Learning how to clear RAM on iPhone is incredibly useful. It’s common for the iPhone to periodically slow down and stutter, and you may have noticed your device occasionally behaving slugglishly, particularly when trying to flick between or open apps, or when performing tasks using intensive apps.
Sometimes, your iPhone may freeze altogether. Obviously, on older phones, this is more common, as their hardware is less well-placed to handle more modern software and applications, but it’s also happened a couple of times on my iPhone 13 Pro Max too.
Very often, what can be causing the freezing or slow down is that your phone’s Random Access Memory (RAM) has become full. RAM is where the processor stores short-term data, which it can call on to run programs. Computers and phones (which are, in effect, mini computers) only have a certain amount of RAM. So, when there’s a lot going on and that RAM starts to get full, the processor has limited places to store short-term data and everything slows down while the system manages the backlog.
Now, the computer’s operating system (OS) usually deals with RAM management itself and is the expert at doing so. iOS is no exception: it’s a fantastic OS, and is part of what makes the iPhone one of the best phones around. All this said, no OS is totally infallible, and sometimes for whatever reason they don’t quite manage everything as effectively as they could, leading to full RAM and juddering or lock-up issues.
When this happens on a computer, you’d close background apps and end processes. But on an iPhone, where background apps are ‘suspended’ and not using RAM, open apps aren’t the problem and closing them does nothing.
That doesn’t mean your iPhone’s RAM can’t get full though, nor that it isn’t to blame for certain stuttering or freezing issues — it just means that closing background apps isn’t going to fix the problem. So what do you do if your iPhone is operating slowly and you think memory is the issue? Well, there is in fact a way to clear your iPhone’s RAM manually, which can often fix a lagging or frozen iPhone. Here’s how.