There are many factors that contribute to the poor battery life of your Android phone. Thinner bodies, brighter screens, faster processors, more background software and faster Internet connections all take a toll on phone batteries, but manufacturers are also incorporating more powerful batteries to compensate.
1. Enable Power Saving Mode:
Think you’re going to find yourself in a situation where you need your phone battery to last longer than usual? Put your phone into power-saving mode, which automatically turns off functions that can drain battery life. On our Samsung device, we opened Settings > Battery & Device Maintenance and tapped on the Battery entry.
Below the battery usage chart, we’ve turned on Power Saving Mode to instantly control networking, sync and location services, and turn down the screen’s refresh rate. You can further customize the feature by tapping Power Saving Mode to save even more battery life, by turning off Always On Display, limiting CPU speed to 70%, or reducing brightness by 10%. There is also a power saving option in the Quick Settings menu.
For maximum power saving, the Limit Apps and Home Screen option runs only selected apps and restricts all background activity when power saving mode is enabled. For older versions of Android, you may be offered several power saving mode presets, each with a different balance between performance and battery life.
2. Adjust the screen brightness
Smartphone screens are big, bright battery hogs. No need to change your device to bright setting. Go to your display settings and lower the screen brightness. You can open the pull down screen and control the brightness from there.
While you’re at it, consider turning off auto-brightness. This feature adjusts based on your perceived needs, but can raise the brightness of your display higher than needed. Turn off the switch next to Adaptive Brightness and your eyes (and battery) will thank you.
3. Set when your screen time ends
The longer your phone’s screen is on, the more battery life you’ll use. This can be countered by setting the screen to turn off earlier than usual. If you want to leave an unlocked phone on the table, this is the feature to replace. On both Galaxy and Pixel phones, you can open Settings > Display > Screen timeout and select one of several options from 15 seconds to 10 minutes.
4. Disable background app refresh and updates
Apps continue to run in the background even when you’re not using them. This, of course, eats up data and battery life over time. You can put unused apps to sleep under battery settings on your Samsung device. To prevent apps from wasting your battery life, choose Background app limits and enable unused apps to sleep.
You can even go a step further and manually tell your phone to put certain apps to sleep. Select Sleeping Apps or Deep Sleeping Apps and tap the plus (+) icon to add your apps to the list. Note that sleeping apps only receive updates occasionally, and deep sleep apps don’t work while they’re in use, so updates may be delayed.
It is a good idea to periodically check the apps that are wasting your battery. Go to Battery and device care > Battery > View details to decide which apps to allow running in the background and which to turn off when not in use. On Google Pixel phones, open Battery > Adaptive Preferences and turn on Adaptive Battery to keep apps you don’t use as much running in the background. You can also control individual apps from Apps > See all apps > Battery, then make sure the app is set to optimized.