16 Tips to Extend Your Smartphone’s Battery Life

16 Tips to Extend Your Smartphone's Battery Life

While our phones are increasingly central to our daily life, work and activities, their batteries are also increasingly under stress. To get the most out of them, we need to understand what drains our battery and how to optimize it to improve its life.

We have here, the best 16 tips and tricks from experts that can help you extend your smartphone’s battery life.

Dim The Brightness

“One of the best ways to extend your phone’s battery life is by dimming the brightness of its screen. This is a surefire way to get more time out of your phone battery before you need to charge again. The display of your smartphone is one of its biggest power hogs. The brighter the display, the more power it needs to emit. Simply adjusting your brightness settings to a lower number can save you a big chunk of time between charges. Just search brightness in your phone settings to quickly make this adjustment.”

Jason Young, CEO Smart Home Focus

Don’t Charge Overnight

Eoin Piggott advises against overcharging, “If you’re looking to extend the longevity of your smartphones battery life, there are a few simple things you can do. Firstly, don’t leave your phone charge idly overnight. Continuous trickle charging when full is actually harmful to the battery and actually causes plating of the metallic lithium; this will reduce stability and can lead to random crashes and reboots. It also creates a huge amount of excess heat caused by wasted power dissipation. 

No High-Power Activities When Charging

“Another no-no is performing high-intensity activities on your phone whilst it’s charging, the two main culprits being gaming and watching videos. Parasitic load is when the battery is being significantly drained whilst it’s actually being charged, this is quite harmful for the battery’s lifespan as it distorts the entire charging cycle. If parasitic loads occur when a device is fully charged it can induce a higher voltage stress on the battery and again create heat.”

Eoin Piggott, ITAD Expert & Business Development Associate

Adopt Best Charging Practices

“One can lengthen the battery life of their phones by adopting charging best practices. Some of these hacks are as simple as not charging the phone all the way up or letting it discharge to 0%. Charging your battery to 100% or letting it drain to extreme lows completes the cycles of the batteries. This reduces the number of active cells slowly until the battery can’t hold enough charge anymore.

“The optimal charging cycle for a smartphone starts at around 15%, and ends at 85% or thereabouts. Using your phone on extremely low charge kills the battery cells. The same can be said of continuously charging your phone to 100%. Sticking to the middle ground lets your battery stay longer by completing less cycles. The 15-85% charging cycle will maintain the phone’s battery health, which means that the battery will certainly be alive for longer.”

Radu Vrabie, Founder and Marketer powerbankexpert

Monitor Your Network Data

“More often than not, network data can often be a major battery drainer, so it’s always best to stick to Wi-Fi whenever possible. You can usually keep your phone from utilizing cellular data by switching off mobile data services from the settings panel on your phone. Alternatively, if you are running extremely low on battery and no charger in sight, you can switch your phone to Airplane Mode to disable all data network features, which should significantly save whatever percentage is left, but this will also disrupt any incoming calls and texts.”  (Eden Cheng)

Disable Active Tracking

“Many mobile features like Bluetooth, voice assistance, and location services are often quite useful but are big battery drainers, as your phone has to constantly ping to connect and update. However, if you disable them, you should be able to reserve battery life significantly.”  (Eden Cheng)

Reduce Screen Brightness

“Many mobile phone screens nowadays come with a huge amount of crisp resolution and pixels, but the problem with that is they can often be massive battery hogs. And more often than not, you would find that you can conserve a huge amount of battery, simply by reducing the level of brightness on your screen. You can also disable auto-brightness, which, while meant to adjust your screen brightness for better viewing can end up raising your brightness to unnecessarily high levels.” (Eden Cheng)

Close Background Apps

“While many developers try to ensure that their apps can run as efficiently as possible, many apps often end up running in the background, even when you don’t need them. This can often end up consuming a lot of data and battery life if left unchecked. As such, you should always ensure that you have closed any unused apps or depending on the phone, head to settings to disable background activity.”

Eden Cheng, Founder WeInvoice

Uninstall And Delete Unwanted, Unused, Or Battery-draining Apps

“There is no need to have many apps while some run in the background and consumes the battery for nothing. Go to settings to turn off battery-draining apps, especially those you don’t actively use, and get rid of heavy apps like Facebook to use a computer or laptop to access the site.” (Harriet Chan)

Avoid Using Your Phone Until The Battery Dies

“It puts stress on modern smartphone batteries, which their design isn’t meant to be fully depleted or charged completely. Instead, the best way is to charge the phone once it goes below 20% and charge up to 90%.” (Harriet Chan)

Turn On Power-saving Mode

“This is a clever strategy for people who don’t use their phones to do a lot as it helps the phone battery last longer than usual. In addition, it automatically cuts back on functions that could be eating the battery life.”

Harriet Chan, Co-Founder of CocoFinder

Use Dark Wallpaper or Dark Mode

“Using a dark wallpaper, dark theme, or dark mode is an effective way to extend battery life. In dark wallpaper colored pixels are not used so less power is needed to run your smartphone. Black pixels consume minimum power, results in improvement of your battery life. Live wallpapers also use more battery, so try to avoid it as much as possible.” (Tanay Sankhe)

Disable Location Service

“Many apps use your location service to track your routes, but it is only convenient for travel apps or some kind of online game. If you are concerned about the battery life of your smartphone then it is advisable to keep your location service off.” (Tanay Sankhe)

Use Wi-Fi

“We suggest you use Wi-Fi whenever you are indoors as it will boost the battery life and capacity of your smartphone. Using mobile data during the poor signal tends to use more battery by amplifying the radio signals and ends up draining your mobile battery faster.” (Tanay Sankhe)

Turn On Power Saving Mode

“Imagine yourself in a situation where you need battery life to last longer than normal days. Just a simple click can save your day! Switch on the power-saving mode of your mobile, it will automatically cut off the functions that eat more battery.” (Tanay Sankhe)

Remove Background Apps

“It’s the most simple way to improve the battery life of your smartphone. Clear all the recent apps that you were previously using, as these apps in the background consume some power results in reducing the battery life.”

Tanay Sankhe, Content Marketer and Founder of Smart Gadget Pick 

Larry Covert
Editor-in-Chief Larry has worked a decade in finance, for an international bank where he saw before his eyes how his former company invested on almost everything that has something to do with technology and advancement. This inspired him to create the company along with his then newly-formed team of professionals from different fields, different walks of life.