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.), email, 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

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 available online, but paywalled), this time utilizing the more recent Samsung Galaxy S3; same for the Samsung Galaxy S6 in January 2016¹ – so I add their values here:

┌─────────────────┬────────────────────┬───────────┬───────────┐
| Action          | Motorola Droid     | Galaxy S3 | Galaxy S6 |
├─────────────────┼────────────────────┼───────────┤───────────┤
| Video recording |            1557 mW |   1683 mW |  2277 mW² |
| UMTS Upload     |            1410 mW |   1033 mW |   908 mW  |
| UMTS Download   |            1349 mW |   1074 mW |  1138 mW  |
| EGDE Upload     |            1179 mW |           |           |
| Wifi Download   |            1158 mW |    549 mW |  1138 mW  |
| Play Video*1    |            1135 mW |    597 mW |   395 mW² |
| UMTS call       |             983 mW |    637 mW |   362 mW  |
| Camera*1        |             934 mW |   1460 mW |  2335 mW  |
| EGDE Download   |             853 mW |           |   635 mW  |
| BT receive      |             751 mW |    487 mW |           |
| Display (max)   |             730 mW |   1568 mW |  1227 mW  |
| GPS Searching   |             550 mW |    263 mW |   191 mW  |
| GSM call        |             511 mW |    297 mW |   310 mW  |
| BT send         |             487 mW |    454 mW |           |
| Wifi Upload     |             479 mW |    488 mW |   987 mW  |
| Display (min)   |             310 mW |    567 mW |   260 mW  |
| MP3 play        |             160 mW |    153 mW |   140 mW  |
| UMTS Standby    |            18.3 mW |   10.9 mW |  16.2 mW  |
| GSM/EDGE Standby|            11.6 mW |    9.5 mW |    15 mW  |
| Wifi Stdby 2.4  |             7.8 mW |    9.3 mW |    18 mW  |
| Wifi Stby 5 GHz |               -    |   14.6 mW |    20 mW  |
| BT Standby      |             2.8 mW |    1.8 mW |   2.9 mW  |
| GPS Standby     |             0.4 mW |    0.7 mW |   0.2 mW  |
| NFC Standby     |               -    |      4 mW |   0.1 µW  |
| Wifi Tether*2   |                    |    372 mW |   542 mW³ |
| Wifi Tether DL*3|                    |   1254 mW |  1871 mW³ |
└─────────────────┴────────────────────┴───────────┴───────────┘

*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: Airplane Mode: 6.4 / 6.4 / 10.7 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/LTE, play it fullsize, and in the background do some video recording which in parallel gets uploaded via 3G/LTE. CAREFUL !!! Wear gloves … #-)

---

^{1: calculations used a different base with this third run, so I „rebased“ the values here to match
2: full HD
3: with LTE}

Answer 4

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 5

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

Answer 6

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 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

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 12

Unfortunately battery life on android devices seems to be worse then other similar 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 don't 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 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

If you have a Nexus 5 the following Youtube video entitled "Nexus 5 Top 10 Battery Saving Tips" should prove useful and highlights:

• Turning off vibrating Key Press
• Turning off auto brightness
• Setting GPS to Battery Saving
• Using the Default Launcher
• Turning NFC off
• Use Apps like Tasker for Automation
• Minimise the use of Widgets & Screens
• Use a custom kernel (requires Root)
• Use ART runtime
• Turn off "OK Google"

Please note that whilst the video highlights the Nexus 5, it will of course be applicable to a whole host of other Android devices as well.

For a more comprehensive look see also this guide entitled "How to extend your Android’s battery life" published on April 15th 2013, for Android Authority.

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

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 17

If you have root access on your device, it's certainly worth taking a look at Greenify. This app takes care for those processes permanently running in background and waking up your device needlessly: As soon as you switch your display off, Greenify "hibernates" apps you selected to be handled, so they can no longer wake up your device to "do something needless". They get "re-animated" once you switch your screen back on.

Answer 18

Just adding to what people have suggested for underclocking - you can create a profile for an underclocked frequency and enable that profile only when the phone is locked. This will ensure that your phone performs well when unlocked but saves battery when locked.

Answer 19

Turn off always on monitoring Apps, like the fitness applications. Google Fit has a High Precision mode that eats more battery.

Also turn off "Ok Google": Configuration → Idiom and Text → Google voice dictation → Ok Google detection → Turn off all, or at least the "from any screen" config.

Turn off any other monitoring App you can think about.

Answer 20

As no one mentioned this, so if all the other solutions didn't increase your battery lifetime, then a factory reset is your last choice. Based on this question, the user has said that he got tremendous battery performance after factory resetting the device.

Note: Factory resetting without backing up your data you will lose data. So backup all the data(contacts, SMS, app-data etc) before factory resetting and also read this answer

Answer 21

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 22

This is radical but very useful if you are in a remote region without cellular network or in an crowded event where the network capacity isn't enough for everybody: turn off your chips.

Go to Configuration → SIM Cards → uncheck all your cards.

If you have a multi-chip phone, turn off one your secondary chip that it will help.