3 Apps That Can Make Your Gaming Phone More Powerful

Most gaming smartphones already offer capable hardware, and many can run demanding titles without issue. However, whether gaming phones are worth buying depends a lot on what you want from them. But this experience is not limited to flagship products. You can also find budget options that provide a good gaming experience, especially if you use apps to better manage device resources. So if you want more stability during longer gaming sessions, there are some great options.

However, it’s worth noting that these apps don’t completely transform the phone. So even if you use them to optimize your phone, they won’t turn a mid-range smartphone into a flagship or guarantee dramatic FPS increases. What they can do is reduce background activity while you play, monitor temperature, or even stabilize the connection when playing online. In practice, these are tools that help make the experience more convenient, especially when the device is close to the limits of its own hardware.

Like the PC version of the app, ExitLag Mobile helps anyone experiencing high latency and MS when gaming online by optimizing the connection. The application analyzes different routes between the phone and the game server, directing traffic to the most efficient option. The goal is to reduce issues like high ping, jitter, packet loss, and sudden latency spikes during matches.

This also explains why some gaming routers may be worth it, since features like QoS help prioritize gaming traffic and reduce congestion. ExitLag, on the other hand, uses its own infrastructure to find better routes for the user, making the connection more stable in certain situations.

So, if your gaming smartphone can run the game without issue but online matches still have high ping, ExitLag can help you by finding an alternative route, especially if you’re playing on more remote servers and want a more responsive experience. However, to use the service you need a subscription, but you can see if it works for your internet connection during the seven-day free trial.

Gamers GLTool is a universal game booster for Android, offering additional tweaks for anyone who wants to improve their gameplay a little, in addition to closing background apps. Just as options hidden in the developer settings can change a phone’s performance, the app lets you adjust the game’s graphics settings, such as resolution, to make the experience more stable.

In practice, this means that Gamers GLTool doesn’t make the CPU or GPU more powerful, but it can improve FPS by reducing the work needed to render the game. This difference is especially important on the most budget-friendly gaming phones, where lowering the resolution or turning off effects can help maintain more stable frame rates, and some users report better performance after using it.

Still, results vary widely by device and game. There aren’t enough independent benchmarks to say that Gamers GLTool always increases FPS, and some users report little to no difference. For this reason, the app works best as a tuning tool, as it lets you trade visual quality for performance, which is potentially useful when the hardware isn’t flagship level.

Brevent is an option for anyone who wants finer control over what continues to run while gaming. Android already automatically manages RAM and generally keeps apps cached to reopen them faster, which is also why closing apps doesn’t always improve performance. Brevent goes further by allowing you to put specific applications to sleep or force them to close when they remain active without need. This can be especially useful on phones with limited memory or when an app insists on waking up, syncing, or consuming resources in the background while you’re gaming.

The advantage over built-in phone management is that it offers more specific and persistent control. Instead of lowering the process limit for the entire system or simply clearing recent apps, Brevent lets you choose which apps to restrict and which can still sync or send notifications. This can therefore reduce the competition for RAM and CPU without affecting everything indiscriminately, although it does not increase GPU power or guarantee more FPS. The setup, however, is more technical and requires USB debugging or wireless debugging to work without root.

To select the apps for this list, we left out the tools that come pre-installed on some manufacturers’ phones. For example, Samsung and Xiaomi phones often come with their own Game Booster solutions. Although these resources can contribute to game performance, they generally belong to each brand’s ecosystem. For this reason, these options would not be useful for phones from another manufacturer.

Instead, we prioritized independent apps that can be installed on a wider variety of Android phones and that offer different functions or promise big FPS gains. Many of these tools have limits in what they can do, as there aren’t standalone scaling solutions like on gaming PCs. So a mid-range phone can’t go far beyond what its hardware offers, which is why our options focus on specific areas, such as improving connections to online games or reducing background processes.