We've all been there - you're getting ready to head out for the day only to realize your iPhone battery is in the red...under 20% charged. Great - now you know it's only a short matter of time before you'll be officially disconnected. What are you going to do?! If only you'd taken the time to make sure your battery life was optimized to get the most out of your charge.
Fear not, there are plenty of tricks to improve your iPhone battery life. Let's dive in.
1. Check your battery usage information
Battery Usage shows a breakdown of what apps use are draining your battery.
One of the cool features of iOS 8 is the ability to see exactly which apps are draining the most of your battery. By doing this, you can better manage your battery usage and tweak some settings based off the data you're seeing. You'll see a couple messages appear underneath the specific apps that show what contributed to your batter drainage.
- Background Activity
- This means the app was being used in the background of your phone to gather information while you were using a different app. You can improve your battery life by turning this feature off. You're not going to miss much. Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and turn the switch to Off.
- If you're reliant on receiving emails quite frequently, you might wanna configure your fetch settings. This will control how often your mail uses data to fetch new incoming mail. There are different lengths of intervals your phone can do this, so if emails aren't that important to you, expand the interval or turn it off entirely. Head to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Then scroll through to adjust which mail accounts fetch data and how often they do it.
- Location and Background Locations
- Apps that access your location drain battery in the process. To control which apps you actually need to have gathering your location, go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services. From here you'll be able to swipe on or off.
- Home & Lock Screen
- This means the amount of times your home screen was awakened is doing its part to drain your battery. Whether it's by turning the power button on your phone frequently or by a notification. You can manage your notifications by going to Settings > Notifications.
2. On that note-Manage your notifications!
Most of your apps will send you notifications if you let them. It's smart to manage which ones you need to have notify you on the spot so you don't waste battery life. If you're in Settings > Notifications, you can scroll through your apps to turn off ones you don't need actively updating you.
3. Turn on auto-brightness or turn down your brightness
Auto brightness is a feature that controls the screen brightness on your phone based on your surroundings. When it's dark, it will bring up the brightness and when it's light, it will dim brightness. If you're in a battery saving crunch, just manually turn down your brightness. Having a brightly lit screen constantly will drain your battery (even though it looks so nice).
4. Turn off extra visual effects
By slowly turning your iPhone around in your hand, you'll see that the graphics and app icons turn with the direction you move it, creating a 3D-floating effect. This feature is called the "Parallax" effect. It requires lot of battery for something not very significant. Turn this off by going to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion and swipe this function to Off. We also recommend not using a dynamic wallpaper.
Tape the airplane logo from the Control Center to turn on Airplane Mode
5. Enable "Airplane mode" when you're out of cell service
If you find yourself somewhere where you know you're not going to have cell service, switch to Airplane mode so your iPhone stops trying to search for service. This is an easy feature to save some battery. Simply click on the airplane icon from the control center (get here by swiping up from the bottom of the iPhone screen). Don't forget to turn it back on when you're back to civilization.
6. Disable auto app updates-just check for them manually
Auto app updates require your phone to use data to constantly check for updates. This is a convenient feature, but also a battery killer. Simply fix his by manually checking for updates and turning off auto updates. It's important to note that outdated apps actually drain battery as well so check for updates frequently. Go to Settings > iTunes & App Store. Under Automatic Downloads, swipe left on the Updates section to turn this off.
7. Close apps you're not using
You may think that if you push the home button to exit out of an app that it closes. In fact, it's still running in the background off your iPhone. You can completely close them by double tapping the home button, which brings up a list of all the apps you currently have open. Swipe the app window up to completely close it.