What can I do to increase battery life on my Android device?

Question

What can I do to get better battery life on my Droid? Battery life seems awful. Less than 15 hours or so on normal usage.

Answer 1

I played with this for a little while after getting my Droid, and found that there are a few easy things you can do that make a big difference. There's also a lot of misinformation out there, so you need to do some testing. I get 20 hours of regular use or 16 hours of heavy use.

Note that these are my results on a Motorola Droid with OS 2.1. Your results may vary, particularly if you're using a different OS version!

• Don't use Live Wallpapers. They're cool, but they eat battery.
• Don't use Sense UI. That's HTC's home app. Again, it's pretty, but not friendly to battery.
• Prefer the back button over the home button. The back button lets apps decide if they want to run in the background. The home screen often leaves apps running when they don't need to.
• Don't use app killers! There's no need for them if you use the back button, and you'll end up crippling other apps because of non-obvious dependencies between apps.
• Use WiFi whenever you have access to a network because it uses less battery than 3G. (Shorter distance, lower power.) Turn WiFi off when you don't have access to a network, otherwise it will keep looking for a WiFi network it can use (which drains battery).
• Reduce the frequency at which apps refresh their content. Common offenders are social media clients (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and news or weather apps.
• Finally, watch your battery usage under Settings -> About Phone -> Battery -> Battery Use. This will show you what has been using the battery since it was last charged. (So it shows nothing while charging!) If anything unexpected is using the battery, consider replacing it with another app or service.

Best of luck, and enjoy your Android phone!

Answer 2

Some of the biggest power drainers: GPS, Wifi, and Bluetooth.

In general, it is best to keep these services off unless you are using them. However, GPS will only be used when an application calls for it, so you could technically leave it on all the time.

Some other tips:

• Lower the screen brightness
• Turn off 3G (if you have a phone that you can switch between 3G and 2G).
• Disable automatic Data Sync or:
• Set your apps to sync at longer intervals or don't use apps/widgets that do synchronize often
• Turn off any unnecessary vibrations or haptic feedbacks
• Disable the keyboards backlight
• Avoid using the speakers, opt in for using headphones
• Underclock the CPU (rooted users)
• Turn off data completely (using an app like APNDroid)
• Don't use task killers to automatically kill off processes. They simply will respawn. Uninstall undesired apps.
• Use applications like Locale or Tasker to control your phone's Wifi/GPS/Bluetooth/Sreen brightness/etc. settings automatically with profiles that activate under certain conditions
• Set your screen timeout to a short time interval. Then use Screebl to keep your phone screen on when the phone is only held at certain angles.

Answer 3

Android comes with a widget to easily turn on and off the most common power drainers.

To get it on the home screen:

1. long press on empty area of home screen
2. select 'android widgets'
3. select 'power control' (it takes up a whole row)

It allows you to turn on/off bluetooth, wi-fi, gps, auto aync and screen brightness.

The notifications bar allows wi-fi, bluetooth and gps to be turned on and off.

Answer 4

I usually find that the display uses the most battery. Turning down the brightness drastically improves my battery life.

Answer 5

Consider JuiceDefender. This app turns off your data services when the phone's screen is off and then only enables them again for 3 minutes every 15 (this is configurable). By making all your apps sync at once on a schedule you prevent a lot of thrashing on your radios. It can also prevent the wifi from searching for hotspots when you are not close to any stored hotspots. Also, watch out for task killers, since they are always running, monitoring apps, they can end up causing more drain than the apps themselves

Answer 6

There are so many things one can do I don't wanna repeat here: Remove bad apps, reduce brightness of your dis... ahem, said: not repeat, OK. But if you think about what you could turn off/down and what effect it offers: There's a nice table to be found at the German technology site Heise, titled Energiesparplan (Google Translate Version here). They slightly modified a Motorola Droid to be able to get precise data on energy consumption -- and ended up with a nice table like this, which already substracts the "base consumption" and thus gives the data for each component/action.

In July 2012, the same publisher again made something similar with his article Durchhaltetraining (Google translate: Hang on! -- this article is not yet available online, but usually becomes available after a while, say 12 month or so), this time utilizing the more recent Samsung Galaxy S3 -- so I add its values here:

┌─────────────────┬────────────────────┬───────────┐
| Action          | Motorola Droid     | Galaxy S3 |
├─────────────────┼────────────────────┼───────────┤
| Video recording |            1557 mW |   1683 mW |
| UMTS Upload     |            1410 mW |   1033 mW |
| UMTS Download   |            1349 mW |   1074 mW |
| EGDE Upload     |            1179 mW |           |
| Wifi Download   |            1158 mW |    549 mW |
| Play Video*1    |            1135 mW |    597 mW |
| UMTS call       |             983 mW |    637 mW |
| Camera*1        |             934 mW |   1460 mW |
| EGDE Download   |             853 mW |           |
| BT receive      |             751 mW |    487 mW |
| Display (max)   |             730 mW |   1568 mW |
| GPS Searching   |             550 mW |    263 mW |
| GSM call        |             511 mW |    297 mW |
| BT send         |             487 mW |    454 mW |
| Wifi Upload     |             479 mW |    488 mW |
| Display (min)   |             310 mW |    567 mW |
| MP3 play        |             160 mW |    153 mW |
| UMTS Standby    |            18.3 mW |   10.9 mW |
| GSM/EDGE Standby|            11.6 mW |    9.5 mW |
| Wifi Stdby 2.4  |             7.8 mW |    9.3 mW |
| Wifi Stby 5 GHz |               -    |   14.6 mW |
| BT Standby      |             2.8 mW |    1.8 mW |
| GPS Standby     |             0.4 mW |    0.7 mW |
| NFC Standby     |               -    |      4 mW |
| Wifi Tether*2   |                    |    372 mW |
| Wifi Tether DL*3|                    |   1254 mW |
└─────────────────┴────────────────────┴───────────┘

*1 fullscreen, already minus the display
*2 Tether active with 1 user
*3 download from notebook via Wifi Tether

As an additional reference, the baseline: Ariplane Mode: 6.4 mW.

Recommendation for cold days to get warm fingers: Take your device with both hands, plug in the charger. Now stream a HD video from youtube via 3G, play it fullsize, and in the background do some video recording which in parallel gets uploaded via 3G. CAREFUL !!! Wear gloves... #-)

Answer 7

I run Tasker on my HTC and it's made a noticeable difference without me having to think about power-management. It's kind of a scripting tool for the phone - set a condition and what you want to happen as a result.

Mine is set to turn off Mobile Internet whenever connected via Wifi (and vice versa), only turn on Bluetooth when docked in the car, turn off Wifi when I leave home or work (and forget!) and dim the display after dark.

I've also got it to automatically turn on/off GPS when set apps are running.

It's a set-and-forget app and allows you to automate a lot of the good advice on other answers above. Downside is that it's not free; but cheap. YMMV, but I'm a happy user.

Answer 8

I discovered one thing that absolutely killed my battery life:
Setting Wi-Fi Sleep Policy to When screen turns off. <--- Don't do this!

Make sure it is set to Never sleep or else it will power the Wi-Fi radio on/off every time it needs to sync something.

On my Samsung Galaxy S Captivate this can be found under
Settings -> Wireless and network -> Wi-Fi Settings -> MenuKey:Advanced

Answer 9

To add to these great suggestions;

• Dont use live wallpapers.
• Use a dark background if you have AMOLED.

Good guide here with these points and more; Android Battery Saving Guide

Answer 10

If you have an OLED screen (I know the Droid doesn't), then you can get significant savings by tweaking what is displayed. Jeff Sharkey has recently posted a blog entry describing his experiments with screen colour and the effect on battery usage.

Filtering to show only red pixels only requires 35% of the original baseline OLED panel current, on average. Adding back the baseline current, the best case overall is about 42% of the original system current, effectively doubling the battery life. Also, showing only red pixels doubles as an awesome night vision mode, perfect for astronomy. :)

So a dark and/or reddish background could save a lot of juice.

Answer 11

Unfortunately battery life on android devices seems to be worse then other similair phones (iPhone and blackberry). This is from personal, anecdotal experience.

Things to do are to check your update frequency settings-> accounts & sync. You can lower your update frequencies.

Additionally keep blue tooth or wifi off when you dont' need them. You can find widgets for your homescreen that will let you toggle these quickly.

Also settings-> About Phone -> Battery -> Battery Use could show you any unusual heavy hitters on your battery.

You can also find applications in the market such as "Spare Parts" that give you more detailed battery use information.

Some people have reported that that applications such as "Advanced Task Killer" can be used to periodically kill running applications if you find that your phone vendor has installed any pesky applications that you want to periodically kill. On my current phone though I've found that Advanced Task Killer just used unnecessary battery power and didn't really help me.

Answer 12

SetCPU is a great little software available for free on XDA forums and on the market for 1.99$.

It allows to set different CPU profiles in different conditions.

I have set the following profiles and the battery usage dropped a lot:

• Default mode is conservative with maximum speed set to 768 Mhz (I have Snapdragon 1Ghz CPU).
• Let the CPU run at maximum speed and performance profile when the phone is in charge via USB.
• Set the CPU to drop to 500 Mhz and powersave profile when the screen is off.

There are many other possibilities. The only draw back is that it requires root access.

Answer 13

Don't use Google Voice for Text Messages the way that you are supposed to use it out of the box.

If you set up GV to push your SMS notifications as email (rather than maintaining the Voice app and constant polling), and then do all of your replies via email it minimizes the use for GV, saves on battery, and keeps your SMS's free.

Answer 14

For 4g phones, keep the 4g antenna off until you have a use for it. And if no 4g spot is found, turn it off. 4G antenna is the most expensive power wise antenna out there. And unless you are watching videos even htc recommends turning it off.

Answer 15

If your main power drain is the screen, you might try a magnetic case (or adding a magnet to your existing case) + Holster Snooze to automatically turn off your screen when you put your phone away.

Answer 16

Try to do CPU-intensive tasks like downloading stuff, installing updates, watching video, etc, whilst connected to a charger. This will reduce the wear on your battery so it will perform well for longer.

Answer 17

My preferred solution: get a different phone.

I had a couple of Android phones with awful batter life, and I just got a Nexus S, and I'm very happy with its battary life. I think the amoled display helps.

A bought a couple phones and returned them a week later because the battery life was awful. I suggest you do the same, if we as consumers keep putting up with poorly designed phones, they will just keep making them. Who cares if you have a superfast 4g phone if the battery is dead!