Android is a versatile operating system and everyone knows that it has a lot fewer limitations when compared to its rival, iOS. However, the lesser the limitations, it’s more likely that you would end up adding features and apps to your Android smartphone which will result in a battery drain. Moreover, users with heavy usage of their smartphones face the same issue. To help you with this headache, here are a few ways using which you can save battery life on your Android smartphone.
Reduce Auto Screen-off time
Your Android smartphone turns off its screen automatically if its kept idle. However, it gives you an option where you can decide after how many minutes or seconds your device turns off the display. This option can be found inside the display settings under the ’Screen timeout’ section. Here, you can choose between various options. The lesser the time, the more battery life you get as the screen, which is a major element that consumes battery, turns off sooner on its own.
Turn on Auto Brightness
As we said, the screen is one of the major battery consuming parts of a smartphone. The higher you keep the brightness of the phone, the more power the display panel draws from the battery, thereby reducing battery life heavily. To prevent it, you should enable the auto-brightness function.
This is handled by an Ambient Light sensor that is used to sense the amount of ambient light present, and appropriately dim the device’s screen to match it. Even budget phones are equipped with this sensor nowadays. You can find this option under the display settings as well.
Turn on Battery Optimization
Battery optimization is another way to save battery on Android devices. When you turn on the battery optimisation / adaptive battery feature, the operating system will automatically close apps in the background and will intelligently identify which apps are not of any use. When you turn on the Adaptive Battery feature, apps that you use less often will run less while you’re not using them.
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Your phone can learn how you use your apps over time. If you can see that an App is using more battery than it should, you can go to the app info and turn on battery optimization for that specific app so neither does it run in the background nor does it use data in the background.
Turn off vibrations, especially for keyboards
While using haptic feedback when typing can result in a likeable experience, it actually consumes a lot of battery to vibrate your smartphone. So does sound, but it doesn’t affect the battery as much as vibrations do. You may also turn off the sounds while using the keyboard.
Turn off Location access
Most of the apps you use including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Swiggy, etc require your location for some or other feature. Using your location, apps can show you appropriate ads, automatically identify your delivery address, and more. But keeping the location ON throughout the day, even when you don’t need it, can result in high battery drainage. You can either turn off the location using the quick toggle in the Notification centre or go into the device’s settings to turn it off.
Bonus
While the important ways to save battery on Android smartphones are mentioned above, here are a few more. If you have a smartphone that has an AMOLED display, you may use a dark/black wallpaper on your device. This is because in an AMOLED panel, every Pixel self-illuminates and when you use black wallpaper, the pixels don’t have to illuminate in the black parts. The less pixels illuminate, the more battery life you save.
This won’t help as much with an LCD panel because in such a panel, the display uses backlight technology. This means that the entire display has to light up to show content, regardless of what type of wallpaper you set, either black or white. One of the other ways using which you can save power is by not using battery saver apps, as they do more harm than good, by always running in the background and killing tasks which in turn takes up more power.
Lastly, you may use Airplane Mode when you don’t need any type of network or when you are in an area where network coverage is poor. This is because your phone will stop searching for networks constantly that will help increase battery life. If you want to have network all the time, you can turn off Mobile Data and Wi-Fi so they are not connected all the time.