Tag Archives: AVG Cleaner

A Fresh Start for Google’s Pixel: Tips for Your New Android Phone

As the anticipated release of the Google Pixel nears, it may be time to check those old storage habits to ensure your new Android phone performs at its maximum capacity.

 

We’re all waiting with bated breath for Google to release the new Pixel phone tomorrow—it’s rumored to have twelve megapixels in the rear camera and Full HD display to view your photos.

While Android enthusiasts are bubbling with excitement about the new features, better images typically also mean heavier files. And you can bet that one platform agnostic behavior will remain: extraordinary laziness in clearing out bad and/or duplicate photos.

AVG Technologies recently collected data from 1.5 million users of AVG Cleaner for Android—which creates more space, speed, and battery life for your phone or tablet—and found that the app helped users quickly delete 26 million bad photos and 30 million similar photos. The bad photo overload phenomenon is global, and life is too short to spend even a minute manually scrolling through thousands of pictures to identify and remove the trash.

AVG Cleaner is free, and you can install as soon as you get your shiny new Pixel to make sure your old habits don’t mar your new phone. And it isn’t just a one-time solution: Cleaner can also quickly remove hidden clutter, unused apps, call history, your largest files, and more to free up space for the apps, photos, and music you love most. Just turn on Auto Clean Reminders and AVG Cleaner will automatically find the clutter for you and let you clean it with a simple reminder in the notification panel of your phone or tablet. It’s that easy.

Regardless of how you keep your phone running, it’s always fun to start with a clean slate. We can’t wait to see what other features Google unveils at tomorrow’s event!

Give Your Android Device More Space, Speed & Battery Life

Ready to use our new AVG Cleaner for Android™ 3.0 and its new one-tap ANALYZE view or Smart Photo Cleaner? We’ll guide you through the most important steps of a typical clean-up to make sure you’re not missing anything.

Step 1: Download & launch the new app! Got it? Tap the Analyze button.

Step 2: Clean up photos! Wait for the results. In this example, it found 4 photos that were classified as bad or potentially unwanted:

Tap on Review and Clean, and then use either thumbs down/thumbs up or swipe left or right to delete a photo or keep it. AVG Cleaner for Android will now start learning which photos you like or don’t like to give you more personalized suggestions. But no worries, it will never automatically delete anything – the choice is always yours! Next, go to the Bad Photos and Similar Photos sections to clean up the ones you no longer need. Here, you can mark photos you no longer want:

Got them all? Tap on Delete X Photos! You’ll then find yourself in the Analysis Results area again.

Step 3 – Clean cache: Every time you use your apps, they create what’s called “cache” files. For example, Facebook temporarily stores data from your timeline once you open it to access it quicker next time you open the app. However, many apps tend to forget to delete this data which can accumulate to quite an amount wasted storage. Just tap on Clean Cache and be done with it!

Step 4 – Clean history: Your browser leaves behind traces, such as cookies, temporary browsing data and long-forgotten downloads.

Step 5 – Stop Battery Hogs: The next slice shows you which features of your phone draw the most battery life from your phone – and allows you to turn it off!

Tap to turn anything off you might not need, especially if you’re on the go and without a power outlet in sight.

Step 6 – Stop Memory Hogs: If any currently running app is consuming more than 1% of your memory, they will show up here. You can then go ahead and Force Stop them or Uninstall if you don’t need these anymore.

Step 7 – Get rid of Battery-draining apps: Is your phone not making it to the end of the day without recharging? It may not be your phone itself, but some renegade app(s) that run(s) all the time in the background or does things they’re not supposed to. This section helps you find out which ones are the top drainers – and allows you to stop or delete them!

Step 8 – Free up space: Still struggling to store photos, music or apps on your phone? Then have a look at the last section, Free up space, to see which apps consume the most storage – and get rid of the ones you no longer want!

How much space were you able to free up? How many photos were cleaned up thanks to our new Smart Photo Cleaner? And how many performance-draining apps have you put an end to? Let us know in the comments section below.

If you’re looking for a quick clean-up of all of your unwanted photos, check out our newly re-launched Cleaner today for free!

AVG Performance PRO package is out!

Do you think that slow-downs, crashes, and poor battery life only affect ageing Windows XP (or Vista) PCs or last-generation smartphones? Think again. Even the latest operating systems, such as Windows 10 and Android 6 (Marshmallow) still haven’t found a cure for performance, bottlenecks, storage hogs, and battery drainers.

Whether you’re running an older PC, smartphone or the sleekest, latest hardware, it’s crucial to keep it running at top performance from day one.

AVG Performance comes bundled with 3 products to help keep all of your Windows computers, tablets, Mac computers, and Android phones/tablets clean and fast. The AVG Zen platform is built into each product, so you can optimize all your devices from one place.

An overview of what’s new:

  • AVG PC TuneUp (Version 16.2): comes with a completely new interface, better cleaning and Windows 10 support. It’s available as a standalone application if you just want the PC version
  • AVG Cleaner for Android: has a new App Manager and a fresh design. Available on the Google Play store
  • AVG Cleaner for Mac (Version 14): has a fresh design and new iPhoto & video cache cleaning. Available from the Mac OS X store.

AVG’s products and suites will now be auto-updated on a continual basis, so if you purchase AVG Performance you will no longer need to worry about keeping your products up to date.

Let’s get to into the detail of what’s new:

 

NEW AVG PC TuneUp (version 16.2)

AVG PC TuneUp

Remember how quickly your PC ran when you first got it? The latest version of AVG PC TuneUp helps you keep your computer at peak performance even more so than before:

  • NEW Tuning Dashboard: Gives you faster access to all tuning features so you can easily see performance potential.
  • ENHANCED PC cleaning: Now cleans up hidden and leftover files from even more Steam games, your Download folder and other applications like VMware.
  • NEW Support for Windows 10

So you may ask: PC tuning? Why would I need that on my new machine? Well, whether you’ve got a 2008-era desktop PC or a shiny new ultrabook, AVG PC TuneUp can do something for you. In our internal tests, we looked at how we could improve performance on both new and old machines, here are some of the results*:

PC TuneUp results

 

AVG Cleaner for Android 

AVG Cleaner for Android

AVG Cleaner for Android helps you clean up your Android phone or tablet more easily, and can help keep tabs on performance-draining apps better than ever before, thanks to:

NEW App Manager: The new ‘App Manager’ feature gives you an immediate overview of renegade apps from a single screen and helps you get rid of them:

  • Running Apps: Shows running apps and how much RAM they’re consuming.
  • Unused Apps: Identifies apps that the you haven’t used in a long time.
  • Data Usage, Battery Usage and Storage: Helps you spot the largest apps and the ones with the most battery and mobile traffic drain.

Curious to try it out for yourself? Download it from the Google Play store for free – if you like what you see – upgrade to the PRO version and benefit from improved battery life enhancements, too.

 

AVG Cleaner for Mac (version 14)

AVG Cleaner for Mac

AVG Cleaner for Mac scans for hidden data trash and unwanted duplicate files that gather on Mac computers through everyday use, helping to free up disk space for more of your precious photos, music, and other files.

We’ve added lots of new features for all you Mac fans out there:

  • FRESH Design: The new Cleaner for Mac app sports a new user interface.
  • NEW iPhoto Cache & video cache: iPhoto creates its own “cache” folders which help speed up the viewing of photos, but also take up more space over time. With help from user feedback we’ve now implemented a means to remove iPhoto caches effectively for deleted photos.

You can try our Performance package as a 30-day trial from www.avg.com/performance.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll show you how these products work in greater detail including some step-by-step guides. Stay tuned.

 * The results from our internal test lab are indicative only. Your results may vary.

Improve your smartphone battery life with smart profiles

We’ve just released a new update to our AVG Cleaner for Android PRO.

In version 2.2.1 we’ve tweaked one of your favorite features, Battery Profiles, and now support Android L to help you clean up, speed up and especially boost battery life even better than before and on all the bleeding-edge devices out there.

 

So what’s new?

Despite that it started out as a cleaning app, we’ve made it a super-powerful tool to help you speed up and boost the battery life of your Android and even tell which apps drain your devices mobile data traffic, battery and storage. We’ve continued this tradition in our latest update even more.


Smarter Battery Savings with Battery Profiles

First and foremost, for the folks who love to improve battery life manually, we added a new button called “Choose Manual Settings” which puts you in charge of what features and built-in devices of your Android can drain your battery, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Mobile Data or the automatic synchronization of your files:

As you can see, we’ve also added new “On/Off” buttons to make it more clear what’s enabled and what’s not – the green indicator now shows you exactly how much battery life you can save with each tweak.

Plus, there’s a new profile called “Low Battery” which is available in the PRO version and kicks in when battery life hits a certain threshold, such as “20%” (you have to run it once and then set it up):

That’s super important when you’re nowhere near a power outlet and the phone is running on fumes. It saved my digital life more than once…

Overall, we’ve also made the “Profiles” easier to set up. Once you select a profile for the first time, such as “Car” (for when you’re on the road), we’ll walk you through what conditions and settings you can set up. In the example of car, I set it up so that AVG Cleaner for Android always disables Wi-Fi, auto-sync, screen rotation and screen time-out whenever it’s connected to the Bluetooth of my car:

That’s because I don’t need any Wi-Fi in my car. Plus, I’m using the phone as my GPS so I don’t want the screen rotating randomly or turning itself off after a while.

Download AVG Cleaner for Android now.

Three essential tips for new Android devices

Unfortunately, with today’s smartphones (which have the capacity and the feature-set of a high-end PC from about 10 years ago) it’s no longer a matter of popping in the SIM and using it.

There are a million things to watch out for and set up. In this week’s blog, we’ve compiled the three most useful steps you need to take besides running through the initial setup and downloading your favorite apps.

Sign into your Google Account:

One of the first things your new Android will ask you to do is sign into your Google account. Now, you could technically go without a Google account, but the benefits outweigh a lot of the worries some users have: once you sign in, it will back-up your phone’s settings, installed apps, account data and more – plus it allows you to purchase apps on the Google Play Store.

If you’re worried about privacy, simply create a new account and leave out information you don’t want to be shared with Google.

Google Sync

Get the latest update:

Most phones come with outdated software right out of the gate (as software continues to improve after devices come off the production line). We suggest checking for updates in your “Settings” app under “About device” (or similar).

Do the same for your apps so you don’t have to go into the Google Play store all the time. Go to Settings again and look for the “Auto-update apps” checkbox.

Software update

Get rid of preinstalled bloatware:

As we discovered last month in our AVG App Consumption report, one of the top reasons for battery drain, storage consumption and data traffic are the preinstalled apps on your phone.

We’ve actually made a free app, AVG Cleaner for Android, which lets you view the most draining apps on your phone and helps you get rid of them: Open it up and go to the App Uninstaller.

This will list all your currently running apps. If you tap on the little blue arrow in the top right, you can then sort the list by:

  • App Usage – how often you use each of your apps
  • Storage Usage – how much space your apps use
  • Battery Usage – how demanding each app is on your battery
  • Data Usage – the apps that send and receive the most data (to help avoid hitting your data plan limit)

Uninstall Bloatware