Navigating the modern world doesn’t absolutely require a smartphone, but it makes life a lot easier. Your smartphone lets you do anything from get directions to take care of some banking and even handle some business on a Zoom call.
Yet, all smartphones have a weakness: their batteries. Your average phone battery will hold up through around 500 charge cycles. That typically works out to around 3 to 5 years of service before you face dying battery problems.
The question is, can you do anything to extend your phone’s battery life? Yes, you can. Keep reading for some tips on how to extend phone battery life.
1. Aim For The Middle Ground
When it comes to phone charging, getting it up to 100 percent sounds like the thing to do. Yet, that’s not the best approach. Nor should you let your phone drop all the way to 0 percent. Both full charging and complete depletion put additional stress on the battery.
That extra stress slowly but surely degrades the battery, meaning you either need a new battery or a new phone sooner than you would. Instead, aim to keep your battery charge somewhere between 20 percent and 80 percent.
That charge range eliminates the stress that full charging and full depletion cause, which extends the overall battery life.
2. Lower Screen Brightness
One of the biggest power drains on a smartphone is the screen. The brighter the screen is, the more power it needs. Now, the good news is that most smartphones will automatically adjust the brightness based on light levels around you.
However, you can take it another step by manually reducing the maximum brightness of the screen. Reducing the hard cap on screen brightness means a slower drain on the battery.
That slower drain means you go longer between charges. The more time you can put between charging cycles, the longer your battery and phone will last.
3. Turn Off The Bluetooth And Wifi
Both Bluetooth and Wifi exist to connect your phone to something else. In the case of Bluetooth, it looks for Bluetooth devices that will connect to your phone. In the case of WiFi, it looks for networks that will let you surf the Internet.
All of that scanning soaks up power from your battery. Now, if you live your life in a sea of WiFi at home and at work, the phone won’t spend all of its time scanning. Similarly, if you keep your phone connected to a specific Bluetooth device, like a fitness tracker, it’s less draining.
If you plan on spending time away from WiFi and your Bluetooth devices, turning those off on your phone will spare your battery a bit.
4. Manage Location Services
Your phone and apps constantly look for ways to verify your location. They use everything from GPS to WiFi and even cell towers to confirm.
What’s more, your apps will look to verify your location as a background process. All of that location verification may speed up an app, slightly, when you go to use it, but not enough to justify the power drain that goes with it.
You should go into the location services in your phone’s settings and make sure apps only verify your location when you open the app, rather than running it as a background process.
5. Don’t Leave Your Phone Charging Overnight
A lot of people will plug their phones in before they go to bed and unplug it in the morning. That’s understandable because it’s just so convenient to tie your charging routine to your sleep routine. After all, most people sleep every single day and on a fairly fixed schedule.
Here’s the problem. It doesn’t take most phones 6 to 8 hours to charge. Most of them can complete a charge cycle in about 2 hours.
While those extra hours aren’t catastrophic, they can cause a bit of heat buildup in your battery. That extra heat for 4 to 6 hours a day will speed up the rate at which your battery eventually dies.
Instead, make a point of plugging your phone in during the evening. That way, you can keep an eye on it and unplug the phone once it completes its charge cycle.
6. Pick A Dark Theme
Recent smartphones make use of OLED screens. If your smartphone has an OLED screen, theme choice matters. Why? On older screens, such as LCDs, every pixel gets some power regardless of what it displays.
On OLED screens, pixels that should display black get no power. By choosing a dark screen, you increase the number of unpowered pixels on the screen. That cuts down on the battery drain and boosts the battery’s lifespan over time.
7. Manage Your Apps
Apps are not the smartest type of program out there. If given the chance, they will keep updating in the background all day long. Go into your setting and pick the apps that you want to let refresh.
Let’s say that you get a lot of work-related mails, you’d probably let your mail apps to refresh. If you only check your social media accounts a few times a day, there isn’t much benefit to them refreshing all the time.
8. Use The Right Charger
Off-brand chargers may look like a quick fix if you lose your charger or damage the cable. It’s deceptive, though. Phone manufacturers tune their chargers for specific charging rates and voltages.
If you get a charger that’s not tuned the same way, it can stress the battery. Always look for chargers specifically tuned for your phone, such as the best Magsafe chargers.
Extending Your Phone Battery Life
Your phone battery arrives with about three years of working life under normal usage conditions. Extending your phone battery life means adjusting how you use your phone so it uses less power.
Turn off things like background app refresh and location services for most of your apps. Don’t let your phone charge completely or drop under 20 percent charge. Turn down the brightness on your screen.
These changes can add a substantial amount of time to your battery life. Looking for more smartphone tips and tricks? Check out some of the other posts in our Technology section.
