15 Practical Tips to Make Your Phone Battery Last Longer

Nothing irritates a person like seeing the red battery icon in the middle of the day. Research shows that running low on charge is one of the biggest daily concerns of smartphone users worldwide. The good news is that without installing any application, and with just a few simple changes to settings and habits, you can reduce battery consumption noticeably. In this article we go through 15 practical tricks that both make today's charge on your phone last longer and increase the battery's useful life in the long run.

Quick settings with the biggest impact

Most battery drain comes down to a few factors: screen brightness, wireless connections, and applications running in the background. So it makes sense to start right there. These first three tricks have the biggest impact and take less than five minutes to do. If you only have time to read one section of this article, read this one.

1. Turn on automatic brightness: the display is the biggest battery consumer. With adaptive brightness (Adaptive Brightness) enabled, the phone adjusts brightness based on ambient light, and in the dark environments where you spend most of your time, consumption drops sharply.
2. Shorten the screen timeout: setting the timeout to 30 seconds instead of 1 to 2 minutes removes dozens of pointless keep-screen-on moments every day. This simple change is one of the highest-payoff settings there is.
3. Enable dark mode: if your phone has an AMOLED display (most mid-range and above phones do), dark mode effectively switches black pixels off and saves up to 30 percent when using apps such as messengers.

Managing wireless connections

Wireless modules consume energy searching for networks and holding connections even when they are not being used. A Bluetooth that is connected to nothing, a Wi-Fi that is used once a day at the workplace, and location services that are always on are all silent consumers. A good habit is to turn Wi-Fi off when you leave the house and are out of range of your home internet, and to temporarily disable location services in places where you do not need GPS. Modern devices also offer modes such as adaptive connectivity that handle this management for you.

Reining in power-hungry apps

First of all you should know who your battery's main enemy is. In your phone's settings, open the “Battery” section to sort the list of applications by consumption; you will usually find the three or four main culprits right there. Social media apps sit at the top of the list because of their constant downloading of images and videos. For every power-hungry app you do not use intensively, enable background activity restriction. On Android this is possible through each app's battery settings, and on iPhone through the Battery section in Settings. Also limit automatic app updates to Wi-Fi only, ideally during overnight charging hours.

Healthy charging habits

Today's lithium batteries, built with modern technology, are much better than those of the past, but they still have a few rules. Lithium batteries like cool temperatures, and heat is their number-one enemy; do not leave your phone under direct sunlight, on warm devices, and especially while charging under a pillow. As for the charge range, experts recommend keeping the battery between 20 and 80 percent and letting a full 100 percent charge or a complete drain happen only occasionally. Many new phones have an option that stops charging at 80 percent; if you plan to keep your phone for the long term, turn it on.

1. Use the original charger and cable or reputable products; low-quality chargers both slow the battery down and pose a safety risk.
2. Do not charge the phone with a thick case on during fast charging; trapped heat damages the battery.
3. If you charge overnight, enable the optimized charging feature (Optimized Charging) so the phone times the charging around your wake-up pattern.
4. Restart the phone once a week to clear out faulty processes that draw energy in the background.

Bonus tricks for hard days

1. Remove live wallpapers and excessive widgets; a static dark wallpaper is the best choice.
2. Turn on airplane mode in areas with no antenna or a weak signal; endlessly searching for a signal is the most battery-hungry state possible.
3. Turn off automatic account syncing for non-essential services.
4. Use Battery Saver not only in emergencies but proactively on busy days.
5. Do not install supposedly helpful “battery optimizer” apps; these apps linger in the background themselves and backfire.
6. Uninstall or disable applications you never use; even rarely used apps sometimes run in the background.
7. On newer phones, enable the feature that restricts rarely used apps (such as Dormant Apps).

Myths you should forget

Old beliefs about batteries still circulate around us, dating back to the era of nickel-based batteries. False belief number one: “the battery must be fully drained before charging”. For lithium batteries this is not only unhelpful, it causes damage. The second belief is that “open background apps must always be closed”; on modern phones, closing and reopening apps consumes more energy than keeping them suspended, and it is a pointless chore. The third belief is that “overnight charging ruins the battery”; today's phones cut the charging circuit once the charge is complete, and overnight charging with the optimized feature causes no problems.

Wrapping up

You do not need to implement all 15 of these tricks overnight. Our suggestion is to start with the first three (automatic brightness, screen timeout, and dark mode), which have the biggest effect, then add the rest over the week. Combined, these small changes completely transform your daily experience and banish the worry of “will I make it to a charger tonight” from your mind for good. If you know another practical trick, send it to us through the contact section and we will publish it in future updates of this article with your name on it.