Some people are able to go through their day without charging their iPhone once but for a lot of us, we have to top off our battery before we go to bed. Got a notification from Instagram? A push notification about a new email? These are all these things that can have an affect on the battery life of your phone.
Apple says that with LTE browsing on the iPhone 6, the battery can last “up to ten hours” but it’s hit or miss depending on how much we use our phones and what we are doing with them. After all, even when we aren’t using our phones, the battery life is draining. The part that can be frustrating is that not everyone has access to plugging in their phone throughout the day.
For those moments, here are our nine tips that you can use when you need to extend your iPhone’s battery life a bit more.
1. Battery Usage Screen
The first thing you should do is check the Battery Usage screen. iOS 8 can now tell you what apps is draining your battery. You can check out what apps you’ve used frequently in the 24 hours or the last seven days.
There are some things you can’t change like if you listen to a lot of podcasts and music but there are some apps that use more power than others.
The place to find that screen is heading over to Settings > General > Usage > Battery Usage.
2. Power Cycle
It is recommended that your “power cycle” your battery at least once a month. To do this, drain your battery complete until it shuts down and then charge it again back to 100%. Doing this will re-calibrate your battery indicator and if you are still getting problems, then you know that your phone is the problem, not you using it constantly.
3. Auto Brightness
With Auto Brightness on, your iPhone is constantly adjusting its screen to your current surroundings. Turn this feature off to prevent it from dimming the screen when you are in the dark and brighten it if you are outside. With the Control Center, you can now easily adjust the brightness manually so turn it down to extend your battery life for a bit longer.
This may seem obvious, but your display is draining your battery, and there’s no need to have it shine any brighter than necessary.
Use the Control Center or go to Settings > Wallpapers & Brightness and disable Auto-Brightness
4. Background App Refresh and Push Notifications
With notification services and background app refresh on, your phone will push every single piece of data from apps like Instagram and Facebook to your screen when it come in. This means your iPhone is constantly checking the cloud for any new updates 24/7. And if you are in a place with spotty cell service, this will drain your battery even more because it is struggling to get a signal in order to receive data. You can turn it all off or choose individual apps.
Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh to toggle this setting.
5. Location Services
Apps like Google Maps and Waze use your locations constantly if you have the app open but there are other apps that use location services constantly, thus draining your battery down significantly. Don’t worry, you can turn them back on later when you need it.
Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services and disable any apps that you don’t need location services for.
6. Notification Widgets
Notification widgets are a great feature that Apple introduced with iOS 8. I use it for everything from getting sports scores, calendar events, and more. The bad thing is that some of these widgets constantly update it’s constantly and if you are using something like the weather widget, it’s pulling in data and location services around the clock.
Notification widgets are found in Notification Center by swiping down from the top of the screen.
7. Reduce Motion
It might be cool to see your wallpaper move around when you tilt your iPhone but is it really necessary? This feature doesn’t really appeal to me and on top of that, some people get a little motion sickness after a while. This is one of the first things I did when I got the new iPhone.
Head to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion > On to toggle this setting.
8. Fetching Emails
To most people, e-mails are important to their work life but it does come with a price. With “fetch” on, your phone is continually looking for new emails. If you don’t up to the minute update on your emails, turn it off to save a ton of battery life.
This toggle can be found at Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data.
9. Airplane Mode
If you are in a place with bad reception, your iPhone is struggling hard to get a cell signal and thus, wasting a lot of battery life in doing so especially if it is switching from LTE to 4G a lot. When you have a good signal, your phone doesn’t work as hard because it already has a good signal and sending and receiving data will be easy and fast.
Put your phone in airplane mode if you notice you have bad reception and turn it on when you need it again. A plus is that you can still turn on your Wi-Fi and use that connection without having to turn airplane mode off. Also, if you notice that you are constantly getting a bad signal wherever you go, you can reset your network settings and see if that helps.
Airplane Mode can be found right at the top of the main settings page, or by swiping up the Control Center. To reset your network settings, go to Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings.