Smartphone Battery-Saving Tips For Longer Life

Show by a raise of hands if you’ve ever worried about the longevity of your phone’s battery. If you raised yours, don’t worry. You’re among the many millions of us who are always in that same position, daily. Because our phones are the gadgets we use the most, maintaining, preserving, and protecting battery life is a daily fight we all partake in. That’s why, as the year starts, we have brought you a few essential battery-saving tips for all your mobile devices. These will help significantly extend battery life per charge and slow long-term battery degradation. So, let’s dive right in.

There is only ever one way to start this list, and that’s with the most obvious battery-saving tip. Unless you like staring into the sun or you’re Superman and you absorb bright light, please lower your screen brightness. With the advancement of modern technology, just 50% of your brightness capacity is enough to see clearly, and yet so many of us crank it to 100% for some reason. This just drains the battery faster and, in some cases, affects your eyesight.  

That’s why, for so many of us, the display is usually the biggest battery drainer and should be the first thing we address. You can manually control the brightness of your mobile device, or if that sounds like too much work, there are tools to help. The most important is the adaptive or auto-brightness function. This adjusts your screen’s brightness based on ambient light and saves power. As an added bonus, consider using Dark Mode or a Dark Theme whenever possible. This helps a lot on OLED and AMOLED screens, where black pixels use almost no power at all.

This next tip is the quickest way to get hours of extra runtime, as opposed to getting stuck with a dead phone in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately for you, your phone’s manufacturer figured that instead of making you tinker with every single setting, they could throw you a bone and automate everything, and so they did. Welcome to Low Power Mode or Battery Saver.  

By turning on Battery Saver (for Android) or Low Power Mode (for iOS), your phone automatically does everything it needs to give you the best battery life while preserving as many functions as it can. This mode can be turned on manually, or it can activate automatically when your battery drops below a certain threshold. When activated, it does a bunch of things: it dims the screen, limits background activity, reduces performance, and turns off some visual effects. This will help you big time. Trust me on that.

Unless you’re tech-savvy, you might not even know that some apps, even when they’re not being actively used, can still drain your battery. That’s because they run in the background, updating, using data, power, and processing resources. Some can even record your location and ping it unnecessarily, which drains the battery even faster. The solution? Turn it off.  

Go to your settings, open Battery settings, move to app battery usage, and restrict background data and battery usage for non-essential apps. That one seemingly simple task will save you a lot. Also, remember to turn off location access for most apps and disable unnecessary location services like Wi-Fi scanning and Bluetooth scanning when not needed. Sounds simple enough, right?

In the age of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, two of the connectivity features we use the most, it’s easy to forget to ever switch them off and to always leave them on. However, by having them on when we don’t need them, you guessed it… We drain the battery big time. In fact, a more fitting term is that we suck the life out of the battery.  

This happens because when Wi-Fi or Bluetooth are on, they’re constantly searching for signals, and that process uses power. So please go to your settings and disable Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Mobile Data when you’re not using them. You can even take this a step further and disable 5G if you’re in an area with poor coverage. This will bring you down to 4G/LTE, which means lower speeds, but it significantly improves your battery life. Good trade if you already had poor coverage.

This one is as straightforward as it gets. If your phone is constantly buzzing with notifications from various people, apps, and settings, then the battery simply isn’t going to last. Individually, they don’t seem to matter much. However, remember that constant notifications, sounds, and vibrations add up, and they eat into your battery life. So be sure to turn off non-essential app notifications, so you’re not bombarded by unnecessary updates that will cost you battery life.  

Also, you can always choose to switch vibration to silent or short for calls and texts. That’s because vibration uses more power than a simple ringtone. That small change, over a long day of calls, will give you results you can be happy with. You can take this a step further and disable the LED notification light or always-on status indicators if they’re available. Do that, and you’ll enjoy better battery life that keeps you happy and safe.