How To Double Your IPhone Battery Life!

How To Double Your iPhone Battery Life! Because of what I do the one thing people are always asking me is how to improve their smartphone’s battery life. Unfortunately there’s usually only so much I can help with as we’re all constantly using our phones (rarely for phone calls!) and it’s just the way it is. I know myself that my iPhone5 will just about make it through the day as long as I’m not hammering it with intensive things like sat nav that really drain it. P.S. Use the free Waze App for sat nav, it’s brilliant. Anyway, one of the blogs I read religiously is Seth Godin’s here and yesterday he’d talked about people who are “on a mission”. He linked to another blog from a former Apple Genius who’s mission was to improve battery life. The full article is here and is definitely worth a read but below is my succinct version and details of the one big change that has more than doubled my battery life. Go to “Settings”, “General”, and tap “Background App Refresh”. By default this is switched on and so are all Apps that have been developed to use this function. By simply switching this option off or at least minimising the number of Apps that use it will seriously improve your battery life. I put a quick video on YouTube showing the process here. You’d think there’d be some downsides but it doesn’t affect things like push notifications or running Apps that have been minimised. According to Apple this function is used for preloading App data so that when you run them the info is already there. I’ve not noticed a speed difference with any of the Apps I use though. For those of you who are really interested then take a look at Apple’s explanation here.

According to Apple, iPhone 7 offers up to 2 hours longer battery life than iPhone 6s, and iPhone 7 Plus offers up to an hour longer battery life than iPhone 6s Plus. But if you’re still having battery life problems then check out the tips below to see how to troubleshoot and fix the battery life issues on your new iPhone. I’ve noticed that people are quite cynical about such articles as most of them tell you to disable features. It is important to understand that your battery life will vary as per your usage, so if you listen to your music locally from the Music app and not stream off LTE/3G/Wi-Fi, your battery life would last much longer. Usage is the amount of time iPhone has been awake and in use since the last full charge. The phone is awake when you’re on a call, using email, listening to music, browsing the web, or sending and receiving text messages, or even during certain background tasks such as auto-checking email. By default, iOS displays the battery level in the top right corner of the status bar.

You can keep track of the charge remaining in your iPhone more easily by enabling the battery percentage indicator, which displays the battery left in percentage. Battery and tap on the Battery Percentage toggle to turn it on. The first step in fixing the battery problems is to understand battery usage. In iOS 8 Apple added the naming and shaming feature, which gives you a breakdown of battery usage by apps. Apple has made some improvements to this feature in iOS 9. It now gives you the amount of time the app was used and the amount of time it was running in the background. You can use that information to identify the battery hogs. This will show you all the apps and internal services like Home & Lock screen that are consuming battery on your iPhone. By default, it shows you the battery hogs in the last 24 hours. You can also check the apps that are consuming battery in the last 4 days by tapping on the Last 4 Days tab as you can see in the screenshot above.

You can also tap the clock icon to the right on Last 4 days to find out how much time you’ve used the apps, and how much time the apps have been running in the background. The battery usage provides you information about how much battery is consumed by various apps and services on your device. It is important to mention here that an app with a high percentage battery usage does not necessarily mean it is a battery hog. It could be because you were using it a lot, or if it was running in the background to upload or download content. The apps that should be a concern are ones that show up on top of power consumption list even though you haven’t been using them. Phone will also tell you what activity that could have resulted in battery consumption such as Background activity in case of the Mail app in the screenshot above. If you can live without the app then the best thing to do is delete the app. While iOS takes care of suspending apps in the background, it’s likely that some apps wake up in the background to fetch content off the network.

You may want to force close apps like VoIP, navigation and streaming audio apps if you’re not using them as they’re known to drain battery life. It is important to note here that you should only close apps that you don’t want to use. It is a not a good practice to force close all apps, as that could have an adverse impact on battery life. Force close an app by double-pressing the home button scrolling through the apps to find the one you want to close, and swiping up on the app card to close it. Background App Refresh) features for the app as they can end up consuming battery life. We will cover it more detail next. When we install apps, they prompt us to give them access to various things such location etc., and we tend to blindly say yes. However, apps using location services can have a major impact on battery life. So you may want to review which apps should have access to your device’s location.