While our smartphones have certainly made our lives significantly easier, there are few things as infuriating as having to search for a power outlet to revive your ever-low-on-power device.
If you use an Android smartphone, there are some ways to make this occurrence less frequent – here is how to save battery power on your Android device.
‘Adaptive Battery’ and ‘Adaptive Brightness’ are your friends
Your Android device has two simple settings that can go a long way in saving battery on your phone. Head to your phone’s settings and tap on “Battery”, and then on “Adaptive Battery”. Enable this setting if it is not yet enabled.
The brightness of your screen can also affect battery life significantly. To turn this on, go to your phone’s settings and tap on “Display” and then enable “Adaptive Display”. Tweaking this setting will allow your phone to adapt its screen brightness by itself, saving you having to lower the brightness yourself.
Turn off or get rid of unnecessary apps
Apps that you don’t use often have a way of not only draining battery power, but also bloating your phone and slowing it down as a result. You can see which apps use the most battery power by going to “Settings”, then “Battery”. Tap on “More” and then on “Battery Usage” to see how much battery power the apps on your phone use.
To stop certain apps from operating in the background, tap on “Show full device usage”, then on the app in question. Tap on “Background Restriction” and then on “Restrict”. Also, take a keen look at which apps you aren’t using, and delete them altogether. If you haven’t played Candy Crush in a year, it might be time to accept that the time for Candy Crush is over.
Use Battery Saver mode
Your phone automatically switches to battery saving mode once the battery reaches a critical level. You can specify when you want battery saving mode to kick in by tapping “Settings”, “Battery” and “Battery Saver”. Make sure “Turn on automatically” is enabled, then select the percentage that you prefer. You can also turn on battery saving mode all the time, if your device really does need a break from it all.
Use Doze Mode
If you’re running Android 6.0 on your device, you’ll have access to a nice little feature called Doze Mode. This setting ensures that the apps on your device are not using battery power when you’re not using your phone, by only periodically accessing the network for updates and syncs.
To activate Doze Mode for all your apps, go to your phone’s settings, then to “Apps & Notifications”. Scroll down to “Advanced”, then choose “Special app access” and “Battery optimisation”. Tap on the “Not optimised” button and choose “All apps” to make Doze Mode applicable to all the apps on your phone. If there are certain apps that require constant updating because you use them for work, you can tap on the name of the app and then tap on “Don’t optimise”.