I know you may have read the headline and thought "But that's main reason I have a smartphone! I can't do that!" Or maybe the thought was more likely "Andy, you're an idiot." Before you go clicking that "Enable" or "Update" button, please hear me out.

I have a two-year-old Motorola RAZR. It was lightning fast when I got it, but it wasn't anymore. I searched for ways to maybe speed it up like deleting apps I never used, clearing the caches, and cleaning up the internal storage. That helped a little but it was still running painfully slow. Tweetcaster, the app I like for Twitter, was having problems refreshing. When I got a tweet notification, it seemed to take forever for it the load up. My browser sat and thought a lot without showing me anything. Even Gmail freaked out on me and that's always been the most reliable app on my phone. I was getting so frustrated I was ready to just quit and get a dumb phone.

Then I looked at the running apps screen in my phone and one app stood out from the rest: Facebook.

The Android app version of Mark Zuckerberg's addicting brain child was eating up resources like I eat at a free buffet. It used a ton of memory with three or four other apps that it installs and uses. Facebook itself was moving like mud in March even when it was the only app I had open.

This got me thinking. When Facebook forced everyone to get the Messenger app to get messages, I installed it and my phone was instantly running much worse. It was so bad I had to hold the power button until it rebooted. I uninstalled Messenger and my phone went back up to its below average functionality. So I decided to try removing Facebook itself (gasp) to see what would happen. I couldn't completely remove it since it was pre-installed, but I could uninstall the updates and disable it, so that's what I did.

I got my phone back!

Tweetcaster started working fine again. My browser didn't sit and spin eternally. Gmail was smoking right along again. And all of the other little hiccups and slow downs I had grown so frustrated with were gone. I was so happy!

If you are reading this and thinking "That's great, but I really want to use Facebook on my phone. I can't just delete it!" Yes you can. Just do what you originally did to get on Facebook. Open your browser and type in facebook.com and press go. It runs just fine in the browser, doesn't slow the phone down nearly as bad, and you can get MESSAGES in the same place that the rest of Facebook is.

Facebook Mobile Website Screenshot
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Now if you have a newer phone, it likely has better, faster hardware in it and doesn't have the problems that older phones like mine do. (Two years is ancient for smart phones.) But if you're like me and would rather spend $200 on something other than another phone that will old and busted and slow in six months, just remove Facebook and see if it helps.

Another thing you can try to do, if Facebook came pre-installed on your phone, is to uninstall the updates and just use the old version of the app. The original app was much smaller than the current version. Updates are supposed to fix things, but they sometimes cause more problems.

If you have an iPhone, I don't know if this will help or not. But I would bet a round of beers that even the almighty iPhone would speed up with Facebook removed from the system.

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