IOS 11: How To Improve IPhone Battery Life

Since iOS 11 has been available for over a week, many users are now running Apple’s latest mobile OS. While there are lots of great new features, one downside many users are experiencing is decreased battery life. Let’s take a look at the best ways to improve battery life on your iPhone. While more that a 50% drop in battery life sounds terrible, there are a few things to keep in mind (if you want to get right to tweaking your iPhone for better battery life, head below). The data from Wandera was collected from 50,000 moderate to heavy users, for 3 days following iOS 11’s launch. First, the sample size is great, but these are relatively demanding iOS users. Second, the data coming from the 3 days after iOS 11 availability makes a difference. However, even if iOS 11 battery performance doesn’t remain as bad as this past week may have indicated (hopefully today’s 11.0.1 update will help), it may remain worse than iOS 10 to some degree.

Head to Settings → Battery to check out the details of your battery usage. Last 24 Hours will be the default for showing what apps are using the most energy. Tapping the clock icon on the right hand side gives you a detailed breakdown of how much time was spent on screen and in the background for each app. Also take a look at battery life suggestions just above battery usage. This will give you quick, actionable ways to reduce battery drain. Now you’re in a better position to be more efficient with usage, along with having an idea of more settings to adjust as we keep going here. Low Power Mode isn’t new in iOS 11, but it’s a really useful feature to stretch your battery life when needed. The feature works by suspending mail fetch, background app refresh, auto downloads, and more. This isn’t a ‘use every day’ type of feature (hopefully), but is handy in a pinch.

You can turn on Low Power mode under Settings → Battery. However, it’s really useful to have quick access to Low Power Mode by adding it to iOS 11’s redesigned Control Center. Navigate to Settings → Control Center → Customize Controls, then tap the sign next to Low Power Mode. If you notice Home & Lock Screen usage on your battery usage higher than you’d expect, double-check that setting. If you can tolerate it, 30 seconds will help you preserve the most battery life. Especially with most of Apple’s iPhones supporting raise to wake, 30 seconds is usually worth it. Navigate to Settings → Display & Brightness → Auto-Lock. Lowering your screen brightness will also help with battery life, but this will likely come down to personal preference. Low Power Mode turns off background app refresh across the board, but you can customize which apps use this feature for a more convenient experience as well as improved battery life. Head to Settings → General → Background App Refresh. You can also opt to only use background app refresh on Wi-Fi in addition to Wi-Fi and Cellular or turning the feature off. However, most users will find leaving Wi-Fi and Cellular on while customizing which apps are used for background app refresh to be the best fit. Taking a look at your location services settings is another way to be more efficient with battery life (and cellular data usage). Head to Settings → Privacy → Location Services to update the privileges for your apps. Watch out for any apps that ask to Always use your location and switch to While Using or Never. Taking a look at your push and fetch settings is also worthwhile. Navigate to Settings → Accounts & Passwords → Fetch New Data. One possible approach is to leave your primary account(s) as push to receive new mail asap, and turn secondary/non-crticial accounts to fetch every 30 minutes or hour.

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.



The best way to approach this is to first disable location services for all the apps. Location Services. After you’ve disabled location services for all apps, you identify which apps such as navigation apps should use location services and enabled them individually. In iOS, you can allow apps to use Location Services only while using the app, so the apps don’t use battery consuming GPS feature all the time. This can be useful for apps like the App Store, which don’t need to be using location services all the time. Location Services. Apps that recently used your location have a compass like indicator next to them. Tap on the app, you should see the While Using the App, tap on it if you want the app to use location services only while using the app. This will ensure that the app will access your location only when it or one of its features are visible on the screen. As you can see below, iOS also tells you the App Store app is using location services to “find relevant apps nearby”.