After years of use, we’ve all gotten used to our smartphones lasting a single day. The problem comes, for example, when the battery degrades over time, which suddenly means you get home with very little battery left, or with a completely dead phone.
If you don’t want to replace your smartphone—or its battery—so quickly, these 5 tips can help you extend the runtime on your device, which in turn slows down the battery’s degradation. We’ll show you 5 tips to save more battery. You can use them all, but you can also choose the ones that suit you best. As an example, we’ll use a Xiaomi smartphone with MIUI—other Android phones will be very similar.
Enabling Dark Mode
If your smartphone has an AMOLED display, which allows it to completely turn off pixel lighting for black color, then Dark Mode is a quick and very easy way for you to save more battery. In the display settings, enable Dark Mode, which you can even set for individual apps, and turn it off in the ones where you don’t like it.
Too Bright Screen (enabling auto brightness)
In strong sunlight, we increase brightness to the maximum for better readability, but then forget to lower it. This can drain a large amount of battery capacity, since a bright display is one of the most power-hungry parts of a phone. Just like with Dark Mode, open brightness level in the display menu, and there enable auto brightness. The ambient light sensor in your phone will take care of the rest.
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Turn off automatic connection to the 5G network
If you don’t need 5G data speeds right now, you can save battery by disabling automatic connection to the 5G network. 5G connection uses significantly more battery than, for example, 4G. In the SIM cards settings, choose your SIM card and find the network type option. After selecting the 4G network preference, your smartphone will no longer connect to the 5G network automatically.
Limiting location services
If you’re just at home and don’t need location services on, turning them off can help extend your smartphone’s battery life. Some apps periodically use location access. In the location settings, you can check these apps, or see which apps have permission to request location anytime (location access – always allowed). Here, we recommend keeping only the apps that need this permission, for example for automatic activity detection or another automated task.
Optimizing background apps
In the battery settings, check which apps are draining the most power. If they’re apps you don’t really use much, click directly on the app and in the detailed information you can set stricter background running settings (battery saving), or tell the system to automatically close them after a while to save your smartphone’s battery life.
Automatic cache clearing can also help you, of course (turning off background apps and clearing their temporary data), which you can enable from the battery settings as well (click the settings icon in the top right). For example, you can set your phone to clear the cache after you haven’t used it for 30 minutes.
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Right there you’ll also find the battery saver mode, which lowers your processor speed, turns off some system animations, and you can use it when you don’t have a charger nearby and need your phone to last until the end of the day. Almost all the tips and settings mentioned in this guide can be enabled quickly right after you open the system’s quick settings by swiping down on the home screen.
Did you like these 5 tips to save even more battery? If you have any other tips for improving your smartphone’s performance, feel free to write them to us below in the discussion under the article. Also follow our China Planet website, subscribe to our newsletter, and join us in our Facebook group.
