Take the right actions to improve the autonomy of your Android smartphone.
Android smartphones may be more and more enduring, some uses have an unfortunate tendency to drain your device’s battery. To avoid running out of steam when you are far from an electrical outlet, it is better to adopt certain reflexes to reduce energy consumption.
Android incorporates several features dedicated to autonomy management which, associated with the configuration of certain parameters will allow you to more or less drastically reduce energy consumption.
1. Activate the energy saving mode
To improve the battery life of your device, the first instinct to adopt is to activate Android’s energy saving mode. Once activated, the smartphone does not update the data of the applications until you open them and stops all use of the GPS when the screen of the device is turned off. Also, apps can no longer perform background tasks and Google Assistant will no longer respond to OK Google until you manually activate it.
To do this, go to Settings then, in the Battery menu, enter Battery Saver and tap Activate now.
You can also configure the battery saver to activate automatically based on the remaining charge level.
To do this, choose to activate it automatically, and set the battery percentage below which you want the battery saver to activate itself.
2. Use adaptive battery options
Most recent Android phones include an Adaptive Battery option that can detect applications that are too hungry in order to close them when they are running in the background.
Open Settings, enter Battery, and navigate to the Adaptive Battery options and verify that Use Adaptive Battery is enabled.
3. Switch to Dark Mode
If you are lucky enough to have a smartphone equipped with an OLED screen, activating Android’s dark mode or using the dark mode integrated into your various applications can help you improve the autonomy of your device. How? ‘Or’ What ? Quite simply because with this screen technology, the black pixels displayed are in reality off pixels.
So the more apps you use that use a dark theme, the less pixels on your screen are lit. Therefore, the screen needs less power to operate. If for applications like Facebook, the activation of the dark theme is integrated in the application’s settings, on the other hand, it is necessary to carry out some operations to activate the dark theme in other applications such as Google Photos, or in Google Chrome.
- Enable dark theme in Google Photos
- Activate the sober theme in Google Chrome
4. Use automatic brightness
Using high brightness can dramatically reduce your battery life. If it is possible to reduce it according to your needs from the notifications panel, you can also find the setting in Settings, then in the View menu under the heading Brightness level.
But the best is probably to use the option to adapt the brightness of the screen automatically according to your lighting conditions. Still in the Parameters Display menu, go to Brightness adjustment to activate the function.
5. Limit greedy applications
Improving the autonomy of your smartphone also involves monitoring the energy consumption of installed applications. To do this, go to Settings, then in Battery, tap the options menu to access Battery Usage.
The device’s charge and discharge curves are displayed, as well as the distribution of energy consumption by application.
Thus, the identification of applications that consume too much energy is simple and will allow you to find an alternative solution, or to set up certain limits (no GPS, no updating in the background, etc.).
To avoid as much as possible applications that are too greedy, prefer so-called applications Lite or Progressive Web Apps, web applications that can be installed directly from the Add menu to the home screen of the main menu of Google Chrome.
6. Limit the use of GPS
The use of location on a smartphone is also a source of high energy consumption. Some apps use background locating, so it’s best to do a little audit to check which apps really need background locating, and block others.
Open Android Settings and go to the Security & location menu. In the Privacy section, enter Location and tap Show all in Recent location requests. All applications that have recently used your smartphone’s GPS are listed there.
If one of them shouldn’t be there, you can prevent it from using your device’s location by going to App permissions.
Review all allowed apps and turn off the ones you don’t want location to be used for.
Finally, to locate you, in addition to using the integrated GPS, your smartphone is likely to use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, even if these two wireless connections are disabled.
Expand Advanced options and enter the Search menu to disable Wi-Fi search and Bluetooth search for location.
7. Disable Google Assistant
If initiating a Google request by simply launching an “OK Google” on your smartphone can be practical, this is done at the cost of constantly monitoring your smartphone to detect when you say it, and therefore certain energy consumption. .
To limit this unnecessary energy consumption, it is possible to deactivate this function of the Assistant. Open the Google app and go to the More tab.
Go to Settings, then from the Voice menu, go to the Voice Match menu and turn off Access with Voice Match. The Google Assistant will no longer be available when saying Ok Google but will remain available manually, by holding your finger on the home button, for example.
8. Suppress notifications
Are you receiving too many (too many) notifications? This undoubtedly has a negative impact on the autonomy of your device. Better, again, to sort between useful notifications, and those you really don’t need.
Open Settings and go to the Apps & notifications menu. Then go into Notifications, then in the section showing recently sent notifications, tap on Show all for the last seven days.
You will then obtain the list of applications that have sent notifications during the last week and will have plenty of time to deactivate those you do not / no longer need.
9. Limit mobile data usage in the background
When you are not using your smartphone, some apps continue to download data in the background. To avoid it, go to Settings, then in Network and Internet, go to Mobile network. Then enter the Data consumption by applications menu.
All applications that have used mobile data are listed there. For each app that you feel is not useful for it to be able to download mobile data in the background, that is, when you don’t voluntarily open those apps, enter the details of the app data consumption and uncheck the Background data option.
10. Reduce the duration of the automatic screen lock
To prevent your smartphone screen from staying on for too long after placing it on a table, go to Settings then, in Display, expand Advanced options.
Enter the Sleep menu and reduce the time to a minimum so that your device’s screen turns off quickly after a period of inactivity.