The iPhone is a great companion that provides plenty to do — that is, unless your battery is dead. Once the juice is gone, you’re left with a pretty paperweight. It’s frustrating when you’re struggling to make your iPhone’s battery last between charges, and no one wants to be searching for an outlet more often than needed. Luckily, these tips will buy you some extra time. If you want to know how to save battery life on an iPhone, then you’re in the right place. You might also consider investing in one of the best portable battery chargers money can buy, to keep your iPhone working on the go.
Show the Battery Percentage
If you’re keeping an eye on your battery level, you may find it easier to track as a percentage, rather than a bar icon. To see the percentage go to Settings > Battery > Battery Percentage.
Turn on Low Power Mode
If you have iOS 9 or later installed on your iPhone, then you can take advantage of Apple’s Low Power Mode. You’ll find the toggle to turn it on in Settings > Battery > Low Power Mode. The feature temporarily turns off or reduces mail fetch, Siri functions, background app refresh, automatic downloads, and some visual effects until you fully charge your iPhone.
Turn down the volume
You should consider turning the volume down on your iPhone and using headphones whenever possible, thus allowing you to reduce the impact of audio on your phone’s battery life. If you take a look in Settings > Music, you can also set a volume limit and turn the EQ off to save even more power.
Turn off iCloud
Automatically backing up to iCloud can drain your battery and eat through your data allowance. It’s a useful feature for backing up precious photos, but there might be a few things being backed up that you don’t really care about or need. Take a look in Settings > Your name > iCloud and toggle off anything you don’t want.
Kill “Hey Siri”
This feature is an unnecessary battery drain if you don’t really use it, mostly because your iPhone will be listening for “Hey Siri” whenever it’s charging. To turn it off, go to Settings > Siri & Search and turn Listen for “Hey Siri” off.
Don’t bother closing apps
A lot of people imagine that the apps listed when they double tap the Home button are actually still open in the background and using battery life, but they usually aren’t. Outside of Background App Refresh, which we’ll look at soon, the vast majority of apps are not doing anything when they’re not in use. You can actually end up draining more battery by double tapping the Home button and quitting them all the time, so don’t do it.
Turn off Background App Refresh
You can start your journey of iPhone battery discovery by going to Settings > Battery. As a quick test, try making a note of the remaining standby and usage times, then tap the sleep/wake button and wait 10 minutes. Then, go back to Settings > Battery and you should find standby time has increased by 10 minutes. If it hasn’t, then something is keeping your iPhone from resting, and it’s likely an app.
Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and take a look at the list. Do you really need all those apps updating themselves in the background and draining your battery life? Be ruthless and turn off all the apps you don’t need to update automatically. Remember, they’ll still update and work as normal when you fire them up, they just won’t keep running when you’re not using them. If you find that you don’t like the change, you can always head back into this section and toggle the apps back on again.
Switch Push Email to Fetch
Do you really need to get every email as soon as it comes in? Maybe you’ve got a secondary email account that isn’t so important. Go into Settings > Accounts & Passwords > Fetch New Data and switch from Push to either Fetch or Manual. With Fetch, you can set an interval, such as every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and so on, for your iPhone to check for new email. The longer you make the interval, the less battery you’ll be using. With Manual, it will only check for new email when you open the app.
Kill Push notifications from apps
Some apps will send you notifications that you don’t really need. Go to Settings > Notifications and tap on any apps that you don’t need notifications from. Consider turning Allow Notifications off or just switch off Show on Lock Screen and some of the other settings.
Turn off Automatic Downloads
You can have your iPhone update Music, Apps, and iOS automatically, but it will eat a lot of battery life. Your iPhone might also choose an inopportune moment to update everything. You can save power and battery life by going into Settings > iTunes & App Store and sliding Use Cellular Data to off, so it only updates on Wi-Fi. You’ll save even more if you just turn the automatic downloads off altogether and update on your own schedule.
Reduce screen brightness
The screen drains the battery faster than anything else and the brighter it is, the faster it drains. Go to Settings > Display & brightness and turn True Tone off. Then, set your brightness to the lowest setting that still looks readable. You might have to tweak it from time to time, but you’ll save a lot of juice this way.
Turn off vibrations
Do you really need your iPhone to vibrate? It will eat up some battery life and it’s probably only necessary when you have your iPhone on silent. Go to Settings > Sound & Haptics and you can toggle Vibrate on Ring to off.
Reduce Auto-Lock time
When you stop using it, your iPhone takes a set amount of time to turn the screen off. You can change it in Settings > Display & brightness > Auto-Lock. Set it as low as you can without it becoming annoying, and you’ll save a decent amount of battery life over time.
Turn off AirDrop
You don’t need AirDrop turned on all the time either, so swipe up from the bottom of the screen to bring up the Control Center and turn it off until you actually need it.
