Tips to fix Battery usage
Before we proceed further giving you tips on how to improve battery life, we think it is important to know how much battery life your new iPhone is expected to deliver, so you can gauge for yourself if you should be concerned about battery life. Below is the battery life from the tech specs page on Apple’s website.
ow is the battery life from the tech specs page on Apple’s website.
iPhone 6s battery life (left), iPhone 6s Plus battery life (right)
It is important to understand that your battery life will vary as per your usage, so if you listen to your music locally from the Music app and not stream off LTE/3G/Wi-Fi, your battery life would last much longer.
You can check the battery usage and standby time since the last full charge via the Settings app under the Time since last full charge section (Settings > Battery).
Usage is the amount of time iPhone has been awake and in use since the last full charge. The phone is awake when you’re on a call, using email, listening to music, browsing the web, or sending and receiving text messages, or even during certain background tasks such as auto-checking email.
Battery Percentage
By default, iOS displays the battery level in the top right corner of the status bar. You can keep track of the charge remaining in your iPhone more easily by enabling the battery percentage indicator, which displays the battery left in percentage. To see the percentage of battery remaining, navigate to Settings > Battery and tap on the Battery Percentage toggle to turn it on.
Now that you know how much battery life you should expect and you can track it with the battery percentage indicator, check these 9 tips to help you manage and improve battery life on your shiny new iPhone:
1. Battery usage
The first step in fixing the battery problems is to understand battery usage. In iOS 8 Apple added the naming and shaming feature, which gives you a breakdown of battery usage by apps. Apple has made some improvements to this feature in iOS 9. It now gives you the amount of time the app was used and the amount of time it was running in the background. You can use that information to identify the battery hogs.
How to find battery usage on your iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus
- Launch the Settings app
- Tap on Battery
This will show you all the apps and internal services like Home & Lock screen that are consuming battery on your iPhone. By default, it shows you the battery hogs in the last 24 hours. You can also check the apps that are consuming battery in the last 4 days by tapping on the Last 4 Days tab as you can see in the screenshot above. You can also tap the clock icon to the right on Last 4 days to find out how much time you’ve used the apps, and how much time the apps have been running in the background.
Identifying battery hogs
The battery usage provides you information about how much battery is consumed by various apps and services on your device. It is important to mention here that an app with a high percentage battery usage does not necessarily mean it is a battery hog. It could be because you were using it a lot, or if it was running in the background to upload or download content.
The apps that should be a concern are ones that show up on top of power consumption list even though you haven’t been using them. iPhone will also tell you what activity that could have resulted in battery consumption such as Background activity in case of the Mail app in the screenshot above.
What next
If you’ve identified an app that is draining battery life on your device, here are some of the things you can do to extend your iPhone’s battery life, especially if it is third-party app:
- If you can live without the app then the best thing to do is delete the app.
- While iOS takes care of suspending apps in the background, it’s likely that some apps wake up in the background to fetch content off the network. You may want to force close apps like VoIP, navigation and streaming audio apps if you’re not using them as they’re known to drain battery life. It is important to note here that you should only close apps that you don’t want to use. It is a not a good practice to force close all apps, as that could have an adverse impact on battery life. Force close an app by double-pressing the home button scrolling through the apps to find the one you want to close, and swiping up on the app card to close it.
- If you want to use the app, then you should seriously consider disabling Location Services (Settings > Privacy > Location Services) and Background app refresh(Settings > General > Background App Refresh) features for the app as they can end up consuming battery life. We will cover it more detail next.