Boost your Android battery life with these tips.
We use smartphones on a daily basis as part of our daily routine. Year after year as technology advances more and more, devices get thinner, faster and smarter. Helping us navigate to places, organize events, get prepared with hourly weather forecasts, and even enabling us to talk to our phones when they are locked without touching them. But with all of this, comes a price. Battery technology hasn’t really taken off and therefore our smartphones are affected as all of these new features end up draining the battery faster.
The first Android phone the HTC Dream had an 1150mAh battery and powered a 3.2” TFT capacitive touchscreen. Google’s latest Android flagship the Google nexus 6 has a 3220mAh battery which powered a 6” QHD display. Display technology has advanced a lot in the 7 years, yet some manufacturers still sacrifice battery life using the same technology for design.
1. Use manual brightness settings.
The part of your phone you look at most is your screen, so an obvious battery saving tip is to turn down your brightness. Don’t use adaptive/auto brightness, even though it sounds convenient because it sets the brightness brighter than you actually you need and therefore this can eat up your battery.
2. Place your phone in airplane mode.
When your phone is idle for a long period of time you should place your phone on airplane mode. This will preserve your battery life, as your apps won’t be constantly syncing every 10 minutes. Also it disables LTE and Wi-Fi so you don’t get distracted by constant bombardment of notifications.
3. Declutter your home screen/s.
Having several widgets across multiple home screens can slow your phone down, and drain your battery. You should remove the widgets you don’t really need, as some require the internet and can impact on your battery as they sync to get updates every 10-15 minutes.
4. Haptic feedback and Vibrations.
Even though vibration motors are quite small and not really known for draining battery, they can cause some drain. For example, when you have multiple notifications alerting your phone and your vibrations are turned on it can affect battery life. Also, I personally turned off vibrations on my keyboard because having the phone vibrating every time I press a letter is annoying and also helps to improve my battery life.
5. Black wallpapers can save battery.
If your phone has an AMOLED display like most Samsung devices. Then you can use a black wallpaper. By doing this you will save battery because on AMOLED displays, black pixels do not light up so those pixels will remain unlit as it does not need to be powered.
6. Location services.
Most apps do not require location tracking, but some do. However, by default on newer Android phones location services are on high accuracy mode. This means that it uses GPS, Wi-Fi (when turned on) and mobile data to determine your location. This can obviously use up a lot of your mobile data if you’re not connected to Wi-Fi. To change this go to Settings > Location > Mode and chose battery saving.
7. Use the stock battery saving features.
If you own a newer Android device like the HTC one M9 or like the Samsung Galaxy S6/S6 edge; they have built battery saving features into their own Android skins. As they have built their skins on top of Android their power saving features really work! This is because the feature is part of their own skin which is optimized for their devices. Both Samsung and HTC have extreme power saving modes, they restrict third party app usage, limit CPU performance, turn down brightness and a whole lot more to give you the bare essentials. It limits the user to 6 key apps, (and for Samsung devices it turns the whole skins black and white to save more power). Also last year Google released its biggest Android update and with this they included a battery saving mode. As the new version of Android was all about aesthetics and animations, one of the battery saving features is reducing animations. It also makes the notification bar and navigation bar at the top and bottom orange to indicate to the user that the device is in battery saving mode.
8. Don’t be outdated.
Keeping your apps updated is very beneficial, other than getting the latest features for an app is great. However, there is also another reason why app developers push updates to their apps. Most of the updates might say ‘bug fixes and improvements’ and these improvements are battery optimizations.
9. You don’t need updates every 5 minutes.
Turning off auto sync for apps like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter means that your phone won’t be constantly be checking for updates using your data and also your battery. Manually updating the app by pulling down to refresh is just as effective and you will still get all the updates but when you want them. To turn auto-sync off go to Settings > Accounts > tap the three dot menu and turn off auto-sync data. For other apps like Twitter, go to setting in the Twitter app, select your user name and uncheck auto-sync data.
10. Animations, animations, animations.
This is quite an old trick to save battery for android users, if you go to Settings > Scroll down to About phone > Build number > press it 6 times you will be given a new option in your settings menu called ‘Developer Options’ if you click on it and scroll down to animations you can adjust the animation speed to be faster if you want, or you can disable them altogether. This saves battery as your phone will no longer take time to animate an app opening etc. It will make your phone feel much faster, but as #Lollipop is based on animations the experience isn’t the same.
11. Don’t use Live Wallpapers.
Although live wallpapers are pretty cool, they use a lot of battery as some are also interactive. Due to all the animation it can be very heavy on the battery and therefore can lead to poor battery performance.
12. Wi-Fi scanning.
Some smart features are great, auto connecting to Wi-Fi when it’s turned on, notifying you when there are hotspots available, but some smart settings aren’t always helpful. On newer Android devices there is a setting for Wi-Fi which is toggled on by default and that is to scan for Wi-Fi even when Wi-Fi is turned off. This can drain your battery as it is always scanning and use google location services to detect Wi-Fi hotspots. To change this go to Settings > Wi-Fi > Advanced settings > Scanning always available.
Pro Tip: The best way to save battery life is to put your phone down. You don’t have to be connected 24/7. Memories don’t always live on your phone.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post and we sincerely hope you found it helpful and enjoyable! Please feel free to leave your thoughts down below in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe to Bane Tech on YouTube, Google+, Facebook, Twitter & Instagram!
- How to get Adaptive Icons on any Android Device - September 11
- Back To School Guide 2017 - August 21
- Enable Grayscale Mode on your Pixel or nexus device – No Root Needed - August 7
