I often hear people say “My Android battery life sucks!”, to which I usually reply “Yeah, unless you’ve tweaked it, it probably does.”
This article will explore some easy ways for any Android device user to improve their battery life, using…
MonkeyBiz’s Rules of Android Battery Conservation.
First off, let’s talk reasonable expectations. No amount of tweaking will make your phone battery last forever. In fact, barring something extraordinary, your phone will probably top out at 16-20 hours of normal use. With an extended battery, you might hit a full 24. Consequently, charge your phone every night.
From a purely practical perspective, the absolute best I advice I can give for improving your Android experience, as it relates to battery life, is buying a second battery and a charger and leaving it plugged in. It gives you the option of changing batteries and moving on with a full charge in under a minute. It’ll cost you a little, but it’s well worth the investment.
If your device has a non-removable battery, tough noogies. Shoulda bought a better device.
The Golden Rule: Always have a second battery on the charger.
Moreover, it doesn’t hurt to have chargers everywhere. I have one in my car, at my desk at work, at home on my desk, and at home on my nightstand. Considering most devices use a micro-USB compatible port, you shouldn’t have a problem finding a few.
The Silver Rule: Have battery chargers everywhere you go.
Now, the first thing you’re going to want to do to determine what exactly is draining your phone’s battery life is to go to the Battery page. Did you know that your phone has a Battery page? I bet you didn’t. You access it by going to Settings > About Phone > Battery. Selecting “Battery use” will give you a detailed display of what exactly has been using your device’s battery.
More likely than not, your biggest power hogs are going to be your display, cell standby, and Wifi standby.
So, now that we know what’s draining your juice, let’s talk about how we can stop the bleeding.
The #1 thing, in my experience, that people fail to do, is properly manage their display brightness. They leave the brightness cranked up on their screen and wonder why their battery dies in four hours. I have a toggle widget on my home screen that toggles between 0% (low light conditions light nighttime and bars), 30% (where I normally keep my brightness), and 100% (outside on a sunny day). You’ll find that smartly adjusting your display brightness based on conditions makes for a much improved battery life.
Another good tip is to check what your screen timeout is. I typically keep mine set at 30 seconds to a minute. You can adjust this under Settings > Display. The higher the timeout, the longer it takes your screen to turn off if you’re not using it.
A quick note on Automatic Brightness: some people like it, some do not. I feel like it sets my brightness too high by default and doesn’t adapt well. Your results may vary. It is, strictly speaking, better than nothing, but not comparable to manual management.
Rule #1: Turn your display brightness down unless a higher brightness is absolutely necessary.
Mobile data (3G, 4G, 4G LTE) is incredibly battery intensive compared to WiFi. Simply connecting to WiFi when you’re at home, work, etc. can extend your battery life significantly. Typically speaking, I’m on WiFi at home and at work, and on 4G LTE in between, or when I’m out and about.
Rule #2: Only use mobile data if WiFi is not available.
I love the fact that we’re finally getting broadband-class speeds to our mobile phones. I just wish that it didn’t absolutely thrash the battery in the process.
Every 4G LTE phone on the market today is running a first generation LTE radio, which is to say it’s not incredibly power efficient. Consequently, using 4G LTE for an extended period of time will drain your battery significantly.
So, if you happen to have a 4G LTE device, I would recommend picking up a toggle widget from the Android Market. I use LTE OnOff, which opens a settings menu that allows you to change from 4G to 3G.
Worth noting: the next version of CyanogenMod, CM9, will include an LTE toggle in its built in notification settings.
Rule #3: 4G is a battery destroyer.
Do me a quick favor: go to Settings > Accounts & sync. How many things do you have listed there? 6? 10? Every one of those items works in the background of your OS, using precious battery life to send and receive data. Now, some of those things you want to run. For example, I like having my Google Contacts synced on a regular basis, so that if something happens to my phone they’re still available. I like getting my Gmail in a timely fashion. I like getting notifications for Facebook and Twitter. These are all important things. However, the Stocks and the News apps that are included on my phone don’t need to sync, because I don’t use them.
If you’re rooted, you can remove some of these included applications without issue. If not, select the application, then uncheck everything that’s selected to sync. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s better than nothing. Moreover, you can select to only sync certain things. The choice is yours.
Rule #5: Beware of Accounts & sync.
So, if you’ve done all of these things, and your battery is still dying after 8 hours, it’s possible your phone is running dogshit software. This is not out of the question. With the exception of the Nexus series, most phones do not run stock Android, and stuff like TouchWiz and Sense can easily suck your battery to nothing. However, we’re Android users, and unlike those silly iPhone users, we can do something about this. We can root our phones and install new software like Cyanogenmod that can significantly improve the battery life, just by virtue of not being entirely full of carrier-mandated crap.
And that brings us to our final rule…
The Android Prime Directive: When in doubt, hack the planet.
If anyone has anything they’d like to add, or would like some advice, leave a comment!
Please also see the previous Droid Does posts: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
