15 Easy Ways To Save your iPhone’s Battery Life

This post is a few year's old but still very much relevant in 2020: 

Away from a power source with an empty battery? Don't panic, here's what you need to do:

So here’s what you need to do if you see that disturbing ‘Low Battery’ message saying you have 20% of battery remaining:

1. Don’t panic, 20% still means you can use your phone for even a couple of hours.
2. The screen is the biggest battery eater: open the control center and reduce the brightness level to the minimum needed (20%-30% should do). If you have auto-brightness turned on – make sure to turn it off.
3. Turn off AirDrop and Bluetooth.
4. Make sure you don’t have any GPS/Map application open, not even in the background. Navigators drain your battery even if you do not actively use them because they run in the background.
5. Avoid using messages apps like WhatsApp which use Push Notifications. Push Notifications consume a lot of energy.

So those are 5 immediate things to do if that 20% battery remaining message catches you off-guard.

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Here are 10 additional tips for extending your iPhone battery life:

1. Turn off Background Apps Refresh: go to Settings >> General >> Background App Refresh and turn off apps that you don’t need to run in the background. Leave only the apps you know you will need to be up-to-date like navigators and EverNote. Navigator apps should have the option to run in the background but then you need to “kill” them properly when not in use using the multitasking feature.
2. Cancel Push Notifications: almost every app wants to send you push notifications, but the mechanism is very expensive in battery life and should be minimized. go to Settings >> Notification Center and cancel most of the apps there. Leave only the once you need in order to remain productive with your phone.
3. Disable Location Services if you don’t really need them: go to Settings >> Privacy >> Location Services and turn off every app that doesn’t really need to know your location every few minutes.
4. Turn off background apps update: go to Settings >> iTunes & AppStore and turn off the automatic download option. It’s not a must-have feature and will at least let you enjoy exploring what’s new with your apps in the AppStore
5. Reduce Motions: go to Settings >> General >> Accessibility and turn on: Reduce Motion.
   This will reduce some of the iOS7 coolness in the homescreen (disabling Parallex, but then again – who needs it anyway…
6. Take care of your battery: keep it between 40%-80% as much as possible. Avoid reaching 0% and aim to get there only once every 1-2 months for full discharge/charge and calibration.
   Avoid too short charging sessions but don’t leave your phone hooked to a cable too many hours or days.
7. Optimize your Spotlight Search: I really like the Spotlight search, in some scenarios, it’s the fastest way to access information, numbers, passwords, even if they are hidden in emails, SMS, etc.
   It comes with a cost though: iOS is continuously indexing data to make sure it’s quickly accessible through the Spotlight search. This slows down the device and kills the battery. To improve the situation without losing the functionality – select only the type of information you really wish to search from by going to Settings >> General >> Spotlight Search and uncheck the items you don’t often use like podcasts, videos, music, and others.
8. Turn off the option to join Wifi networks automatically: go to Settings >> Wi-Fi and uncheck the option ‘Ask to Join Networks’ – this means that known networks will still be connected automatically but when roaming you will not be prompt with new networks unless you look for them yourself. It’s one of my favorite features in iOS since the first versions of it, but it causes the phone to constantly look for new networks that consume the battery.
9. Take good care of your screen: don’t leave it open for no reason, don’t wait for the screen to dim automatically – turn it off. When speaking with the speaker – shut down the screen to save battery, turn off auto-brightness on a regular basis, and learn to tune it when full brightness is not really needed.
10. Regularly disable all sorts of unwanted services such as AirDrop or location-based services unless you really need them: make yourself a habit to clean apps and services every once in a while: this will reduce the chances of having an app that is working on the background without your knowledge.

That’s it for today. Keep this guide handy in case you run into one of those situations where your battery drops dead exactly when you need it the most.