You have no doubt noticed that the longer you use your Android phone or tablet, the slower it can get. As well as a noticeable drop in performance, it’s also likely that storage space gets eaten up, apps start to hang and other problems might creep in. There are steps you can take from within Android that enable you to free up space, monitor the status of different aspects of your device and generally stay in control, but this will generally mean having to visit number of different areas of settings or making use of third party tools.

All-In-One Toolbox – or All-In-One Toolbox (17 Tools) to give the app its full title – aims to be very much what the name suggests, your one-stop-shop for all manner of maintenance and optimization tasks. The collection of tools includes a batch installer and uninstaller as well as a task management tool.

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Introducing All-In-One Toolbox

Fire up the app and you’ll be greeted not by a selection of tools to choose from, but a system info screen. This gives you a quick graphical overview of how your memory and storage space are being used up, and lets you check CPU usage.

There are three buttons on this startup screen: Battery Booster invites you to buy a separate app, System Info gives you more details about your device, while Quick Boost kills background apps to free up memory.

Info screen: device health and quick optimizations.

On the subject of the Quick Boost option, it’s worth mentioning the whitelisting option straight away. To avoid having important apps terminated, head to the Settings section by tapping the upper left cog icon and then working through the User and System sections to cordon off apps that should remain running at all times.

Whitelisting prevents apps from being terminated.

In terms of options, there’s not much else to concern yourself with. Activate the notification icon and an icon will be displayed whenever the app is running and, perhaps more usefully, a shortcut to All-In-One Toolbox is added to the notification screen, not only providing instant access to the app, but also showing memory and battery details.

All-In-One Toolbox in the notification screen.

Power Up Processes

One of the easiest ways to boost the performance of your device, improve battery life and free up memory, is to kill apps that may be running in the background. Move to the Process section of All-In-One and you’ll see a list of apps and processes that are currently running. Depending on the type of optimization you are looking for, you can use the menu on the right to order the list so the processes that are using the most memory, CPU or battery are listed first.

Sort your running processes by memory, CPU or battery usage.

Selected the apps you’d like to stop using, or wasting, your device’s resources, and just hit the Kill button to reap the benefits.

Toolbox Tools

Move to the Tools section All-In-One and you’ll find what you would expect to find in an app billing itself as a ‘toolbox’ – a collection of various utilities. These are divided up in to various sections – system cleaning, SD management and several others – but as there are only twelve items in total, this does not seem entirely necessary.

While there are technically 17 tools in the tool box, I get the distinct impression that tools that could – perhaps should – have been grouped together have been deliberately split up to bolster the numbers; should the batch installer and the batch uninstaller really be separate tools? And on the subject of number bolstering, I’m not sure that a homescreen widget and homescreen shortcuts should really be counted as tools in their own right.

There are 17 tools to work with, an artificially inflated number.

Each of the tools is incredibly easy to use and provide you with a variety of ways to perform quick fixes for common Android problems. Running out of space? Clear out app caches with a couple of taps, use the App2SD option to move app data to the SD card, or clear out some unnecessary files from your SD card.

App2SD moves your app’s data to your SD card.

This latter option — the file cleaner — is interesting as it gives you a quick and easy way to track down temporary files, image thumbnails and other wasteful files so you can remove them in one fell swoop.

SDCard Cleaner: one of the space-freeing tools.

As well as freeing up space, you can also protect your privacy by cleaning your history and logs. But it’s not all about freeing up space and clearing logs, there’s also a backup tool and handy startup management options. These enable you to choose any apps you have installed and configure them to start automatically when you power up your device or, conversely, prevent apps from autorunning to free up resources.

Force or block apps from running at startup.

Summing Up

There are certainly some useful tools to be found in All-In-One Toolbox, and the fact that the app is free of charge means that there is little reason not to take a look at it. The problem with the app is that it is just not very well designed. The decision to split the startup management tools in two – one for adding startup items and another for removing them – is just plain strange.

There are a lot of useful options to be found here, but they are more spread out than they need to be. If you can turn a blind eye to the fact that the interface is not as well designed as it could be, accept the fact that you’ll probably have to visit several different areas of the app to achieve very closely related tasks, and realize that you’re not really getting 17 tools in the toolbox, this is a great app – just don’t be fooled into thinking there’s more to it than is actually there.