More and more is expected of smartphones every year, and to accommodate theses expectations, the processors have become more powerful and screens have gotten larger. Which is really impressive but what’s not impressive are the batteries of these phones which haven’t made as much progress.
Thus leaving us to rely solely on software for longer-lasting endurance. So, a question arises here “How to extend an Android phone’s battery life?” Well, in this article I’ll present you with some very practical tips to help you extend your Android phone’s battery life and avoid emotional breakdowns because of technology. So, what are we waiting for, let’s begin.
Take Control of Your Location
Required by apps such as Google Maps and Waze, many users leave location services running all day without really thinking about them, these chip away at your battery life very quickly. Don’t believe me? Just completely turn off the GPS function and you’ll easily notice a drastic improvement in your phone’s battery life.
Now, the above solution may not be very practical so instead, I recommend that you turn it on only for as long as you need to. If you have to really use location services but you’re low on battery, you can go for lower location accuracy in your phone settings instead of high accuracy mode for which the phone employs several other modules including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. This consumes more battery life and usually is not necessary.
Switch to the Dark Side
What kind of screen does your Android phone sports? Is it an LCD screen or an OLED one? If its the latter one then you can easily preserve some battery by switching to a darker theme. Since OLED works by lighting up individual pixels to create images, backgrounds with deep blacks allow them to consume less power.
There are lots of ways you can take advantage of this such as you can apply a dark wallpaper, enable a system-wide dark theme (if there is one in your phone), enable the night mode on compatible apps (like Twitter, Pocket), and so forth.
On the other hand, if you have an LCD display, the most power-efficient option is a white wallpaper. However, the benefit of having a white background on an LCD display is not as significant as the benefit of having a black background on an OLED display.
If you’re not sure about what kind of screen your phone sports, then its best to go with the darker one.
Manually Disable Screen Pixels
You can also turn off pixels manually if you don’t feel at home with darker gradients by using Pixoff, a 3rd-party app. I don’t think you’ll notice much of a drop in quality, especially if you have a 1080p or higher screen unless you’re consuming content in HD. Samsung and some other Android manufacturers also include a setting that allows you to reduce the resolution of your display.
Dim Your Brightness
Well, full brightness might be necessary to see those important emails and messages under the full light of day, but why are you still running that setup after sunset? Reduce the brightness and use adaptive brightness or auto brightness depending on your Android version. However, I would recommend that you control your display’s brightness manually as the system actually sets the brightness at a higher level than what you really need when setting on auto-brightness.
To save even more power, try keeping your screen off as much as possible, so head-on to your display settings and set the screen timeout interval to be as short as 15 seconds.
Offload Unused or Infrequently Used Apps
There are probably more than one apps on your Android phone that you have not used even once in a week, meaning most of them are just clutter anyway. Remember the more the apps, the more power your phone uses to keep them running in the background.
So, if you want to extend your phone’s battery life then you’ll have to do the opposite, decrease the number of apps on your phone. Do you really need three photo editors or separate news site apps when you can access them all on Twitter? You can also delete apps such as alarm clock, calculators, and replace them with physical tools.
So, pick up your phone and delete unnecessary, redundant, or infrequently used apps to extend your phone’s battery life.
Organize Your Home Screen
Most of the people around me have cluttered home screens loaded with tons of apps and widgets, they look so bad that just by looking at them gives me a headache. Such cluttered home screens suck away your Android phone’s battery life, yes you heard it right, apart from being visually unattractive cluttered home screens are not good for your phone’s battery either.
So, keep yourself from falling into this trap by keeping your home screen minimalist. Only keep the essential apps on your screen and do away with live wallpapers, as those consume more battery than regular pictures. As mentioned above, instead apply a dark wallpaper to help you preserve even more battery life.
Turn off Sound and Vibration
How do we get to know about incoming calls, messages, and notifications? Well, through sounds and vibration of course, in moderate number these will not affect your battery life much but too much of these can drain your battery life.
For instance, if you are a part of a very active group chat, or if you subscribe to a lot of feeds, then you should definitely consider turning off the sound and vibration for these apps. I don’t think turning sound and vibration off should be a big deal for you as you can still see notifications via banners or message previews that’ll keep you from missing any notifications.
Use Battery Saving Modes
The quickest way to conserve your battery life is by activating the power saving mode found (most likely) under the Battery section in the settings of your phone. Most major phone manufacturers have their own versions of power-saving modes. These can automatically turn off background tasks, manage applications, control settings, and so forth.
What’s more, in most phones this feature can be set to be automatically activated when the phone’s battery drops to a certain level. So, implement this tip once and enjoy longer battery life without worrying about it again.
That’s all folks!