Can rebooting your iPhone really make it run faster? I tried it every day to find out

A common bit of advice floating around is that rebooting your iPhone will magically speed it up, making it feel like a new device. But is it really that simple?

Over the past few months, I decided to put this idea to the test by regularly rebooting my iPhone. I’m a heavy iPhone user — seriously, that thing is practically glued to my hand — so if constant use causes it to slow down, I figured I’d definitely notice any benefits from rebooting.

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Like most people, I don’t usually reboot my iPhone unless it’s absolutely necessary, like after an update or in the rare case it crashes (which doesn’t happen much these days). I’ve heard all about the supposed benefits of rebooting, along with the real security benefits of doing it regularly, but honestly, I’ve never been consistent with it. Why? Because, well, I just can’t be bothered.

Regularly rebooting my iPhone

I decided to see what benefits regular rebooting could actually bring. And when I say “regular,” I mean daily, because nothing is more consistent than that, right?

When it came to the benefits I was looking for, I wasn’t interested in technical benchmarks or synthetic testing. I wanted to experience real, noticeable performance improvements — something I could actually feel in day-to-day use, not just a few extra points on a benchmark that wouldn’t make a noticeable difference in real life.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the past few months: regularly rebooting my iPhone.

What a wild, rock-and-roll lifestyle I lead, right?

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Did my iPhone get a massive performance boost, and did my life suddenly become better in every way just from rebooting?

Nope.

I started with daily reboots, and here’s how it went. I’d begin the day with a reboot, only to find that my iPhone felt a bit sluggish for the first few hours. Apps were especially slow on their first run of the day — likely because the memory cache for all the apps I use had been cleared. On top of that, the iPhone runs background tasks after a reboot, which didn’t help. By around lunchtime, though, my iPhone would feel like it was back to “normal” for the rest of the day. “Normal” meaning that the iPhone felt like it did when it was running right and not being sluggish after I’d rebooted it.

Rinse and repeat.

After about three weeks of morning reboots, I next tried rebooting my iPhone before going to bed, thinking this might give it time to finish those background tasks overnight. The result? When I started using my iPhone in the morning, apps still felt a bit sluggish on their first run, but things seemed to get back to “normal” a little faster than with the morning reboot.

I stuck with these daily reboots for about a month and a half, and honestly, all I felt I accomplished was making my iPhone experience worse for a few hours every day.

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I tried a few different approaches, starting with rebooting every few days, then once a week, and finally going back to just using my iPhone as I always had, without bothering to reboot it. And to be completely honest, the best option seemed to be to just leave it alone. All my input was doing was making things worse.

Great.

Did tests show any performance gains?

I resorted to benchmarking, because hey, maybe I couldn’t feel any difference, but perhaps under the hood, things were running a lot smoother thanks to my efforts.

Nope.

I ran tests using Geekbench and AnTuTu, hoping to see some performance gains. The results? Absolutely no improvement whatsoever.

Apple knows how to design an operating system, and iOS does an excellent job of optimizing performance without the user needing to step in and reboot.

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Now, if you’re worried about malware or spyware on your iPhone, then regular reboots might make sense. In that case, you could even install an app like iVerify to remind you to reboot periodically. But if you’re not in that category, forget about rebooting, because it’s not worth the hassle.

Instead, there are better ways to keep your iPhone running smoothly. Things like applying updates promptly, keeping your apps up to date, and freeing up storage space to give your device some breathing room will do far more to maintain performance than rebooting ever could.