Smartphones today are powerful, blazing-fast, and capable of performing tasks that even the computers of the past couldn’t handle. But all that comes with a price. The more you burden it with tasks, the more your smartphone battery life is compromised and drains out quickly.
Honestly, the longevity of your smartphone battery life depends upon only a single key factor; The way you use it. Are you concerned about how fast your smartphone’s battery drains out? Worry not! We have got you covered with our complete guide about how you can extend your smartphone battery life. You can either do this with your phone’s built-in features or with the help of third-party apps.
Battery optimization using phone’s settings
Battery drain can be really a nuisance when you haven’t got the time to charge your phone throughout the day. Most people don’t want to use third-party apps for battery management due to privacy concerns, as those apps collect and send data to the servers. However, there are ample of your phone’s native features which you can tweak to wring out more battery throughout your busy workday.
Adjust screen brightness
As much as you may love the bright and colorful display of your smartphone, it’s the archenemy of your smartphone battery life and eats up the most significant part of the battery compared to any other component of your phone.
Almost every smartphone has an ambient light sensor and auto-brightness option so you should make the most out of it by tuning your display brightness. Either you can dim the display manually by turning down the brightness, or you can turn auto brightness on, which adapts according to the ambiance and automatically turns the brightness down in dark conditions. Using this feature regularly may enhance your smartphone battery life drastically.
Avoid live wallpapers and excessive widgets
As cool as they look, live wallpapers prove to be another nail in the coffin of the smartphone batteries. Not only that but they also slow down the device too just because they regularly have to update so in addition to the display, the processor and RAM also get busy which, resultantly, not only drains the battery but also slows the phone down.
Similarly, widgets also play their part in draining the battery as they have to display the updated information continually and keep updating with intervals. Removing excessive widgets also helps speed up your phone.
Turn off the animations to extend smartphone battery life
When opening a window or closing one on your phone, the transition effects are called animations. If your phone is draining the battery, there is a good chance that animations are playing their part. They can be turned off in settings. Go to Settings>System>About Phone and tap “Build number” seven times. “Developer options” will appear in settings.
Go back to Settings>System>Developer options and turn off the “Windows animation scale,” “Transition animation scale” and “Animator duration scale.”
Turning animations off will not only increase the longevity of your smartphone battery life but will also speed up your phone.
Also Read: Smartphones with the best battery life that we tested
Turn off sync
You should well know your phone takes up a lot of resources when the apps refresh in the background. Apps such as weather, Gmail, Twitter, etc. constantly need to refresh to present you with the latest data available. As useful as it is, syncing your phone regularly takes a toll on the phone’s resources and consumes more battery. Turning off the auto-sync feature also extends your smartphone battery life.
Besides that, you can also enhance your smartphone battery life by restricting background data usage. It not only ekes out more battery from the phone but also helps you save your data consumption.
Turn off radio connectivity when not needed
Do you like listening to music with your Bluetooth hands-free? Or are you always conscious about your health and use a Bluetooth fitness tracker? Whatever the case may be, when you are not listening to music, or you are resting and don’t need your fitness tracker, do remember to turn the Bluetooth off as it constantly searches for available radio signals even when it is connected. Turning it off will noticeably increase your battery life.
Similarly, wifi radio is a serious battery drainer, so whenever you don’t need to use your wifi connection while you are away, you have to toggle it off and turn it on only when you need to access it the internet.
Turning off location services will also enhance your smartphone battery life by hours. Google’s location services continuously keep searching for GPS signals to determine your location in real-time and this process affects the phone’s battery massively so turning it off results in added battery life.
Battery optimization using third-party apps
You can also equip your phone with battery monitoring apps that monitor battery usage so you may have a better idea of how the apps behave in consuming battery. Here we have compiled a list of the most effective apps available on the play store to optimize and enhance your smartphone battery life. Each app has its unique features and can help you a lot in conserving power.
Kaspersky Battery Life
Kaspersky remains one of the biggest names in the software industry. Their android app, Battery life, is one of the highest-rated apps for battery optimization and is also easy to use with an array of functions to choose from.
The app monitors and analyzes the behavior of other apps and tells you which one is draining most of the battery. You can also enable notification for the most power-hungry apps. All the apps running in the background can be shut down with one touch. However, you can also create a whitelist so the phone will show or close the apps included in the whitelist.
Battery Doctor
With over 100 million downloads, battery doctor is an ideal app for battery optimization. It has interesting options like a battery cooler, which tells you the battery temperature and informs you with apps that heat up your phone so you can close them instantly. You can optimize the battery with one touch.
There are also preset modes for battery usage which include Classic, Long Life, and Sleep Mode. These modes have their restrictions and allowances for the battery to make sure it lasts longer. You can also create your own mode.
It keeps a complete record of charging and discharging and provides detailed information on battery usage.
Greenify
It mainly started as a root-only app but is now available to users without rooted phones too. This app is unique and an effective one too. It identifies the app that are consuming phones resources excessively and places them in hibernation or puts them to sleep when you are not using them.
This not only extends the battery life of your phone but also speeds up your phone. The background processing of an app is fairly optimized thanks to Greenify.