Battery Ultimate Booster

There are a number of factors that contribute to poor battery life on your Android phone. Thinner bodies, brighter screens, faster processors, more background software, and speedier internet connections all take their toll on phone batteries, which is why battery cases and portable batteries have grown in popularity. With Android 6.0 Marshmallow onwards, Google added the Doze feature, which puts the phone to sleep when it's sitting on a table except for urgent notifications (like text messages) and occasional syncs. This battery optimization is intended to give your phone an automatic boost, but there are a few other things you can do to improve your battery life. As this is Android, options for how to enable these services will vary by handset, but a quick search in settings should bring them up.

Think you're going to be stuck in a situation where you need your phone battery to last longer than it normally does? Switch your phone into power saver mode, which automatically cuts back on functions that may eat battery life. On the Samsung Galaxy S10, for instance, there are two options. The first limits the display brightness, CPU speed, and network usage. The second strips your phone down to just the essential apps and services. Samsung phones also offer Device Maintenance, which weeds out crashed apps, bad pieces of data, and other impurities that can take up memory on your phone and suck up energy.

Features like Bluetooth, NFC, Samsung's phone visibility, and location services are helpful but drain your battery as your phone pings to connect and update. If you're looking to preserve juice, turn them off until you actually need them. You also might not need your voice assistant program at all times. If you have Google Assistant up and running, go into the Assistant settings and deactivate it, which will stop Google Assistant from actively listening and using up battery life. If you have a Samsung device, you can also turn off the Bixby voice assistant feature that comes with the company's Android phones.

Smartphone screens look great these days, but unsurprisingly, crisp resolution and bountiful pixels are battery hogs. You probably don't need your device turned up to the highest setting. Go into your display settings and turn down the brightness on the screen; your eyes and battery will thank you. You should also consider disabling auto brightness, which adjusts based on your perceived needs but can also raise the brightness of your display higher than it needs to be. You can also change how long your screen remains active. Under the display settings on your phone, set it to fade to black after a few seconds. And head into the notifications settings to disable notifications from specific apps, so your phone doesn't light up every time a new alert comes in.

Stay away from moving wallpaper, because it takes energy for your display to animate it. It's also a good idea to limit yourself to a background with fewer colors in it, since the display will eat up more energy if it needs to render a lot of different colors. While widgets are tempting and convenient, they are essentially an active program usable right from your home screen, so the phone uses energy keeping the feature running. Just say no to these little guys if battery life is a problem.

Most apps you use are active even after you exit them. That’s where Android’s app-specific battery tools enter. With a simple switch, you can completely restrict an app from accessing the battery in the background. Find this at  Settings  >  Apps & Notifications  and there, inside the specific app’s page, tap  Advanced > Battery > Background restriction . If you have an older phone, you can also try a third-party app called Greenify. This automatically stop apps from consuming resources in the background. However, we recommend using the native feature on modern devices since it generally works better than third-party solutions.

Your battery life can take a big hit if an app doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. This could be caused by anything from a bug to a deliberate aggressive background feature. You can check this by heading into  Settings > Battery > Menu > Battery Usage  to see which apps have drained the most of it. If there’s an app you don’t use much, you should uninstall it and monitor the battery for a day to see if it improves. You can also force-close the app and give it another shot. If nothing proves useful, get rid of it and switch to an alternative. And make sure you don’t have any of the worst Android battery killers on your phone.

A phone constantly beeping and buzzing with notifications is annoying  and  a battery drain, so knock it off. Your phone has to trigger an internal motor to buzz, which—you guessed it—uses energy. Go into the sounds and vibration settings and turn vibration intensity down. Here, you can also disable haptic feedback so it doesn't vibrate when you type or touch the screen.

Developers put a lot of work into making sure their apps run as efficiently as possible. Update your apps as often as possible to ensure you're running the best version available. That said, app updates can be hefty, eating into data and battery life. So it might be a good idea to restrict app (and OS) updates to when you are on Wi-Fi. Or shut off auto-updates temporarily until you can juice up again. Similarly, you can opt to shut off auto-updates inside apps, too. Perhaps your Instagram app automatically refreshes with new content as it's available. That's great for keeping up with your friends' selfies and holiday stories, but it's—everybody now!—a battery drain. In your phone's settings, you can turn off the option to automatically sync data and manually update those apps as you use them to save a bit of battery life.

While  Google Assistant is a handy tool to have for fun and work , it’s also one of the Android features that constantly gobbles up your phone’s energy. It’s listening for the wake command, is connected to your location for instantly fetching contextual results, and more. If you don’t heavily depend on Google Assistant, it’s best to shutter it. Unsurprisingly, Google hasn’t made Assistant’s switch easy to reach. You have to jump through a few hoops to find it. First, go into the  Google app  and hit the  More  tab. There, tap  Settings  and under the  Google Assistant header, tap  Settings  again. Next, select the  Assistant  tab and there, tap your phone’s name at the bottom of the list. Turn off the  Google Assistant  option and you’re done.

If all this is too much to remember, a service like If This Then That(IFTTT) supports automated workflows that can help you conserve battery life. Use IFTTT to turn off services like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth based on your location, for example, or disable specific services when your battery falls to a certain percentage. Apps like Greenify, meanwhile, will analyze the apps on your phone and identify which ones are more likely to suck up your battery life. It can then set inactive apps deemed to be problematic into hibernation, ensuring that your phone battery runs as smoothly as it did the day you got the device.

Notifications are important. But if you find them intrusive and hate the persistent stream of pings, you should try disabling auto-sync altogether. That way, you’ll only see new content when you open an app and refresh it manually. Since apps won’t constantly refresh themselves in the background to feed you new information, this can save you a ton of battery life too. To disable auto-sync, visit  Settings > Accounts  and there, the  Automatically sync data  options should be available at the bottom. You can also disable sync on a per-app basis in most apps.