Tip of the Week: 7 Tips to Extend the Life of Your Android’s Battery

One experience shared by every mobile device user is batteries losing power faster than they’d like. Until someone invents a battery that never again needs to be recharged, this struggle will always be real. Here are seven ways to make your mobile device's battery last longer.

Dim Your Screen
Go to Settings > Display and toggle Adaptive brightness.

Your screen is likely your device’s biggest energy hog. The longer it’s powered on and the brighter it is, the more power it will sap from the batteries. For example, you don’t really need your screen to remain powered on for a full minute after you’re done checking a notification. Therefore, make adjustments to your screen’s settings accordingly.

Turn Off Location Service (GPS)
Go to Settings > General > Location.

As long as your phone’s location service is enabled, it will use energy to stay connected to GPS satellites. Unless you’re actively using an app that requires GPS, like Google Maps, it’s likely that you won’t need GPS and you can go ahead and turn it off.

Disable WiFi When Out and About
Go to Settings > WiFi, Bluetooth, or Data Usage.

If you ever get a chance to connect your device to WiFi, do it and save yourself some precious data. However, when you’re traveling from place-to-place and you’re outside the range of any usable WiFi, then you’ll want to go ahead and disable your device’s WiFi. Otherwise, your device will use a significant amount of energy looking for and trying to connect to usable WiFi signals.

Turn Vibration Off
Hit the Volume Down key until you feel the phone vibrate, then hit it once more to silence all notifications.

When in social situations, having your phone vibrate for notifications is a great way to not annoy others. However, it requires significant battery power to get your phone to buzz and shake like that. By turning off your phone's vibration setting, you’ll extend the battery of your phone just a wee bit more, especially if you’re one to receive constant notifications.

Manually Update App
Go to Play Store > Settings > Auto-update apps, and turn auto-update off or set it to update over WiFi only.

By default, your phone is set to automatically update its apps. While this works out fine if you’ve got a full battery, if you’re trying to conserve battery power, the last thing you’ll want is for your phone to connect to the Play Store and start downloading data.

Disable Background Data
Go to Settings > Data Usage.

Just because you’ve closed an app doesn’t mean that it’s not doing something behind the scenes. For some of your apps, they might be consuming more background data than you think (like GPS information). Disabling the collection of background data will save you battery power, but it also might cause some of your apps to not function properly when you go use them, so just be aware of that.

Airplane Mode
Go to Settings > Connections > More networks > Airplane mode.

Before you get desperate enough to conserve power that you turn off your phone entirely, try airplane mode. This is a handy feature that gives you access to several of your device’s useful apps, like clock, calendar, and contacts while cutting off its connection to networks like the Internet. If your phone isn't trying to push data to all of its Internet-connected apps, then it will eat up much less power. Obviously, you won’t be able to send or receive messages or calls, but you’ll be able to reserve power until you need it.

These are just some of the battery-saving tips you can try, there are actually several more things you can try if you’ve gone through this list and still find your battery dying quicker than you’d like. What are some ways that you keep your batteries powered? Let us know in the comments.