.
- Sitting at 100% is mild stress. Leave optimised or adaptive charging switched on and let the phone finish charging when you wake up rather than at 2am.
- Deep discharges are worse than partial ones. Topping up whenever is fine; the advice to drain to zero belongs to nickel batteries and is thirty years out of date.
- Do not chase battery health percentages. It is a coarse estimate that moves in steps and jumps around with temperature. Judge by how long the phone lasts.
- A battery replacement is cheap relative to a phone, and it is the single most effective upgrade an ageing handset can get.
The screen and the body
- Dry microfibre for the screen. For anything greasy, barely damp with water. Not alcohol, not window cleaner, not washing-up liquid — they strip the oleophobic coating and then everything smudges permanently.
- Clean the inside of the case monthly. It is where the grit that scratches a phone lives, and where the lint that blocks the speakers comes from.
- Check the case cutouts. A cutout a millimetre off a speaker slot muffles the phone for its entire life and is invisible until you take the case off and listen.
- Grit between case and phone is what scratches backs, not pockets. Wiping the case out is the actual prevention.
The software half, which is shorter than you think
Genuinely useful: keep the OS updated, mostly for security; keep 10% or so of storage free, because a completely full drive does slow a phone down; restart it occasionally; and know where your backups are, since the failure you cannot recover from is not a slow phone, it is a lost one.
Not useful: closing background apps to save battery — on both platforms the OS has already suspended them, and force-quitting means paying the full relaunch cost next time. Cleaner apps that promise to free memory. Battery calibration rituals. Task killers. None of these do anything a modern phone has not already done.