The tasks today’s smartphones perform are more demanding than ever. And to accommodate growing needs, processors have become more powerful and screens have gotten larger.
Sadly, lithium-ion batteries haven’t made as much progress. This leaves you to rely solely on software for longer-lasting endurance unless you want to upgrade to a phone with maximum battery life. Here are some practical tips for improving battery life on an Android phone.
1. Rethink Wallpaper and Widgets
Stay away from moving wallpaper, because it takes energy for your display to animate it. It's also a good idea to limit yourself to a background with fewer colors in it since the display will eat up more energy if it needs to render a lot of different colors. The best wallpapers I will suggest is to Dark Wallpapers.
While widgets are tempting and
convenient, they are essentially an active program usable right from your home
screen, so the phone uses energy keeping the feature running. Just say no to
these little guys if battery life is a problem.
2. Switch to the Dark Side
If your phone sports an OLED screen, switching to a dark theme helps to preserve the battery. Since OLED displays can disable individual pixels, backgrounds with deep blacks allow them to consume less power. You can take advantage of this in many ways. You can begin by applying a dark wallpaper, enabling a system-wide dark theme if your phone has one, and enabling the night mode on compatible apps like Twitter, Pocket, and more. We’ve covered some great themed android apps you should try.
3. Limit Apps Running in the Background
Most apps you use are active even after you exit them. That’s where Android’s app-specific battery tools enter. With a simple switch, you can completely restrict an app from accessing the battery in the background. Find this at Settings > Apps & Notifications and there, inside the specific app’s page, tap Advanced > Battery > Background restriction. If you have an older phone, you can also try a third-party app called Greenify. This automatically stops apps from consuming resources in the background. However, we recommend using the native feature on modern devices since it generally works better than third-party solutions.
4. Monitor Misbehaving Apps
Your battery life can take a big hit if an app doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. This could be caused by anything from a bug to a deliberate aggressive background feature. You can check this by heading into Settings > Battery > Menu > Battery Usage to see which apps have drained the most of it.
If there’s an app you don’t use much, you should uninstall it and monitor the battery for a day to see if it improves. You can also force-close the app and give it another shot. If nothing proves useful, get rid of it and switch to an alternative. And make sure you don’t have any of the worst android battery killers on your phone.
5. Switch to Lite or Progressive Web Apps
Another nifty method that doesn’t require much sacrifice and still extends your phone’s battery life is switching to lite or progressive web apps. These are slimmed-down versions of apps available in a browser. Companies offer them to make the experience better on underpowered phones. They take fewer resources, but you won’t miss out on much.
6. Disable Google Assistant
While Google Assistant is a handy tool to have for fun and work, it’s also one of the Android features that constantly gobbles up your phone’s energy. It’s listening for the wake command, is connected to your location for instantly fetching contextual results, and more. If you don’t heavily depend on Google Assistant, it’s best to shutter it.
Unsurprisingly, Google hasn’t made the Assistant’s switch easy to reach. You have to jump through a few hoops to find it. First, go into the Google app and hit the More tab. There, tap Settings and under the Google Assistant header, tap Settings again. Next, select the Assistant tab and there, tap your phone’s name at the bottom of the list. Turn off the Google Assistant option and you’re done.
7. Turn down the screen brightness.
A smartphone’s screen is the component that typically uses the most battery. Turning down the screen brightness will save energy. Using Auto-Brightness probably saves battery for most people by automatically reducing screen brightness when there’s less light, although it does involve more work for the light sensor.
The thing that would truly save the most battery in this area would be to manage it manually and fairly obsessively. That is, manually set it to the lowest visible level every time there’s a change in ambient lighting levels. Both Android and iOS give you options to turn down overall screen brightness even if you’re also using auto-brightness.
8. Reduce the screen timeout (auto-lock)
If you leave your screen ON without using it, it will automatically turn off after a while, usually one or two minutes. You can save energy by reducing the Screen Timeout time. By default, I believe iPhones set their Auto-Lock to 2 minutes, which might be more than you need. You may be fine with 1 minute, or even 30 seconds. On the other hand, if you reduce auto-lock or screen timeout you may find your screen dimming too soon when you’re in the middle of reading a news story or recipe, so that’s a call you’ll need to make.
I use Tasker (an automation app) to change the screen timeout on my Smartphone depending on what app I’m using. My default is a fairly short screen timeout of 35 seconds, but for apps where I am likely to be looking at the screen without using it, such as news and note-taking apps, I extend that timeout to over a minute.
9. Avoid extremes of heat and cold.
If your phone gets very hot or cold it can strain the battery and shorten its lifespan. Leaving it in your car would probably be the worst culprit if it’s hot and sunny outside or below freezing in winter.
10. Avoid fast charging.
Charging your phone quickly stresses the battery. Unless you need it, avoid using fast charging. The slower you charge your battery the better, so if you don’t mind slow charging overnight, go for it. Charging your phone from your computer as well as certain smart plugs can limit the current going into your phone, slowing its charge rate. Some external battery packs might slow the speed of charging, but I’m not sure about that.
11. Avoid draining your phone battery to 0% or charging it to 100%.
Older types of rechargeable batteries had ‘battery memory’. If you didn’t charge them to full and discharge them to zero battery they ‘remembered’ and reduced their useful range. It was better for their lifespan if you always drained and charged the battery completely. Newer phone batteries work differently. It stresses the battery to drain it completely or charge it completely. Phone batteries are happiest if you keep them above 20% capacity and below 90%. To be extremely precise, they’re happiest around 50% capacity.
Short charges are probably fine, by the way, so if you’re the sort of person that finds yourself frequently topping up your phone for quick charges, that’s fine for your battery. Paying a lot of attention to this one may be too much micromanagement. But when I owned my first smartphone I thought battery memory applied so I generally drained it low and charged it to 100%. Now that I know more about how the battery works, I usually plug it in before it gets below 20% and unplugs it before completely charged if I think of it.
12. Charge your phone to 50% for long-term storage
The healthiest charge for a lithium-ion battery seems to be about 50%. If you are going to store your phone for an extended period, charge it to 50% before turning it off and storing it. This is easier on the battery than charging it to 100% or letting it drain to 0% before storage.
The battery, by the way, continues to degrade and discharge if the phone is turned off and not being used at all. This generation of batteries was designed to be used. If you think of it, turn the phone on every several months and top the battery up to 50%.
13. Manually Disable Screen Pixels
If you’re not comfortable with darker gradients, you can also manually switch off pixels through a third-party app called Pixoff. The app can also employ one of several available grid patterns to quickly, for instance, deactivate half of the pixels.
Unless you’re watching a movie or consuming other content in HD, you won’t notice much of a drop in quality, especially if you have a 1080p screen or higher. A few manufacturers like Samsung also include a setting that allows you to reduce the display’s resolution.
Download: Pixoff (Free, premium version available)
14. Sync Settings
Notifications are important. But if you find them intrusive and hate the persistent stream of pings, you should try disabling auto-sync altogether. That way, you’ll only see new content when you open an app and refresh it manually.
Since apps won’t constantly refresh themselves in the background to feed you new information, this can save you a ton of battery life too. To disable auto-sync, visit Settings > Accounts and there, the Automatically sync data options should be available at the bottom. You can also disable sync on a per-app basis in most apps.
15. The Best Battery Saver
On recent versions of
Android, this feature is called Battery
Saver-head to Battery in Settings to locate it. Like the
iPhone’s low power mode, it turns off a few background services, limits what
your apps can do when they’re not currently active and can be activated
manually or automatically when the battery reaches a certain level.
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