iPhone battery still dying at midday? 5 more tips to help your iPhone go all day
In our earlier article, we gave you five tips and tricks to stretch your iPhone battery life. We focused on limiting battery-draining background processes and optimizing your iPhone display to prevent it from running your battery down unnecessarily.
Now, we bring you five more tips and tricks to help you squeeze the most out of a single charge, including limiting mail fetch, automatic app updates, app suggestions, using content blockers and iOS 9’s new Low Power Mode.
Use manual fetch for non-critical mail accounts
If you use your iPhone for work email – and let’s face it, most of us do – you likely open the Mail app very often throughout your day. Every time you do, all your email accounts linked to the Mail app will refresh.
For better battery life, set non-critical mail accounts (or ones that do not support native push) to fetch mail manually.
Now your iPhone won’t have to fetch mail in the background and will only retrieve mail when you actually need it.
To fetch mail manually for individual accounts, go to Settings > tap on Mail, Contacts, Calendars > tap on Fetch New Data > select Manually.
If this option is too extreme for you, you can also select to fetch mail every 15 minutes, every half hour, or hourly and still squeeze a little bit of extra life out of your iPhone battery.
Turn off automatic app updates over cellular connections
This tip will not only extend your iPhone’s battery life but also save you a bundle on your cellular data plan.
To prevent apps from automatically updating over your cellular connection, go to Settings > tap on App and iTunes Stores > toggle off the option to Use Cellular Data.
Your apps will still update over Wi-Fi and since the connection is bound the both stronger and faster, the drain on your battery will be significantly reduced.
Turn off app suggestions
As per Apple’s description, app suggestions use your location and app usage to suggest apps that may be relevant when you’re in a certain area. These suggestions show up on your Lock screen and in the app switcher.
Turning off app suggestions will result in only a small reduction on battery drain, but as they say “every little bit helps.”
Go to Settings > tap on App and iTunes Stores > scroll to Suggested Apps > toggle off the option for Installed Apps.
Use a content blocker in Safari (iOS 9 only)
Love them or hate them, content blockers have added benefits that go beyond hiding annoying popups, auto-play videos, and ads.
Installing an iOS 9 content blocker in mobile Safari will also stop scripts and trackers from draining your iPhone’s battery.
“For a number of websites that contained mobile ads with a lot of data, Web page data sizes decreased significantly and load times accelerated enormously with ad blockers turned on,” according to The New York Times. “The iPhone’s battery life also improved — but more modestly — with ads removed.”
Enable Low Power Mode (iOS 9 only)
Low Power Mode, a new feature in iOS 9, disables battery-hungry tasks such as Mail Fetch, Background App Refresh, motion effects, and animated wallpapers, resulting in as many as three hours of extra battery life, claims Apple.
To turn on Low Power Mode in iOS 9, go to Settings > tap on Battery > toggle on the option for Low Power Mode.
For a more in-depth look at how Low Power Mode in iOS 9 works and how it affects your iPhone’s performance, read our deep-dive here.
Image credit: Mike Mozart, Flickr, CC BY 2.0
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