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I will use my phone while trekking in a remote area and want to conserve its battery. I won't have phone or wifi networks, but I want to record my track using Google's My Tracks and take photos.

How should I configure my phone to maximize the battery duration?

I'd like to know the specific things I should change for using the phone as a GPS recorder and camera, so it is different of this question. I know that I can turn off wifi and the Sim chips. Maybe I should use another GPS tracker.

I have a lot of apps installed, and nowadays it looks like even a ridiculous weather app needs to start a service. Should I uninstall them?

I'm using a Moto G first generation and Android 5.0.2.

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MyTracks is a fairly power hungry app, because it does lots of things as well as recording a track. eg it shows maps, and graphs, and gives voice announcements etc. For just recording a track, a simpler app would be better.

I recommend GPS Logger for Android, which aims to be more battery effecient. It has lots of settings which can save battery power. Specifically, the time interval before recording a point - you can set this to 60 seconds or more. Also turn off the option for "keep GPS on between fixes". This should still record a fairly detailed track for typical walking speeds, though it may miss some of the tight corners or twisty paths.

For other power saving, yes it is worth turning off wifi and mobile data. You can also complete disable the mobile phone connection, ie set it to airplane mode. This help a lot if you are in an area with poor coverage, because otherwise the phone will waste power trying to find a signal. Obviously this means you can't receive any phone calls/texts, but recording a GPS track will work fine.

Also any other apps running in the background may be wasting power. You don't have to uninstall them, just disable the apps to stop them running. If you go to Settings > Battery, it will tell you what apps are using most power.

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  • Excellent answer. I didn't know that I could use the GPS in airplane mode. Changing MyTracks is another good option. The problem with the Battery setting is that now\days everybody just use Google services and it masquerades the real culprit.
    – neves
    Jun 20, 2015 at 2:45
  • I would really a love a "Safe mode" that would allow me to run my apps but stopped all services.
    – neves
    Jun 20, 2015 at 3:22

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