13 tips to extend the lifespan of your phone battery
It’sharder to replace your phone’s lithium ion battery than it is to treat it rightin the first place. Many smartphones don’t provide easy user access to their
batteries. That includes all iPhones and many flagship Android phones from
brands such as Samsung. Official battery replacements can be expensive or
inconvenient (try getting an official battery replacement at an Apple Store
this year). There are also environmental concerns. Smartphones are, frankly, an
environmental disaster and extending the lifespan of your phone battery helps mitigate
that.
Here are some things you can do topreserve and extend the lifespan of your phone battery. By battery lifespan I mean how many
years and months your battery will last before it needs to be replaced. In
contrast, battery life refers
to how many hours or days your phone will last on a single charge.
With every charge cycle your phonebattery degrades slightly. A charge cycle is a full discharge and charge of the
battery, from 0% to 100%. Partial charges count as a fraction of a cycle.
Charging your phone from 50% to 100%, for example, would be half a charge
cycle. Do that twice and it’s a full charge cycle. Some phone owners go through
more than a full charge cycle a day, others go through less. It depends on how
much you use your phone and what you do with it.
Battery manufacturers say that afterabout 400 cycles a phone battery’s capacity will degrade by 20%. It will only
be able to store 80% of the energy it did originally and will continue to
degrade with additional charge cycles. The reality, however, is that phone
batteries probably degrade faster than that. One online site claims some phones
reach that 20% degradation point after only 100 charge cycles. And just to be
clear, the phone battery doesn’t stop degrading after 400 cycles. That 400
cycles / 20% figure is to give you an idea of the rate of decay.
If you can slow down those charge
cycles — if
you can extend the everyday battery life of your phone — you
can extend its battery lifespan also.Basically, the less you drain and charge the battery, the longer the battery
will last. The problem is, you bought your phone to use it. You have to balance
saving battery life and lifespan with utility, using your phone how and when
you want it. Some of my suggestions below may not work for you. On the other
hand, there may be things that you can implement fairly easily that don’t cramp
your style.
There are two general types ofsuggestions here. Suggestions to make your phone more energy efficient, slowing
battery degradation by slowing down those charge cycles. Reducing screen
brightness would be an example of this type of suggestion. There are also
suggestions to reduce stress and strain to your battery, affecting its lifespan
more directly. Avoiding extremes of heat and cold would be an example of this
second type.
2. Avoid extremes ofheat and cold. If your phone gets very hot or cold it can
strain the battery and shorten its lifespan. Leaving it in your car would
probably be the worst culprit, if it’s hot and sunny outside or below freezing
in winter.
Charging your phone quickly stresses
the battery. Unless you really need it, avoid using fast charging.
In fact, the slower you charge yourbattery the better, so if you don’t mind slow charging overnight, go for it.
Charging your phone from your computer as well as certain smart plugs can limit
the voltage going into your phone, slowing its charge rate. Some external
battery packs might slow the speed of charging, but I’m not sure about that.
Older types of rechargeable batterieshad ‘battery memory’. If you didn’t charge them to full and discharge them to
zero battery they ‘remembered’ and reduced their useful range. It was better
for their lifespan if you always drained and charged the battery completely.
Newer phone batteries work in adifferent way. It stresses the battery to drain it completely or charge it
completely. Phone batteries are happiest if you keep them above 20% capacity
and below 90%. To be extremely precise, they’re happiest around 50% capacity
Short charges are probably fine, by
the way, so if you’re the sort of person that finds yourself frequently topping
up your phone for quick charges, that’s fine for your battery.
Paying a lot of attention this one maybe too much micromanagement. But when I owned my first smartphone I thought
battery memory applied so I generally drained it low and charged it to 100%.
Now that I know more about how the battery works, I usually plug it in before
it gets below 20% and unplug it before completely charged if I think of it.
The healthiest charge for a lithiumion battery seems to be about 50%. If you are going to store your phone for an
extended period, charge it to 50% before turning it off and storing it. This is
easier on the battery than charging it to 100% or letting it drain to 0% before
storage.
The battery, by the way, continues to
degrade and discharge if the phone is turned off and not being used at all.
This generation of batteries was designed to be used. If you think of it, turn
the phone on every several months and top the battery up to 50%.
The tips above address battery
lifespan directly. Battery lifespan is also affected by battery life, how long
your phone lasts on a single charge. Improving battery life extends the
lifespan of the battery by slowing down those charge cycles.
A smartphone’s screen is the componentthat typically uses the most battery. Turning down the screen brightness will
save energy. Using Auto Brightness probably saves battery for most people by
automatically reducing screen brightness when there’s less light, although it
does involve more work for the light sensor.
The thing that would truly save the
most battery in this area would be to manage it manually and fairly
obsessively. That is, manually set it to the lowest visible level every time
there’s a change in ambient lighting levels.
Both Android and iOS give you options
to turn down overall screen brightness even if you’re also using
auto-brightness.
If you leave your screen on withoutusing it, it will automatically turn off after a period of time, usually one ortwo minutes. You can save energy by reducing the Screen Timeout time (called
Auto-Lock on iPhones). By default, I believe iPhones set their Auto-Lock to 2
minutes, which might be more than you need. You may be fine with 1 minute, or
even 30 seconds. On the other hand, if you reduce auto-lock or screen timeout
you may find your screen dimming too soon when you’re in the middle of reading
a news story or recipe, so that’s a call you’ll need to make.
I use Tasker (an automation app) tochange the screen timeout on my Galaxy S7 depending on what app I’m using. My
default is a fairly short screen timeout of 35 seconds, but for apps where I am
likely to be looking at the screen without using it, such as news and
note-taking apps, I extend that timeout to over a minute.
My phone, the Galaxy S7, has an OLEDscreen. To display black it doesn’t block the backlight with a pixel like some
iPhones and many other types of LCD screens. Instead, it doesn’t display
anything at all. The pixels displaying black just don’t turn on. This makes the
contrast between black and colour very sharp and beautiful. It also means that
displaying black on the screen uses no energy, and darker colours use less
energy than bright colours like white. Choosing a dark theme for your phone, if
it has an OLED or AMOLED screen, can save energy. If your screen does not have an OLED screen — and
this includes all iPhones before the iPhone X — a dark theme won’t make a
difference .
I found a dark theme I like in theSamsung store, and there are some excellent free icon pack apps for Android out
there that focus on darker-themed icons. I use Cygnus Dark, Mellow Dark,
Moonrise Icon Pack, and Moonshine. I use the Nova Launcher App to customize the
appearance of app icons and often remove the name of the app if it’s clear enough
from the icon what it is. That removes white space off of the screen, and I
also think it looks nice and is less distracting.
Some people find a darker theme is
easier on the eyes in terms of preventing eye strain, and less light overall
may mean less blue light, which can affect sleep patterns.
Many apps include a dark theme intheir settings. For example, I have Google Books set to a dark theme, where the
virtual ‘page’ is black instead of white and the letters are white. Most of the
pixels display black (are turned off) and use no energy.
I’m less familiar with customization
and dark themes for iPhones. My understanding is that iPhones are somewhat
harder to personalize. So far, though, only the iPhone X series have OLED
screens so they are the only iPhones that would see energy savings from a dark
theme.
…or restrict its permissions andreduce its use. Facebook is a notorious resource hog, both on Android and
iPhones. If you really want to use Facebook, go into settings and restrict its
permissions such as video autoplay, access to your location, and notifications.
Do you really want Facebook tracking your location? Autoplaying videos in
Facebook (they play automatically, whether you select them or not) uses energy
and data, and can be annoying and intrusive in some cases. There might be
relevant settings both in the app itself and within your phone settings.
If Facebook came pre-installed on your
phone (as it did on mine), it may not be possible to delete it completely
because your phone considers it a system app. In that case, you can disable it
in Settings if you wish.
Look through your battery settings forother apps that use a disproportionate amount of energy and delete, disable, or
restrict permissions where possible. For apps you want to keep using, you can restrict
permissions you don’t need. There are also ‘light’ versions of some popular
apps that generally take up less space, use less data, and may use less power.
Facebook Messenger Light is one example.
In general, though, the apps that use
the most battery will be the apps you use the most, so deleting or reducing use
may not be that practical for you.
Your phone has one or more energysaving modes. These limit the performance of the CPU (and other features).
Consider using them. You will get lower performance but better battery life.
You might not mind the trade-off.
Many apps exist as both free and paidversions, and the difference is often that the free version is supported with
ads. Displaying ads uses slightly more data and slightly more energy.
Purchasing an app you use frequently rather than using the free ad-supported
version may pay off in the long run by reducing data and battery usage. You
also free up screen space by getting rid of distracting ads, usually gain more
features, and support app developers.
You can turn off radios you rarely useuntil you need them. If you never use NFC there’s no reason to keep it on. On
the other hand, radios like GPS, Bluetooth, andNFC, don’t really use a lot of
energy in standby mode but only if they’re actually operating. In other words,
any energy savings from micromanaging radios will probably be limited.
On thing to think about in terms of
radios is that the weaker your cell or WiFi signal, the more power your phone
needs to access that signal. To access cellular data or WiFi your phone needs
both to receive and send information. If you’re not receiving a strong signal
it means your phone needs to boost its own signal to reach that distant cell
tower or WiFi router, using more energy.
If your bedroom has a strong cellsignal but a weak WiFi signal, it may save you energy to use cellular data
instead of WiFi. Similarly, if you have a strong WiFi signal but weak cell
signal, it’s better to stick to WiFi.
If you’re out of range of cell service
and WiFi, turn airplane mode on. Smartphones are always on the lookout for cell
and WiFi signals if they don’t have them. If no signal is available, your phone
will go crazy looking for one.
Many online sources say changing youremail from push to fetch will save battery. Push means your device is always
listening for new email, and these get pushed through immediately. Fetch means
your device checks for new messages at a given interval, every 15 minutes for
example. The most energy efficient thing to do would be to fetch manually, that
is your device only checks for mail when you manually open your email app.
There is debate about whether fetch
does indeed save energy. It probably depends on volume of email and patterns of
email usage. I use push. It is efficient enough for me.
Current versions of iOS will show youyour battery health. There is no such feature in Android, but there are
third-party apps that will perform this function.
I use AccuBattery which tracks batteryhealth and other stats, as well as giving you a notification when your phone
charges to a certain point so you may unplug it. So far, AccuBattery seems to
be confirming my understanding of battery degradation. AccuBattery recommends
charging to 80%. Some sources I have read suggest the healthy range extends to
90% and that is often a target I aim for as a good compromise between
preserving battery in the long term and not running out of battery in the short
term.
At the end of the day, the big question
is how much is it worth paying attention to all this battery efficiency stuff.
Are the battery savings worth the effort?
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