My Google Pixel 5 has served me well for a number of years. It has been a trusty handset right from day one, even if it was never considered the most state-of-the-art piece of equipment as far as flagship phones go. Its rear-facing fingerprint sensor remains top-notch, its camera post-processing is excellent, and its clean flavor of Android is as refreshing to use today as it was at launch.

That being said, my Pixel 5 isn’t immune to the passing of time. Over the years, it has slowed down by a fair amount, to the point that it feels less snappy during day-to-day interactions. Luckily, I’ve been able to breathe some new life into the device and speed it up considerably by tweaking and managing a few specific Android settings.

Here are three things I did to bring my Pixel 5 up to speed with 2026-era flagship smartphones in terms of software fluidity and performance.

Adjust global transition speeds

For a snappier look and feel

One of the oldest tricks in the Android book, adjusting global transition speeds is a great way to speed up the look and feel of any Android phone — Pixel included. By adjusting the device’s animation scaling, you can make the handset feel a fair bit zippier on the fly. To do so, you have to enable developer options. I have a full guide where I break down how to change animation scale and duration, which you can access by following this link. Note that changing these settings doesn’t technically speed up anything, but it creates the illusion of a faster interface due to quicker animations taking place.

Reign in app permissions

To stop resource-intensive apps in their tracks

The more applications you install on your Pixel, the more background processes start to add up. To avoid apps from eating into your phone’s performance, consider restricting background access to the ones you use less frequently. In my case, not only did doing so improve the speed of my Pixel, but it also netted me back a fair bit of battery life in the process. To restrict an app’s background activity, navigate to Settings > Apps > General > App battery usage and then select an app. From here, simply toggle off Allow background usage.

Clear out storage space

To allow for some breathing room

For optimal performance, it’s important to give your Pixel phone some breathing room in terms of storage capacity. I found that as I ran out of available space on my Pixel 5, things began to slow to a crawl. Leaving a few extra gigabytes in the tank is necessary to give the device’s operating system the room it needs to undergo under-the-hood operations, including memory swap (using storage capacity as temporary RAM to keep performance in check). As a general rule of thumb, I’d recommend leaving at least 5GB free for the system to work with.