I think we can all agree that one of the worst feelings is looking at your phone’s battery percentage and realizing it’s either almost dead or when you’re out and about seeing that it’s not going to make it through whatever activity you’re doing and you’re gonna have to just restrict your phone usage.
Yes, it sucks but, there are some things you can do to improve your phone’s battery life on a day to day basis. That’s what we’re gonna go over now; there’s no magic pill to magically double your phone battery life for free or anything like that unfortunately but, there are a set of best practices some of which you probably already know and when you combine these all together then they can make a big difference.
Lower Phone Screen Brightness
First on my list is lowering your phone screen’s brightness obviously your screen uses up a ton of battery so if you lower the brightness it’s gonna last longer and the other thing is using the low power mode battery saving mode on Android and iOS obviously that’s gonna reduce background usage and improve battery life.
Enable Dark Mode
Now, next up number two, this one is way more relevant now because so many phones use OLED these days and that is if your phone has an OLED screen then use dark mode theme for either iOS or Android that both have dark modes now and to understand the rationale behind this, you have to understand the difference between an LCD screen and an OLED screen.
So, with an LCD screen, it typically has an LED backlight and the brightness of the screen that you set will determine how bright that backlight is but what actually determines the colors on the screen whether it’s white, black, blue, green, red or whatever has to do with some crystals in the display that switch on and off but that backlight stays constant across the entire screen.
So even if something on the screen is black then the backlight behind those black pixels is still on so if you have an LCD screen even if the whole screen is black then the backlight is still on so you’re still using as much battery as if the whole screen was white.
Now with OLED, this is very different where each individual pixel lights itself so if you have a completely black screen that just means that all the pixels are off. If you have a completely white screen that means that all the pixels are on and it is made up of sub pixels red, green & blue so, that means if it’s white then all three sub-pixels are on and you get the idea. Basically, this means that if you have dark parts of the screen and white parts of the screen then the dark parts of the screen are just gonna have the pixels off.
So for example, theoretically this is a very rough example it’s not going to be exact but, say you had an OLED screen where half the image was black and half of it was white that, theoretically, would use half the power as an LCD screen no matter what the colors on the LCD screen are but the takeaway of this is if you’re using dark mode on your phone then it’s going to have way more dark pixels more often. This means that much more often it’s going to be using less battery than it would otherwise.
Wi-Fi > Cellular Data
Moving on, the next thing you can do is if you have the ability to connect to a Wi-Fi access point instead of just using cellular data do that because using Wi-Fi for data uses significantly less power than the cellular radios for a lot of reasons including having to broadcast shorter distances from the Wi-Fi access point then some Tower really far away because the Wi-Fi access point is going to be producing a stronger signal.
Moreover, if you are out somewhere and you don’t have any Wi-Fi available and you’re just gonna use cellular data and you know that then turn off the Wi-Fi antenna using the quick settings both Android and iOS have this option because having that Wi-Fi radio on is obviously going to be using more power than if it was off.
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