Improving battery life of an Android phone
So Androids are great and its everywhere. Phones, watches, TVs, cars… however, one thing that has not significantly improved over the years is the battery life management. Although larger capacity batteries have been introduced, android as the software has not been able to make a significant improvement in the core to consume less power and this can be extensively seen on mobile phones and the Wear OS software used in smartwatches.
How to improve the situation on mobile phones: Below are few tricks that I have tried on my daily driver, a Motorola X4 running Android 9 Pie for some time now and I see at least a marginal improvement in the battery drain issue. Hey, Something is better than nothing, right?
Disable background data
Android apps can consume data in the background. Which means that they can run in the background, connect to the internet and download some stuff even when you are not really using it causing battery drain. Below is a way to disable this, for simplicity, I am doing this on the Google Play Books app which I don’t really expect to download data in the background.
How to disable: Based on how stock your android phone OS is, you can find the settings here:
Settings>Apps & Notifications>{click on the app}>Data usage>{Uncheck} Background data
Apply Battery restrictions
The next thing that you could do is to apply Battery restrictions. Android introduced the Adaptive battery with the Android 9 Pie to do exactly this. However, I do not find it very effective as the apps still consume battery in the background.
How to apply: Based on how stock your android phone OS is, you can find the settings here:
Settings>Apps & Notifications>{click on the app}>Battery> Background restrictions>Restrict
IMPORTANT NOTE: This change on an app may change its behavior cause delayed notifications. Hence apply this restriction only on those apps which you don’t rely on everyday.
Disable adaptive brightness
Unless some app is misbehaving/consuming battery unnaturally, the screen ON time consumes the maximum amount of battery during your everyday use. Android 9 Pie also introduced something called the Adaptive brightness although most likely, it is just a re-branded Adaptive display. Disabling this feature and setting the screen brightness on the lower side can save some battery.
How to disable: Based on how stock your android phone OS is, you can find the settings here:
Settings>Display>Adaptive brightness>{uncheck} Adaptive brightness
Use tools like IFTTT to perform some scheduled/automated tasks
If This Then That, also known as IFTTT, is a free web-based service to create chains of simple conditional statements, called applets. It can use the device’s current location as a trigger to enable or disable hardware components like WiFi, Bluetooth etc. This can save you a lot of power. Download IFTTT here.
I have added the following applets in my device, you could create more.
Turn Off WiFi when i leave my home
Turn On WiFi when i reach my office
Turn Off WiFi when i leave office
Turn On WiFi when i reach back home
Turn Off Bluetooth and WiFi after 2 AM and turn them back On at 8 AM
How to create: Here is a short video on how you could create your own applets in the IFTTT mobile app.
Uninstall or disable bloatware
Let's be honest. Some phones come with a lot of bloatware and things that you are never going to use. Such apps can be and should be removed from your device. And if the apps cannot be removed/uninstalled, they can be disabled. Disabling such apps will stop it from running in the background and also remove it from the app drawer.
How to disable/uninstall: Based on how stock your android phone OS is, you can find the settings here:
Settings>Apps & Notifications>{click on the app}>Uninstall/Disable
Keyboard preference change
If you are someone who texts a lot, it would help if you turn off haptic response in the keyboard preference. Although it feels good, every character that you type takes additional power if the haptic response is active. The same applies to the sound on keypress.
How to disable: Assuming that you use Google’s keyboard app, the GBoard.
Keyboard settings(the gear icon)>Preferences>{Under} Key press>{disable} Haptic feedback on keypress
Keyboard settings(the gear icon)>Preferences>{Under} Key press>{disable} Sound on keypress
Notification changes
Thanks to bigger RAM and ROM sizes, we tend to have a lot of apps installed on our phones. With apps, come push notifications. Many of these notifications are distractions and downright intrusive and they tend to consume a lot of power with vibrations and sound enabled.
We could be a little choosy here with which app notifications are really important and which ones can be disabled.
How to disable: Based on how stock your android phone OS is, you can find the settings here:
Settings>Apps & Notifications>{click on the app}>Notifications>{uncheck} Show notifications
NOTE: If the app categories notifications, you could leave the “Show notifications” checked and select only the required notification for an app. This will disable unwanted notifications while still allowing the required ones.
Daywise for notification heroes
If you are someone who is paranoid about missing notifications, you could also install the Daywise app. This app lets you schedule and see your notifications as a bundle in a neat inbox fashion without missing any of them.
You can choose the apps that you would like to receive immediate notifications from or you could schedule the rest of them into a bundle.
The app is still in development and is available as early access in the Google Play Store.
Conclusion and thoughts
There are many skinned/custom android distributions like Xiaomi’s MIUI and Opps’s ColorOS who implement some of the above tricks by default. However stock android does not and you could try them on such devices. I have been testing this for some time now and I could see a significantly less RAM is consumed(at-least 300 MB of reduction in RAM usage) and a better battery life with no misbehaviour from the restricted apps.
Please do let me know in the comments if you end up trying this and if you see an improvement in the battery department. I will update this post if I run into any trouble with the apps.
Thanks for reading!
