17 Tips to Boost Your Android Phone's Battery Life

Android smartphones are powerful, but unfortunately, they don't have endless battery life. In fact, many Android phone users would be happy to make it through a single day, hoping that a nightly recharge is sufficient.

A number of factors have conspired to reduce gadget endurance over the past several years. Thinner designs with less room for batteries, larger and brighter screens, faster quad-core processors, more software that runs in the background, and power-hungry GPS radios all share responsibility. The move from 3G to 4G networks a few years ago—particularly of the LTE variety—has also taken its toll.

These tips should apply across just about any Android phone. Try these tips to extend your handset's battery life:

1.      Use a dark background.  If you use a phone with an AMOLED screen, using black or dark wallpaper can save the battery.  This is because such screens light up only the colored pixels while black pixels remain unaffected.  The more dark or black pixels you have on your screen, the less power your phone will need to illuminate them.

2.        Turn off location tracking.  There are several apps on your phone that constantly track your location, but not all may actually need to use this information.  Since GPS tracking does use a lot of power on your smartphone, disable the location tracking in apps that you don’t need.

3.     See what's sucking the most juice. Navigate to Settings > Battery to see an organized breakdown of what's consuming your phone's battery. Applications and features will display in a descending list of battery hogs. If you see an application you barely use or a feature you never use, you'll want to uninstall the app or turn off the feature.

4.        Use lock screen notifications.  Enabling lock screen notifications can extend your phone’s battery life as you can read your notifications without having to unlock and light up the whole screen.

5.        Reduce email, Twitter, and Facebook polling. Set your various messaging apps to "manual" for the polling or refresh frequency, just as a test, and you'll instantly extend your device's battery life by a significant amount. Once you see what a difference that makes, try re-enabling just the most important ones, and possibly reducing their polling frequency in the process.

6.        Turn unnecessary hardware radios off. It's great that today's phones have LTE, NFC, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, but do you really need all five activated 24 hours per day? Android keeps location-based apps resident in the background, and the constant drain on your battery will become noticeable, fast. If your phone has a power control widget, you can use it to quickly turn on/off GPS (the largest power drain), NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LTE. On stock Android, swipe down to bring up the Notification bar, and then tap the icon on the top right corner.

7.        Use the ultra-power saving mode if you have it. Many android mobiles have Ultra Power Saving and Extreme Power Saving modes, that limits the phone to texting, phone calls, Web browsing, and Facebook. This can squeeze extra hours or even a day of standby time out of just a few remaining percentage points of battery.

8.        Trim apps running in the background. From Settings > Apps, swipe to the left; you'll see a list of apps that are currently running. Tap on each one to see what they're for; you can stop any apps that you don't need running in the background all of the time.

9.        Dump unnecessary home screen widgets and live wallpaper. Just because they're sitting on the home screen, seemingly inactive, doesn't mean they're not consuming power. This goes for widgets that poll status updates in the background, as well as ones that just sit there but look pretty and animated—not to mention animated live wallpaper. (But don't dump everything, as part of what makes Android great are the home screen customizations; just remove the ones you don't use.)

10.     Reduce the display brightness. This applies to your phone as well as laptop.  Most smartphones have an auto brightness feature, but it may help to manually adjust the brightness to make your phone’s battery last longer.

11.     Shorter timeout.  All android smartphones allow you to customize the display timeout time,  You might want to reduce it to a more practical level like 30 seconds, which will help you increase the battery efficiency of your smartphone.

12.     Update your apps only on Wi-Fi. Applications often get updated to use less battery power, so you should make sure your apps are up to date. Even if you configured the phone for automatic updates, some apps still require that you manually install updates.

It is better to install apps or schedule up-dates over Wi-fi, as being on bandwidth means you’re your phone will consume a considerable amount of power while up-dating apps.  You can also schedule these updates at times when you are plugged in, given that the phone you use supports it.

13.     Keep an eye on signal strength and use airplane mode. If you're in an area with poor cellular coverage, the phone will work harder to latch onto a strong-enough signal. This has an adverse effect on battery life. There's not much you can do about this one, but keep in mind that this could be the culprit behind a seemingly weak battery; it's worth popping the phone into Airplane mode if you don't need data or voice calls. Flight/airplane mode disables all wireless features.  Enabling this mode when in areas where cellarer or Wi-fi coverage is not strong can help in controlling drainage of your battery.

14.     Check the reviews. We conduct battery life tests on every single Android phone we review. Unsurprisingly, the results vary widely between handsets, even on the same network. When choosing a phone, make sure that real world talk time is sufficient. You can't go by what the manufacturer says; we see variances on the order of several hours of usage in both directions on a regular basis.

15.   Buy a battery case or larger extended battery. Battery cases combine a hardware enclosure, which protects your phone, with an extended battery that can double your phone's endurance. You can find models compatible with popular Android phones from a variety of manufacturers.

16.     Opt for original batteries only. You may save some money on battery purchases if you go for second-rate batteries, but such products will also deliver a sub-standard performance. If you find that your phone does not make it through the day even after using it conservatively, it may be time to get your battery checked.

17.     Deactivate vibration and haptic feedback.  Having the phone on ringer and on vibration can drain it.  So you might want to put off vibration unless you absolutely need the additional awareness.  Another way to preserve battery is by turning off the haptic feedback.