13 Tips/Tricks To Save iPhone Battery Life

It seems inevitable to come across iPhone battery life issues as your iPhone gets older.  These tips and tricks will help save your battery life, keeping you from charging mid day. As Apple’s iOS operating system continues to become more powerful and iPhones are equipped with higher resolution screens and more powerful processors it is an uphill battle to maintain battery life. Luckily there are multiple ways to maximize your battery life. Below I outline a multitude of tips/tricks to save your iPhone battery life.

Turn Off Vibrate

Vibrate uses more battery life than ringtones and if not necessary, turn it off during meetings or while sleeping. If you don’t want to turn off vibrate, then lessen the intensity of the vibrations.

Close Unused Apps

Double click the home key, which will bring up a list of your open apps at the bottom.  Hold your finger on one of the apps and they will start jiggling with little minus signs in the corner.  Click the minus signs and turn off all open apps.  If you don’t do this often you’ll be amazed at how many open applications are running on your iPhone.

Dim Your Screen

This is a huge one, dimming your screen will significantly improve your power use. Ideally you want the auto brightness turned on to make sure the screen is more dim in low light areas. Try lowering the brightness up to the point where it becomes harder to read. Go to Settings > Brightness & Wallpaper and dim your screen.

Turn Off Location Services

– Many apps use location services to target results, ads and functionality but often you don’t realize or need them to use location services.  You can tell if an app is using location services by the little arrow at the top right corner of your iPhone.  Location GPS uses quite a lot of battery life, turn it off by going to Settings > Privacy > Location Services.

Turn Off Bluetooth

If you’re not using Bluetooth, turn it off as it is continuously transmitting a Bluetooth signal.  Go to Settings > Bluetooth.

Decrease Auto-lock

Go to Settings > General > Auto-Lock and decrease down to 1 minute so that your iPhone goes to sleep quicker when you aren’t using it.

Turn Off When Inactive

Hit the power button to put your phone to sleep immediately after using it to save battery life.  If you know you’re not going to use it for a couple of hours you could completely turn your phone off.

Turn Off Push Email

Push data automatically “pushes” your emails from the server to your iPhone so you get the email immediately.  This requires a good bit of battery and data usage.  Turn off your push data and it won’t constantly be checking for new messages, saving battery and wireless data. Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar > Fetch New Data.

Turn Off Fetch Email

Fetch email will search for emails on the server at regular intervals, which uses your battery life and data.  Fetch less often or completely turn off fetch to save your iPhone energy. Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar > Fetch New Data.

Turn Off Push Notifications

Many apps have the ability to send push notifications, where they will immediately let you know of activity on the app, this is indicated by the little red number next to an app.  By turning this off you save battery life and wireless data, preventing the apps from constantly pushing notifications.  To turn off go to Settings > Notifications and you can disable notifications for select apps.

Turn Off Unused 4G or WiFi

If you know that you will not need cellular data such as 3G or 4G because you are in an area without service, turn it off to conserve battery.  Similarly, if you know you will not be close to a WiFi hotspot for a while, turn it off to save your iPhone’s battery. Alternatively, you could just turn your iPhone on airplane mode. Bluetooth can be found at Settings > Bluetooth.  3G/4G can be found at Settings > General > Cellular.

Up To Date Software

Apple is typically very good with releasing timely software updates for iOS and I would recommend to always update your software.  If you just got a new phone or a new iOS make sure you keep up to date on software versions.  I’ve had a couple instances where I got a new phone and the battery life was going down very quickly, Apple soon thereafter released a software update fixing these issues and the problem was solved.

Buy A Battery Addition

If none of these seem to work, a last case scenario is to buy an iPhone battery add on.  Head over to Amazon.com or Best Buy and pick up one of the many external batteries.  Of course this will make your iPhone a bit bulkier.