Android offers a great user experience for many users with one of the key reasons being its ability to finely tailor its phone to your personal preferences. This includes being able to control how your device consumes its battery charge — which can help a lot when it seems like your Android phone is using more power than it should. It may not be an issue if you are working from home or near a power supply, but if you are out on the go, you might want to consider implementing some simple changes to get the most out of your battery life. While Google has posted a set of tips on how to get the most life from a Pixel phone battery, almost all the additional tips it provides are just as applicable to any Android phone.
One of the easiest ways to save battery life on your phone is to turn down the screen brightness. Auto-brightness settings can be useful to help in this regard, but it is also worth manually turning it down as low as you are comfortable with. This becomes a little harder if you are outdoors as the additional ambient light will mean you will need to ramp up your display brightness. However, you can also reduce your screen usage by also using Google Assistant to launch apps and check your email, messages, and get it to do other functions just with voice control. More recent mid-range and high-end Android flagship phones also have high-refresh-rate display settings that you can toggle off or on — if battery life is vital to you, this is also something that you could consider turning off to extend your mileage.
Another simple way to extend your battery life on an Android phone, particularly one with poor battery life, is to use its built-in Battery-Saver feature. This handy feature pauses many of your phone’s background activities that can be battery draining. For example, instead of your phone routinely checking a server for your latest email in the background, it will only pull the latest messages when you open the app. It will do this for all apps that are normally running in the background like social media feeds. Battery Saver also typically reduces CPU usage — but also performance — which can have its downsides. The upside is greatly improved battery life.
Adaptive Battery is also an important battery-saving feature to have turned on an Android phone. It was introduced in Android 9 and works by applying Google’s smart algorithm tech to learn how you use your phone’s apps and adjusts how much background activity each app uses accordingly. This is a smart feature that is designed to help you get on with using your phone without having to worry too much about manually adjusting background activity settings. This can take up to as much as two weeks. However, once its deep-learning smarts understand usage, users often report a significant improvement in battery life.
