Easy Ways to Extend Your Phone Battery Life

As smartphones become more advanced, we tend to find ourselves using them more on a daily basis. With that, your phone’s battery is bound to be used more. Over time, you will notice that your phone’s battery life isn’t as long lasting as it was when you first got it. It is a fact that batteries become less effective as they age. Luckily, there are many things you can do to help extend your phone battery life. Keep reading to see what you can do to your phone.

Optimize and Adjust Your Screen’s Display

There are quite a few things you can do to your screen’s display to squeeze more battery life from your phone. For starters, you can disable auto brightness. Auto brightness increases and reduces the brightness of your screen automatically. This can drain the battery. Best practice is to keep the brightness at your personal preference. It is recommended to keep the brightness at about 50% or lower.

If you are using an Android smartphone that has an AMOLED display (most Samsung phones), using an all-black or darker wallpaper will save you some battery life as well. This is because AMOLED screens have individual pixels that emit their own light. If the pixels are set to black, the pixels don’t turn on and do not have to emit any light which in turn saves battery life for other things.

Animated wallpapers are cool, but they unfortunately drain your phone battery life. Instead of using an animated wallpaper, switch to a static wallpaper, such as a photo. Doing this makes your phone more power efficient.

Another tip is to adjust your screen’s timeout, sleep, or auto-lock setting. Screen timeout, sleep, and auto-lock is a feature that automatically locks or turns the screen off based on a chosen amount of time that elapses. This feature can be found in the Display section of your phone’s Settings. If you are using an Android, the feature will be referred to as screen timeout or sleep. For iPhone users, this feature is called auto-lock.

Figure Out Which Apps are Using Up Most of Your Phone Battery Life

Understanding which apps are using up most of your phone battery life is important to extending the battery life. On both iPhone and Android, you can find this information by going to your Settings and tapping on Battery or Battery Usage.

In addition to seeing which apps are using up most of your battery, you can manage apps that are running and turned on to refresh their content in the background even when the apps are not currently being used. Turning off apps from refreshing in the background can help preserve phone battery life. On Android, this can be done by going to Settings, tap Apps, select an app, and then choose to turn background data off. For iPhones, this is done by going to Settings, select General, and Background App Refresh.

It is also vital to keep the apps on your phone up to date. An app that is poorly optimized can be a burden on battery life causing it to drain quicker. Check for available app updates to install by going to the Google Play Store on your Android or the App Store on your iPhone.

Turn Off Things You Aren’t Using

It’s simple. The more things you have turned on, the more your phone has to work in order to keep those things on. This in turn uses more of your phone battery. Why have them on if you’re not using them?

One of the many things people keep turned on is Bluetooth. It would be wise to turn Bluetooth off if you’re not using it. If you just use Bluetooth while in your car, you can turn Bluetooth on when you’re in the car. Then turn Bluetooth off whenever you are not in the car. Doing so will help extend your phone battery life.

Turn off location tracking. Some apps use your location to provide real-time location data. If you barely use location-based apps or use them sparingly, it would be a good idea to leave location for those apps off and turn it back on when you need to use it.

Use Battery Saver or Low Power Mode

We recommend turning on battery saver or low power mode when necessary. Turning on battery saver or lower power mode helps conserve battery power by changing certain settings until you can fully charge your phone. Please note that Android refers to this feature as Battery Saver. On iPhone, this feature is referred to as Low Power Mode. This featured can be turned on by going to the Settings and tapping on Battery.

Stay on Wi-Fi Whenever Possible

Not only does staying on wi-fi help you save on your Twigby bill because you are not using cellular data but staying on wi-fi helps extend your phone battery life. It’s recommended to stay on wi-fi whenever possible because data over wi-fi uses less battery power than data over cellular. When on wi-fi, your phone isn’t trying to look for the next cell tower or has to worry about roaming. Connecting to a wi-fi network can be done by going to your phone’s Settings and tapping Wi-Fi.

Keep Your Battery Charged

This one is obvious, but keep your battery charged. Charge your phone each night to ensure that you will always start the day with a full battery. Try keeping a car charger or battery pack handy in case your phone needs to be charged while you’re on the go.

Now that you are familiar with how to extend your phone battery life, we hope you feel comfortable with making the changes you see necessary to squeeze as much juice out of your phone as you can. For step by step instructions on how to make the changes mentioned, please click here.