The ultimate guide to increasing your Android phone's battery life
We all use our phones differently. And while the batteries inside them should be plenty big enough to last all day without worry, that’s not always the case. With bigger screens, more powerful apps, and streaming everything, it’s rare when we make it from morning till night without a quick charge along the way. Let alone actually last as long as the spec sheets claim.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are quite a few ways your phone’s battery can adapt to your particular routine, and with a few tweaks and toggles, you’ll can gain precious minutes and even hours on a charge. No matter how big your battery is, you can squeeze a little more juice out of it just by making a few changes, some of which you won’t even notice.
But which battery-saving techniques work best? Over a couple weeks of tests I found that while none of the methods I tried had a negative impact on my battery life, they didn’t all deliver the kind of results that will save you from carrying around a battery pack. That being said, I was ultimately able to add several hours to most days simply by implementing a combination of tips and tricks—most of which were as simple as flicking a single switch in Settings.
Taking an inventory
Over the past couple weeks I’ve learned a lot about my Pixel’s battery. Or rather, I’ve learned a lot about how much I use it. Truth be told, I never paid too much attention to just how much I use my phone, and I have to admit, it’s a lot.
While the two weeks of condensed battery charts seen here might look relatively similar, the duration varied greatly over the course of my tests.
I don’t use a ton of different apps on a normal day. For the most part, in approximate order of usage: Sirius XM for my daily Howard Stern fix; Waze for navigating traffic on my commute; Newton for managing my three email accounts; IA Writer for, well, writing; Chrome; ESPN; the occasional time-killing jaunt with Slotomania (don’t judge); Apple Music (I said don’t judge); Accuweather; Slack; Messenger; Calendar; StockTwits; Play Store; Mint; a peek at upcoming shoe releases in SNKRS and Nike+; Bloomz for announcements from my son’s school; and a few phone calls.
Of course, there are others that pop up here and there, but these are the ones that are most likely to be near the front of my app switcher at any given moment. And the most likely to drain my battery. While I didn’t stop using any of them, by learning which ones were draining my battery the most, I was able to adjust accordingly.
Unplugging
Like all of you, I’ve always utilized rudimentary battery-saving techniques, but mostly I just plugged in when I could: in the car or at my desk, whether I needed the extra juice or not. It’s something we all do, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but the constant powering-up tends to lead to some bad habits. In my case, I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten.
Waze isn’t totally to blame, but keeping the screen on while I was driving had a major effect on my battery.
Take Waze for instance. I pretty much use it whenever I need to drive more than a few miles, and I’ve taken to leaving the screen on like so I could follow along like I would on a built-in navigation system. But I always have my phone plugged in, so I never really considered how much the way I used my phone was draining my battery.
So, the first day I started this project, I stopped charging until my phone absolutely needed it. And I quickly learned that I was doing it all wrong. My first day I barely got through 8 hours before I was in single digits. At the time I didn’t think that was so terrible—especially since I hadn’t actually been trying to conserve battery life—but as I dug into the various settings, I realized that conserving battery isn’t just about turning things off and on. It’s also about being aware of how I—and my apps—were using my phone.
With a combination of changes, you can achieve maximum battery life on your Android phone.
Dimming the display
That being said, there’s one switch that has an enormous effect on battery life, even if you change nothing else. It’s inside the Display settings and it’s called Adaptive brightness. It’s on by default on just about every smartphone you buy, and if you haven’t already, go and turn it off right now.
Simply by turning Adaptive brightness off, I added hours to my battery life.
What it does is “optimize” the brightness of your screen depending on the light in the room you’re in, so if you’re using it in bed it will automatically dim and if you’re outside on a sunny day it will blast you with brightness so you can see what you’re doing. This can often lead to your display being brighter than it really needs to be, which is a big drain on your battery.
So turn it off. I promise you won’t miss it. I consistently gained 2 or more hours of battery life when it was off, more if you factor in that it also showed me that I didn’t need to keep my screen nearly as bright as adaptive brightness was making it. So after you flip the toggle, spend some time adjusting the slider until you find a comfortable level. Today’s phone screens can get insanely bright—as you can see if you leave adaptive brightness on—but for most situations, you’ll be able to read your screen perfectly fine with a low brightness setting.
The key point is this: Lowering your display brightness even a little can have a big impact on battery life, and depending on your environment, Adaptive Brightness can work against that. Try turning it off and find a low-but-comfortable brightness setting.
Turning on battery saver
With a feature called Battery Saver, you’re all but guaranteed to gain a battery boost. If you’ve never used it (or only ever turned it on when prompted), you can find it in the Battery settings. You can set it to turn on when your battery reaches 15 percent or 5 percent; it effectively shuts down all extraneous activities, including background syncing, vibrations, animations, and location services. Different brands of Android phone often call this something else and have slightly different settings, but nearly every phone has something similar.
It may be obvious, but turning on Battery saver mode will save you some battery.
But Battery Saver’s fortitude had as much to do with my mindset as Android’s system wizardry. While there’s a noticeable difference with how long my phone lasted during those final ticks—even turning it on with 5 percent remaining, I was often able to squeeze out an extra 45 minutes or so before my Pixel shut down—it’s not the kind of thing you’re going to want to use all day. However, you don’t have to wait until your battery reaches a critical level. If you can stand the orange bars that appear, you can flip the switch in your Battery settings whenever you’re approaching a long stretch without an outlet, and you’ll likely be able to power your way through it.
Even if you just stick to the pre-set automatic Battery Saver schedule, it’ll make a big difference. As well as the extra juice it squeezes out, it’s also a more effective mental trigger than the tiny battery icon in the status bar, and I found myself instinctively limiting the number of times I turned to my phone once Battery Saver kicked in. Even when I did, Battery Saver made a major difference, so it’s something you want to use.
Turning off animations and haptics
Since you probably don’t want to be staring at garish orange bars all day, you can replicate some of the changes Battery Saver implements on your own. It can be a pain, and your milage may vary, but things like vibrations and animations do suck small amounts of battery life, and over the course of a day they can add up.
However, the trade-off might not be worth it in some circumstances, so you’ll want to do a little experimenting. For instance, I barely saw any change when silencing vibrations (which can be found in the Sound settings and the individual keyboard settings). And perhaps more importantly, typing and navigation wasn’t nearly as pleasurable as with it turned on.
Turning off vibrations and animations might give you more battery, but at the expense of a smooth Android experience.
I had much more success with limiting animations (a series of buttons that can be found by enabling Developer options in Settings), adding 1-2 hours to my battery. However, the stop-motion jerkiness of the interface made for an awkward experience, so it’s not something you want to deploy every day. Think of it as sort of a nuclear option. When you absolutely need your phone to last and won’t be able to plug in for till the end of the day, shut off Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale under Drawing in Develop options. What you’ll lose in charm you’ll gain in battery life.
Tweaking notifications and updates
They get a bad rap, but turning off notifications might not actually be a good way to preserve battery. Today’s OLED screens optimize lock-screen alerts to push as few pixels as possible, so unless an app is sending an obscene amount while you’re using your phone, you probably won’t save too much juice. I’m not one to load up too many notifications on my screen, but switching off the ones I did get didn’t do all that much.
If a particular app is overloading you with notifications, shutting them off might help, but disabling automatic Play Store updates is a much better way to regain battery life.
One area where you might find battery savings, however, is Play Store updates. There’s a toggle in the app’s settings to allow auto-updating of apps over cellular or Wi-Fi, but the savings isn’t just about data. If you have a lot of apps on your phone, there could be dozens of updates in a day, and while auto updating isn’t necessarily a huge battery drainer, turning it off might save you some precious percentage points. For example, after updating 27 apps over Wi-Fi I saw my battery percentage drop from 84 percent to 78 percent, a not-insignificant decline. So unless there’s a specific app you specifically need, there’s no reason why you can’t wait till you’re plugged in to update.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are quite a few ways your phone’s battery can adapt to your particular routine, and with a few tweaks and toggles, you’ll can gain precious minutes and even hours on a charge. No matter how big your battery is, you can squeeze a little more juice out of it just by making a few changes, some of which you won’t even notice.
But which battery-saving techniques work best? Over a couple weeks of tests I found that while none of the methods I tried had a negative impact on my battery life, they didn’t all deliver the kind of results that will save you from carrying around a battery pack. That being said, I was ultimately able to add several hours to most days simply by implementing a combination of tips and tricks—most of which were as simple as flicking a single switch in Settings.
Taking an inventory
Over the past couple weeks I’ve learned a lot about my Pixel’s battery. Or rather, I’ve learned a lot about how much I use it. Truth be told, I never paid too much attention to just how much I use my phone, and I have to admit, it’s a lot.
While the two weeks of condensed battery charts seen here might look relatively similar, the duration varied greatly over the course of my tests.
I don’t use a ton of different apps on a normal day. For the most part, in approximate order of usage: Sirius XM for my daily Howard Stern fix; Waze for navigating traffic on my commute; Newton for managing my three email accounts; IA Writer for, well, writing; Chrome; ESPN; the occasional time-killing jaunt with Slotomania (don’t judge); Apple Music (I said don’t judge); Accuweather; Slack; Messenger; Calendar; StockTwits; Play Store; Mint; a peek at upcoming shoe releases in SNKRS and Nike+; Bloomz for announcements from my son’s school; and a few phone calls.
Of course, there are others that pop up here and there, but these are the ones that are most likely to be near the front of my app switcher at any given moment. And the most likely to drain my battery. While I didn’t stop using any of them, by learning which ones were draining my battery the most, I was able to adjust accordingly.
Unplugging
Like all of you, I’ve always utilized rudimentary battery-saving techniques, but mostly I just plugged in when I could: in the car or at my desk, whether I needed the extra juice or not. It’s something we all do, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but the constant powering-up tends to lead to some bad habits. In my case, I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten.
Waze isn’t totally to blame, but keeping the screen on while I was driving had a major effect on my battery.
Take Waze for instance. I pretty much use it whenever I need to drive more than a few miles, and I’ve taken to leaving the screen on like so I could follow along like I would on a built-in navigation system. But I always have my phone plugged in, so I never really considered how much the way I used my phone was draining my battery.
So, the first day I started this project, I stopped charging until my phone absolutely needed it. And I quickly learned that I was doing it all wrong. My first day I barely got through 8 hours before I was in single digits. At the time I didn’t think that was so terrible—especially since I hadn’t actually been trying to conserve battery life—but as I dug into the various settings, I realized that conserving battery isn’t just about turning things off and on. It’s also about being aware of how I—and my apps—were using my phone.
With a combination of changes, you can achieve maximum battery life on your Android phone.
Dimming the display
That being said, there’s one switch that has an enormous effect on battery life, even if you change nothing else. It’s inside the Display settings and it’s called Adaptive brightness. It’s on by default on just about every smartphone you buy, and if you haven’t already, go and turn it off right now.
Simply by turning Adaptive brightness off, I added hours to my battery life.
What it does is “optimize” the brightness of your screen depending on the light in the room you’re in, so if you’re using it in bed it will automatically dim and if you’re outside on a sunny day it will blast you with brightness so you can see what you’re doing. This can often lead to your display being brighter than it really needs to be, which is a big drain on your battery.
So turn it off. I promise you won’t miss it. I consistently gained 2 or more hours of battery life when it was off, more if you factor in that it also showed me that I didn’t need to keep my screen nearly as bright as adaptive brightness was making it. So after you flip the toggle, spend some time adjusting the slider until you find a comfortable level. Today’s phone screens can get insanely bright—as you can see if you leave adaptive brightness on—but for most situations, you’ll be able to read your screen perfectly fine with a low brightness setting.
The key point is this: Lowering your display brightness even a little can have a big impact on battery life, and depending on your environment, Adaptive Brightness can work against that. Try turning it off and find a low-but-comfortable brightness setting.
Turning on battery saver
With a feature called Battery Saver, you’re all but guaranteed to gain a battery boost. If you’ve never used it (or only ever turned it on when prompted), you can find it in the Battery settings. You can set it to turn on when your battery reaches 15 percent or 5 percent; it effectively shuts down all extraneous activities, including background syncing, vibrations, animations, and location services. Different brands of Android phone often call this something else and have slightly different settings, but nearly every phone has something similar.
It may be obvious, but turning on Battery saver mode will save you some battery.
But Battery Saver’s fortitude had as much to do with my mindset as Android’s system wizardry. While there’s a noticeable difference with how long my phone lasted during those final ticks—even turning it on with 5 percent remaining, I was often able to squeeze out an extra 45 minutes or so before my Pixel shut down—it’s not the kind of thing you’re going to want to use all day. However, you don’t have to wait until your battery reaches a critical level. If you can stand the orange bars that appear, you can flip the switch in your Battery settings whenever you’re approaching a long stretch without an outlet, and you’ll likely be able to power your way through it.
Even if you just stick to the pre-set automatic Battery Saver schedule, it’ll make a big difference. As well as the extra juice it squeezes out, it’s also a more effective mental trigger than the tiny battery icon in the status bar, and I found myself instinctively limiting the number of times I turned to my phone once Battery Saver kicked in. Even when I did, Battery Saver made a major difference, so it’s something you want to use.
Turning off animations and haptics
Since you probably don’t want to be staring at garish orange bars all day, you can replicate some of the changes Battery Saver implements on your own. It can be a pain, and your milage may vary, but things like vibrations and animations do suck small amounts of battery life, and over the course of a day they can add up.
However, the trade-off might not be worth it in some circumstances, so you’ll want to do a little experimenting. For instance, I barely saw any change when silencing vibrations (which can be found in the Sound settings and the individual keyboard settings). And perhaps more importantly, typing and navigation wasn’t nearly as pleasurable as with it turned on.
Turning off vibrations and animations might give you more battery, but at the expense of a smooth Android experience.
I had much more success with limiting animations (a series of buttons that can be found by enabling Developer options in Settings), adding 1-2 hours to my battery. However, the stop-motion jerkiness of the interface made for an awkward experience, so it’s not something you want to deploy every day. Think of it as sort of a nuclear option. When you absolutely need your phone to last and won’t be able to plug in for till the end of the day, shut off Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale under Drawing in Develop options. What you’ll lose in charm you’ll gain in battery life.
Tweaking notifications and updates
They get a bad rap, but turning off notifications might not actually be a good way to preserve battery. Today’s OLED screens optimize lock-screen alerts to push as few pixels as possible, so unless an app is sending an obscene amount while you’re using your phone, you probably won’t save too much juice. I’m not one to load up too many notifications on my screen, but switching off the ones I did get didn’t do all that much.
If a particular app is overloading you with notifications, shutting them off might help, but disabling automatic Play Store updates is a much better way to regain battery life.
One area where you might find battery savings, however, is Play Store updates. There’s a toggle in the app’s settings to allow auto-updating of apps over cellular or Wi-Fi, but the savings isn’t just about data. If you have a lot of apps on your phone, there could be dozens of updates in a day, and while auto updating isn’t necessarily a huge battery drainer, turning it off might save you some precious percentage points. For example, after updating 27 apps over Wi-Fi I saw my battery percentage drop from 84 percent to 78 percent, a not-insignificant decline. So unless there’s a specific app you specifically need, there’s no reason why you can’t wait till you’re plugged in to update.
The ultimate guide to increasing your Android phone's battery life
![The ultimate guide to increasing your Android phone's battery life]()
Reviewed by Ambali Babatunde
on
16:36
Rating:
No comments: