Apple has added a host of battery-management features to the iPhone over the years.
No matter how good your iPhone’s battery life is, you probably wish it would last a little longer. Over time, even the best batteries degrade, and before that happens, the way you use your phone has a major impact on how long it holds a charge. It makes some sense to think that closing apps you’re not using would mean your phone is using less power, but that’s actually not the case. Instead, there are plenty of other ways to extend battery life without closing any apps.
Background apps may not be to blame for a dead battery, but there are some ways to limit the power those apps draw when you’re not using them. When it’s toggled on, the Background App Refresh setting lets apps pull data from the internet and update themselves even while suspended. Turning this off will prevent these processes and save power. Similarly, under individual apps’ settings, you can choose to let them access location services only when you’re using them.
Changing display settings is a good start
Apple recommends two options as the first steps to extending your battery life. First, manage your phone’s brightness by manually setting it to the lowest level or turn on auto-brightness to let your phone manage it automatically. It’s probably best to try auto-brightness first so you’re not constantly fiddling with your settings or forgetting to turn the brightness down when lighting conditions change. Second, Apple recommends always keeping Wi-Fi turned on so you use as little data as possible, since connecting to a cellular network uses more power than connecting to a Wi-Fi network.
Aside from brightness, there are a few other display settings you can adjust to get more life out of your battery. Disabling Always-On Display is a great place to start, since it’s a nice but not essential feature that puts a constant strain on your battery. Turning on Dark Mode can also save power as long as your phone has an OLED screen, since OLED turns off the parts of the screen where black pixels appear. Turning on Limit Frame Rate sets the phone’s display to a 60 Hz refresh rate instead of ProMotion’s 120 Hz, halving the number of times your screen refreshes during a day. The power savings might not be that noticeable for most people, though, and if you’re used to 120 Hz, the change can be jarring.
Extend your iPhone’s battery life with power settings
Finally, your iPhone has some settings to directly change how it handles charging and power draw. With Adaptive Power turned on, your phone will analyze your usage patterns, changing everything from screen brightness to background data to lower battery drain when you don’t typically need your phone’s full power. Turning on Low Power Mode forces similar changes, but tends to have a heavier impact on your phone’s performance, so it’s best used only when you really need it. With Adaptive Power toggled on, Low Power Mode automatically engages when your battery drops to 20 percent.
Over time, a phone’s battery loses its ability to charge efficiently and hold that charge for as long. While some depletion is inevitable, turning on Optimized Charging will prevent some of that wear by stopping a charge at 80 percent until you really need it. Even better, you can set a charge limit yourself so that your battery never fills to 100 percent, which can reduce its life over time. In general, if you can keep your battery charge between 20 percent and 80 percent, rather than letting it fully drain or fill, you can extend your battery’s life by a noticeable amount even before using any of these other tips.
