Smartphones are fast enough for most people these days. Now, it’s all about other things, including battery life. Even while chip makers and software providers are working hard to make their products last longer on batteries, the truth is that we use our phones more than ever.
It undoubtedly seems impossible to get a gadget that lets you do everything—play games, watch videos, read social media, communicate with friends, check your email, manage your appointments, find your way to places, and more—on screens that are getting bigger and clearer and last all day.
Charging is getting better, faster, and easier, yet phone batteries still don’t last much longer. You may make small changes here and there to help you get the most out of your battery. Together, they might even help your phone survive as long as you do. Here are some of our best suggestions for helping your smartphone’s battery last longer without making it unusable.
1. Find out what is draining your phone’s battery.
You need to know what’s making the battery die too soon before you can remedy any problems with its short life.
You can check the health of your apps by going to Settings > Battery on your Android device. If something in the background is using a lot of power, you’ll be warned here.
To view what has been using your battery, tap the three dots in the top right corner of the screen and click Battery consumption. You may view a full list of services and a graph that displays how much battery life is left and how much has been used up so far.
Battery Saver will turn off some aspects of your device and limit how you can use some apps. However, we’re more interested in the modifications you can make that won’t change how you use your device. So let’s have a look at some of those.
2. Activate Adaptive Battery
To turn on Adaptive Battery, go to Settings > Battery > Adaptive Battery and move the switch. This feature, which came with Android Pie, stops apps that you don’t use often from using too much power in the background.
There is a Restricted App list right below this choice, and it will be empty by default. You can’t just add any app you want to this list. Instead, Adaptive Battery keeps an eye on apps that are running in the background, and if any of them are using too much power, you’ll get a notification telling you about it and asking if you want to add the app to this list.
Part of the reason it’s such a useful feature to turn on is understood when you consider why your phone is running low on power in the first place. Before you bought it, it would have gone through a lot of tests to make sure that the hardware and operating system were energy-efficient. But once you get it home, the company can’t control what you do with it, and a lot of the stress on the battery would have come from programs and upgrades you downloaded from other sources. Adaptive Battery lets them keep an eye on which of these extras is ruining all their hard work and helps you fix the problem.
3. Stop programs from operating in the background
You can still see what apps are running in the background and kill off those that don’t need to be in the multitasking menu, even if you don’t have Android Pie or Adaptive Battery. To get to this on Android Pie, swipe up from the bottom of the screen. On older versions of Android, you should notice a button next to the home button.
Keep in mind that force-closing an app only helps if you aren’t intending to open it again right away. This is because it takes more power to reopen the program than it does to terminate its background processes.
4. Stop programs from starting up automatically
Android doesn’t yet have the option to choose which apps start up when you first switch on your phone, but many modified versions of the operating system, like MIUI, do. For example, on the Mi 9, go to Settings and then App Settings and pick Permissions. To see which apps you wish to run in the background, tap Autostart and then look at the list.
Use common sense here, because apps like Ring Doorbell won’t give you notifications when someone is at the door if you don’t allow them to run in the background.
5. Activate the Always-on Display
For a while now, several phone companies have been putting always-on displays in their smartphones. But with the newest versions of Android, this function is called Glance view and is built in. Basically, it shows the time, date, and notification icons on the phone screen when it’s off. It uses very little battery life to do this, which means you don’t have to wake the screen up all the time to see if you have a new notice or check the time.
To find Glance view, go to Settings > Display > Advanced > Glance view > Glance display duration. We suggest that you always turn this feature on.
6. Turn down the brightness of the screen and turn it off. Brightness that changes
The displays on the cheapest phones can be rather boring, but the displays on the greatest phones can be so brilliant that they hurt your eyes. This is helpful when you’re using the phone outside in the sun, but at other times it’s too much and drains the battery.
To lower the brightness of the screen, go to Settings > Display > Brightness level and move the slider down to a level that is more comfortable. You may also typically find a brightness slider in the notification bar that pulls down on your phone.
Also, turn off Adaptive brightness while you’re in this menu. You would believe that this feature will help the battery last longer by only raising the screen brightness when needed, but it can be easily tricked by inside illumination and takes away all of your control.
7. Lower the time it takes to sleep
The screen stays on for a set amount of time after you wake it up, even if you are done with what you were doing. You can change how long this lasts, and the shorter the screen timeout is, the less battery power will be used.
You may find this option by going to Settings > Display > Advanced > Sleep. You can configure it to be as short as 15 seconds.
8. Lower the screen’s resolution
Not all phones let you change the screen resolution, but Samsung’s flagship phones are known for having Quad-HD+ displays and defaulting to Full-HD+. This is to save battery life because it takes less power to move all those pixels. You can even go down to HD+ if you like.
To check the resolution of your screen on a Samsung phone, navigate to Settings > Display > Screen resolution.
9. Turn on Dark Mode
Android doesn’t have Dark Mode yet, but it will be in Android Q shortly. In the meanwhile, you can carefully pick your wallpaper. A dark design needs less power to light up those pixels. You can also turn on Dark mode in any apps that support it. YouTube and Slack are two examples, but more and more apps are doing this to make it easier on your eyes and battery life by changing the colors on the screen.
Samsung’s phones and Xiaomi’s newest Mi 9 are just two examples of phones that already offer the capability. Look at the display settings to see if you can find this option.
10. Turn off widgets
Widgets can be useful for getting data from your favorite apps that is always up to date directly on your home screen, but checking them all the time will drain your battery. Tap and hold on to the ones you want to keep, then drag them to the Remove icon at the top of the screen to get rid of the ones you don’t need.
Disclaimer
The only reason this article exists is to teach and inform people in a general way. The tips and advice given may be different depending on the device’s manufacturer, software version, and model. They are based on what other users have done and what most smartphones are set up to do.
We can’t promise that battery life will get better for everyone, since different users may see different results. Always follow the manufacturer’s official instructions before making any changes to your system.
We are not responsible for any damage, data loss, or performance issues that may happen as a result of following the advice in this article.