Smartphones are amazing gadgets, but they sure do eat up a ton of battery power. If it seems like your iPhone never holds a battery charge for nearly as long as you want it to, you’re not alone.
These three tips will help you increase the life of your battery whether your phone seems to die halfway through the day or you need to squeeze a few more hours out of it until you can charge it again. While there are additional ways to save battery, these tricks will save the most power the fastest, which is probably your goal if you’re afraid of your phone dying in the next hour.
1. Limit How Much Power the Screen Uses
Your iPhone’s screen sucks up a lot of power. Enable auto-brightness so that it automatically dims at times. You can also reduce the brightness yourself. Lowering it to 50% will make a big difference in how much power your screen uses up.
You can also change the auto-lock settings to preserve your battery power.
Go to Settings > then General > then Auto-Lock and choose the lowest setting.
In iOS 9, 30 seconds is the lowest setting you can opt for. When you’re not actively using your phone, the screen will turn off after 30 seconds, saving you power. Additionally, try to get into the habit of always pressing the sleep button when you’re done using your phone. This will instantly turn the screen off so you won’t even have to wait for the auto-lock to kick in.
2. Low Power Mode
The iPhone’s iOS 9 upgrade came with a new option called Low Power Mode. When activated, Low Power Mode either reduces or turns off things like Hey Siri, Mail fetch, auto-downloads, visual effects and background app refresh.
When your battery only has 20% power left, you’ll get a popup notification on your phone asking if you want to switch to Low Power Mode. You don’t have to make the change, but if you need to get more time out of your battery, you should. According to Apple, you can get up to three more hours of power by using Low Power Mode when your phone’s at 20 percent.
To really stretch the life of your battery, turn on Low Power Mode whenever you want, even if your battery’s at 100 percent.
Low Power Mode can be activated at any time!
Go to Settings > then Battery > switch Low Power Mode “on”
3. Stop Wasting Power!
If your phone seems to lose its charge quickly, you’ll want to check out the battery usage chart. Go to Settings and then Battery to access this chart. The battery usage chart will let you know what’s been using the most energy over the past four days and the past 24 hours. This is one of the top tips from Macworld for staying on top of your battery life and usage.
If the battery usage chart says that Facebook, for example, is using the most power, but your Facebook app isn’t open at the moment, it could be due to background activity. Underneath the app’s name, it may say “Background Activity.” Some apps perform actions even when it’s not actually open.
For example, if you have location services enabled, certain apps may be constantly searching for your location. According to Apple, your location services can eat up a lot of your power, making it difficult to extend battery time.
To turn off background activity for certain apps, or to turn it off completely.
Go to Settings > then General > then Background App Refresh.
Some people opt to keep this option off all the time so that it’s never sucking life out of the battery. You can also turn off the Background App Refresh if you need to get a little more time out of your phone before the battery dies and then turn it back on once it’s recharged.
Your phone also wastes a ton of power by looking for cellular and WiFi networks. There are four basic options for using a network without wreaking havoc on your phone’s charge.
In order to extend battery time, choose one of these options based on your needs:
- Keep both your cell data and your WiFi turned on if you need your cell network for calls and SMS as well as data. Your cell network alone will allow you to access data, but if you’re near a strong WiFi signal, the WiFi will use up less energy to access data.
- If you don’t need your cell network but you do need data and you’re near a strong WiFi signal, turn off the cell data. Remember to only do this if the WiFi network is strong, though. Otherwise, your phone will spend a lot of energy looking for a WiFi connection.
- If you don’t need your data but you do need your cell network, turn off the WiFi.
- If you don’t need data or your cell network at the time and you’re trying to conserve energy, turn on Airplane Mode.
Sometimes you want to save your phone’s battery life so that you can listen to music on a car ride or browse Facebook on vacation. If that’s the case, make temporary changes that won’t affect the things you want to do. For example, you can lower the brightness of the screen or turn off your cellular network.
Other times, you’ll want to keep your phone’s battery as high as possible so that you can get in touch with someone in case of an emergency. At these times, don’t do anything that will suck the battery life from your phone, like listening to music or watching YouTube videos.
The way you preserve the iPhone battery’s life will depend on why you need to keep your phone on and how long you need it to stay on for until you can charge it again.
Do you have any more tips to share on how to save your battery life on any smartphone? Jump into the discussion and help thousands of readers to enjoy their phone time even more!
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