How to Maximize Android Battery
Life
Use Android’s Built-in Battery Usage Screen
There’s a screen built into Android that most casual users
probably don’t even know about, and it can tell you exactly what is killing
your battery. Head into Settings –> About Phone –> Battery
use to see what has been killing your battery life.
From this screen, you can usually see what apps are the
worst offenders, and you will probably notice that the biggest problem—at
least, the biggest one that we can fix—is actually the backlight on the phone.
Personally I’d prefer to talk less to other humans, but that isn’t always an
option!
Note: on my phone, I’ve already configured the backlight to
not be very bright—normally that number would be a lot higher.
Adjust the Backlight to be Less Bright
Since we’ve already determined that the backlight is usually
the biggest problem, you should probably adjust the settings. Head into
Settings –> Display –> Brightness, where you can choose to automatically
adjust, which usually works fairly well, or you can just turn the brightness
down to the lowest acceptable level.
You should make sure that the screen timeout value is set to
turn off quickly as well.
Disable Your Wi-Fi When You Don’t Need It
Wi-Fi can really speed up accessing data on your phone, but
it can also be a big drain on the battery if you don’t need it enabled,
especially when you are out and about… The phone will try and scan for a
wireless network even though you may not want it to.
To enable Airplane mode, you can head into Settings –>
Wireless & networks–> Airplane mode.
You can easily toggle the Wi-Fi on or off with a widget or
shortcut—there’s a built-in widget included in Android phones, or you can use
the AnyCut or BetterCut utilities to create your own shortcuts to directly turn
them on or off without requiring a widget.
Disable Bluetooth if You Don’t Use It
If you aren’t using a wireless headset, there’s no reason to
have Bluetooth running all the time, and you should probably cut it off to save
the battery life. If you never use it at all, head into Settings –> Wireless
& networks–> Bluetooth.
You can also enable or disable the Bluetooth when you do
need it, using the power widget.
Use the Power Widget to Easily Toggle GPS, Bluetooth, Wireless,
and Screen Brightness
Android includes a built-in Power Widget that can easily
toggle these settings on or off—just long press on the background of one of
your screens, choose Widget –> Power Control to add it to the screen. You’ll
notice in this example screenshot that I’ve got my GPS enabled but I’m not
using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth at the moment—the icon all the way on the right lets
you easily toggle the screen brightness settings.
This is probably the simplest and easiest thing that you can
do to save your battery without having to dig into the settings all the time.
Disable Apps that Sync Constantly
The built-in Email application (not the Gmail one, which
uses Push technology) can suck the battery badly, because it syncs on a
too-regular basis, especially when you have lots of accounts—each one of them
is set to sync every 15 minutes. You’d be better off setting it up to sync
manually, but if you want it to sync automatically, you should set it to sync
less frequently.
Open up the Email application, head to your account, and
choose Account settings –> Email check frequency from the menu. Change this
to something more like an hour… or never. You can always hit refresh manually
when you want to read your email.
The same thing holds true for other accounts, like Twitter
clients, which are even less important to update all the time. For Seesmic, you
can head into Settings –> Background Updates from the main screen. For the
official Twitter app, the settings are similar.
The Facebook application polls automatically in the
background, and you can customize the refresh interval for that as well—if you
don’t need Facebook updating all the time, you should set this value as high as
possible.
From the main Facebook screen—the one with the icons—head into
Settings –> Refresh interval from the menu.
Disable the GPS Location Features
One of the biggest battery sucking features on my droid is
the GPS… When I have navigation going, the battery dies far too fast, so I end
up having to keep it plugged in the whole time I am driving. This makes sense…
but what you might not know is that a lot of other applications use the GPS as
well.
You can also change the GPS to use wireless networks, and
uncheck the option for Use GPS satellites—this will make the GPS a little less
accurate, but it will save your battery. Note that you probably want the real
GPS enabled if you’re using Google Maps Navigation.
Additionally, you should turn off the geolocation features
in your Twitter client, weather application, or whatever other apps that you
really don’t need them in. If you want to keep it enabled, that’s great, just
realize that it does drain the battery, so uncheck this option to help.
Use a Task Manager to See What is Always Running
It is a wise decision to have a copy of Advanced Task
Cleaner or a similar application installed on your phone to help you kill
applications that don’t need to be running, but more so that you can see what
exactly is launching itself repeatedly in the background. You can setup an
auto-kill list for applications you don’t use that often—make them cut off when
you shut off the screen, or after an interval.
Note: If you’ve configured your application settings to not
pull down lots of data or do checking in the background, it’s not quite as
important to keep tasks killed all the time—that’s really what kills your
battery, not having them sitting idle.
You can also configure advanced task manager to show you CPU
usage for each app, which is a more useful meter than memory usage when it
comes to battery life.
Disable or Remove Applications That You Aren’t Using
Once you have identified the application that you don’t want
running all the time, check in the settings to see if it can be removed from
running in the background. Some applications will give you an option for
notifications that can be turned off if you don’t need them, making the
application not check in the background so often.
It should go without saying, but we’ll say it anyway—you
should remove the apps that you don’t need anymore, especially the ones that
are draining your battery as determined from the android battery panel or task
manager. Head into Settings –> Applications –> Manage Applications and
then you can click the Uninstall button for an app.
Disable Home Screen Widgets You Don’t Need
If you’ve got loads of widgets that are pulling data from
the web, that means they are likely pulling down data in the background all the
time. You should try not to go overboard with these, or remove the ones you
don’t actually need.
Disable Animated Wallpaper
Yeah, that sweet animated wallpaper doesn’t help your
battery any. Get rid of it for a small extra battery savings.
Use APNDroid to Kill Your Entire Data Connection When You
If you’re using a phone that’s on the AT&T or T-Mobile
networks, you can use the APNDroid utility to kill your data connection
entirely with a simple widget. It doesn’t work on Verizon phones in my testing.
It’ll disable the data but still allow regular calls and SMS.
Keep the Battery from
Getting Too Hot
One of the quickest ways to kill a battery is to leave it
out in the sun—try and keep your phone somewhere that isn’t too hot whenever
possible. You’ll end up needing to replace the battery a lot quicker if you
don’t.
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