How to Increase Android battery life (Tips & Tricks)

When you leave your home, do you leave all the lights on, crank the AC to the max, and leave the TV blaring? Of course not! Electricity costs money, and basic economics means that most people have the common sense to turn off household appliances and lights when they aren’t in use.

The same principle applies to your phone, but instead of paying for your irresponsibility with an energy bill at the end of the month, you’re paying with a dead battery by 5pm. Let’s take a look at some of the lights you may have been leaving on.

Connectivity features

These guys are big culprits. If you want to conserve power, then you should always turn off your Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Location (GPS) when you aren’t actively using them. If you’re want to be really aggressive with control over your battery, you might even want to experiment with disabling your mobile network connection when you know you won’t be using it as well.

Many users leave these features running all day without really thinking about it. Turning on Airplane Mode will knock out all of them in one fell swoop. Airplane Mode isn’t just for when you’re airborne, however. If you’re in an area where cell service is patchy, your phone can expend a lot of battery power trying to get the best connection it can.

Turning on Airplane Mode or turning off your mobile data in favor of an available Wi-Fi network can make all the difference in the world. If you have the choice between using Wi-Fi or cell signal, always choose Wi-Fi, all other things equal. Wi-Fi drains far less battery than cellular service.

Shut down vibration

Vibration is wonderful if you’re in a situation in which you wouldn’t normally be able to hear your cell phone, such as being on the road. For many people, the subtlety of vibrating notifications is indispensable in their workplace (if you’re a lawyer, you can’t exactly have Crazy Frog going off every time you get a text message down at the firm).

However, smartphone vibrations aren’t conjured from magical resonating crystals. To produce the effect, your device has to spin up a small vibration motor every time, which can be really draining on your battery. This goes for haptic feedback as well, that light buzzing your phone may produce when you tap keys on your on-screen keyboard. If you really want to maximize your phone battery life, you should minimize your phone’s jiggliness.

Kill apps when you leave them?

For a long time, app-killing apps were all the rage. Frustrated with laggy user experience, Android users of the days of yore began using all kinds of task managers to eliminate the apps they thought were hogging resources.

The problem is, these task killers became unnecessary even before they really got popular. Android has gotten really good at managing its own memory, and most of the apps that you murder this way will just spring right back to life. If anything, app killers suck battery rather than conserve it.

But there’s a new feature that’s been available since Android 4.0: the Recent Apps menu. Although this feature’s primary intent is to make swapping between apps faster, it is also possible to “swipe away” apps. Some myths have cropped up that it’s good practice to pull up the Recent Apps menu and swipe away any apps you aren’t using, effectively killing them.

This just isn’t true. For one, swiping away recent apps does not kill them. It is a good way to get an app to stop misbehaving (for example, if a Facebook photo gets stuck uploading, then swiping away the app will tell Facebook to cancel this action), but the apps you see on this list are not actively running in the background. The Recent Apps menu is nothing like the Task Manager on your PC, it’s just a visual catalogue to help you navigate your apps easier.

In the modern age of Android’s maturity, there’s no reason that killing apps should be a part of your everyday use of the device. Sometimes it’s possible for apps to go rogue and start hogging resources, but those are the kind of devils you want to put down for good. If part of your regular use of your phone involves app killing, you’re probably depleting battery life rather than saving it.