Smartphones have replaced a lot of gadgets in the recent past. As a matter of fact, they have made us lazy! It sounds weird but we do a lot of tasks on our smartphones. Be it online shopping, ticket booking, watching TV, live streaming, virtual tours, gaming, etc. Most of the people brag about their phone’s hardware specifications but not many talk about its battery life.
While choosing a new smartphone, you should always select a phone with better battery backup than the one with slightly better hardware. It wouldn’t be possible to own a phone with infinite battery life, but if you follow the below tips then you will be able to increase the battery life of your phone/tablet by a great deal.
Read: 5 Reasons Why Your Battery Is Draining Fast
Let’s start with the obvious but highly uncommon practice:
Uninstall Apps That You Don’t Use
Do you remember how fast your phone was when it was new? Then it became slower and slower day by day. It’s not like it hardware decayed or something. It is just that you never performed a device cleanup.
You just kept on installing new apps and games and never cared about the device memory. So, when its memory started to get full, you began noticing system lags and other performance issues.
always make it a habit to uninstall apps that you haven’t used since the last month.
If you don’t have a high-speed Wi-Fi connection at your home, then perhaps you should take backup of apps before uninstalling them.
Here Are The 7 Super-easy-to-follow Tips To Increase Battery Life Of Your Android Devices:
1. Keep your phone to stock settings
It goes without saying that a phone with stock settings will perform much better in almost every aspect than the one with customization. I don’t want you to discourage you from customizing your Android phone. Hell! Android is made for customization. But you should try to not use resource intensive launchers, live & parallax wallpapers.
Launchers and wallpapers do not suck too much battery juice while your phone is asleep, but they do consume a lot of battery power when you are using the phone. I would also advise you to not use any app or notifications settings which consume power without any good reason.
For e.g.: I’ve seen some people using an app which flashes the rear LED while you are in-call. Now, why would anyone want to flash the LED constantly while they are talking on the phone?
Disabling unwanted notifications of apps would be of great help.
Also keep as few widgets on your home screen as possible. Widgets for Weather Report, Google Now, Gmail, etc fetch data from the internet continuously, and hence eat up precious battery juice even without you doing anything.
You also prevent Google Play from auto-updating apps, and auto-adding new widgets on the homescreen by changing the settings.
2. Find out what’s sucking your battery juice and do the needful
Go to Settings > Battery and see which app is consuming the most battery. If it is an app or a game that you installed, then you should either get rid of it immediately or greenify it.
Some of the most battery hungry processes are Screen, Android System, Android OS, and Google Play Services. Anything you suspect to not have any part in the core functionality of the phone should go away.
3. Disable “Ok Google” detection from any screen.
It sounds very cool to have the ability to perform Google search from anyone in the phone. But, have you given about how this works? The system has to keep the microphone ON at all times and do voice processing constantly to enable that cool “Ok Google” detection from all screens.
If you don’t rely so much on this feature then you should disable it immediately.
4. Install Greenify and use a battery saving app.
Greenify is always the first app that I install every time I switch to a new phone. Greenify improves the battery life and performance of the phone by hibernating the selecting apps. It doesn’t kill the apps but puts them in a state of hibernation. You should greenify all non-critical and non-IM apps that run in the background without your consent.
You should always couple Greenify with any battery saving app like BatteryGuru, DU Battery Saver, Deep Sleep Battery Saver, JuiceDefender, etc. for better battery life.
5. Customize display settings
If you checked the battery consumption graph as I mentioned in point #2 then you would have noticed that the screen uses the most battery. Part of this power consumption by the display goes to its brightness.
You should always enable auto brightness if your phone supports it. In case it doesn’t, use the phone at minimum legible brightness settings. In my opinion most of the displays are good enough for reading at 30-50% of maximum brightness.
Another display customization that will have a huge effect on the battery backup is the Screen timeout settings. Screen timeout determines when after long will your display turn off when not used. So shorter the timeout duration, more battery juice you will save.
6. Disable unnecessary sounds, vibrations, auto-refresh, and wireless radios
You should always disable the touch sounds and vibrations by going to Settings > Sounds. These tones and vibrations use battery power for no useful purpose.
Another good practice is to disable the wireless radios when not in use. This includes turning off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC. You can argue that Bluetooth 4.0 LE and NFC don’t use much power, but why waste power for nothing.
Many apps like weather, stock market related apps, app stores, etc. run in the background and auto-fetch data from the internet at a fixed duration. So unless it is a highly-critical app, I would recommend that you set its refresh interval to more than an hour.
Disable Cellular Radio while travelling in low network connectivity areas.
If it sounds like a joke to you then read the following explanation:
You might have noticed that your smartphones loses battery at a rapid rate while you are travelling. This is because of the reason that the cellular modem inside your phone searches for network signals continuously even when there are none.
Have you ever noticed that your phone’s battery drains quickly at your friend’s place than your home? This is because of a simple reason that your operator doesn’t provide good network coverage at your friend’s place.
So, when you choose an operator next time, make sure that it provides good network connectivity in areas where you’ll be using it the most.
Mind your location services: Location services help you get relevant cards at a relevant time and place on Google Now, and also from many other apps and services. You can even enhance your experience by turning on Satellite location (High-accuracy mode).
However, we would advise you to use the high-accuracy mode only when required as turning on GPS will consume a lot of battery.
7. Keep it cool and below 35⁰ C
The Lithium-ion batteries inside our phones and tablets are designed for the operating temperature range of 0⁰ C to 35⁰ C. So, they’ll give you their best performance if you use them inside this range. If you happen to live in a tropical country like India, then you will easily cross the operational temperature range of your Li-ion battery.
The best practice for improving the battery life of your phone would be to avoid using the heavy apps and graphics intensive games under high temperature ambience.
These are the best practices and tips that you should follow to increase battery life of your Android device significantly. Power users with root access can under-clock the CPU for even better battery life. If you have any other tips that can improve the battery up of Android smartphones even more, then please do share them with us via the comments.
In case you still want more backup out of your phone, then you should consider buying a phone with good battery backup.
One Comment
Jason
Thanks, first time Android user here. And your tips are very useful