EN: Geek tip — Three new ways to save your phone's battery
Phone batteries are the single worst part of phones. Of course there’s ways to extend our batteries: plugging in all the time, carrying a battery pack, etc. But that just makes it easier to top up your battery, doesn’t solve the true problem: how to make your phone save power during the day.
What I don’t suggest:
Doing anything that limits the way your phone works, or its abilities. Our devices are amazing machines, with features that make them the pocket-knife of the 21st Century. I won’t limit our phones’ potential so, right off the gate I’m excluding stuff like:
Walking around on Airplane Mode or with Mobile Data turned off (your phone is now a glassy brick, yay. Plus, if you lose it or it’s stolen, you’ll never be able to remotely locate it)
Turning off Bluetooth or WiFi (that disables otherwise intuitive stuff like pairing with cars, watches, speakers, not to mention that WiFi burns a lot less energy than mobile data)
What I do suggest:
Stop 👏🏼 closing 👏🏼 apps 👏🏼
Long gone are the days when your phone would need you to manually close all apps. If you’re replying to a WhatsApp message, you’re firing up the app (asking the phone to load the entire app), replying and terminating it (flushing all the app data from memory). And two minutes later, you’re loading and offloading the app all over again. Dozens of times per day… chips away at the battery. This applies to both Android and iPhone.
No need for those “memory optimisation” apps, either. They exist solely for you to grant them permission to your phone and to sweep up personal data for ads. Toss them out.
Change your background refresh settings
A lot of apps on your phone can check and update stuff on the background, even when your phone is locked. A practical example: Facebook or Instagram don’t make you wait for a fresh feed, so the apps update it in the background, just in case you open them a bit later. That burns through (some) processing power and mobile data every time. But we can manage waiting less than 5 seconds for a fresh feed, can’t we?
No worries, push notifications will still work even if your app can’t be fetching data in the background — it’s two different systems.
On iPhone:
Just go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh, and turn off all apps that don’t need to be checking anything in the background.
On Android:
Go to Settings > Apps > [X App] > Data usage > Background app refresh to OFF.
Disable unnecessary notifications
If you have Instagram installed on your phone, even if you don’t have the app open, your phone will check with Instagram’s servers to see if there’s any notification to show you. That burns a tiny bit of power. Multiply it by dozens of times per day, and most apps on your phone, and it’s suddenly not so tiny.
On iPhone:
Go to Settings > Notifications and disable notifications for any apps that you already ignore daily. Pro tip: you can do it from the Notification Centre: swipe left on a notification and tap “Manage”.
On Android:
This gets complicated, depending on your Android version and phone brand… The simplest way: Open Settings and use the search bar at the top to look for “notifications”.
But, if you really want to dig down for yourself:
Android Oreo 8 or later: Settings > Apps & notifications > Notifications > App notifications, and change the setting within each individual app
Android Nougat 7: Settings > Notifications, and change the setting within each individual app
Android Marshmallow 6 OR Samsung Galaxy devices: Settings > Sound & notifications > App notifications, and change the setting within each individual app.
Let me know if this made your life easier, and your battery life any longer ☺️