I made a video recently about claims related to charging your iPhone battery, I’ll link to it in
the description of this video. But in this video, I want to talk about settings in your iPhone
that you may not be aware of, where a simple toggle on or off could save you battery life,
without impacting your experience of the phone. Stick with me until the end of this video,
I reckon there’s going to be at least one setting here that you probably didn’t even know existed,
never mind considered switching off to save battery.
OK, let’s get into it.
You might think that turning on automatic updates would be a no-no when it comes to saving battery,
and for apps, I can see your point, it doesn’t make sense to waste battery updating an app
that you barely ever use. But when it comes to your OS, your operating system,
I’d definitely recommend having automatic updates switched on.
Apple are constantly tweaking and updating the operating system of your phone,
sometimes with new features, but more often than not with bug fixes.
If they determine that a certain part of the OS is causing significant battery drain for example,
they might release an update to the OS that would fix this, and you can only benefit from that fix
if you’re running the latest version. You might have your phone set to not
allow automatic updates - but how often do you check to see if you’re running the latest version?
I would absolutely recommend turning this setting on. Head to Settings, then General,
then Software Update, and ensure that Automatic Updates are switched on. You can also find
out what iOS version you’re running here, and find out if you’re up to date or not.
Background app refresh is pretty much what it sounds like, it allows an app
to refresh itself in the background while it’s in what Apple call ‘suspended mode’,
the name for when an app is open on your phone, but not the active app that you’re
currently using. This is important to understand, this setting isn’t allowing
apps that you don’t have open to refresh in the background, only suspended apps, so for example,
if I open News, and then immediately open Safari without closing the News app,
the News app is now a suspended app, operating in a kind of low power mode in the background.
The theory being that the suspended app can refresh and update itself in the background
while you’re in another app, and then as soon as you switch over to the background app, it will
be fully up to date and you won’t have to waste any time waiting for the app to refresh itself.
But, this can be power consuming, especially if you have lots of apps open.
Keep in mind that on most decent wifi and cellular connections,
refreshing the data in an app might only take a few seconds,
you need to decide whether those seconds matter enough to you, to potentially lose battery life.
Head into Settings, then General, then Background App Refresh. This switch up at the top is kind of
the kill-switch, turning this off will disable background app refresh for all your apps.
I’m not going to recommend that you do this, you can if you wish, but what I’d recommend
you do instead is spend a few minutes working through the list, turning off any apps that
you’re just not that bothered about being able to background refresh. So on my phone for example,
All 4, there’s absolutely no reason why that would need access to background refresh,
nor Books. Bus Checker might, so I might leave that one on, but you get the idea, it’s well
worth your time going through this list, and toggling off anything that you’re unsure about.
Mail fetch is another setting that, if you’re not careful, can drain more battery
than you might find worth it, in exchange for the benefits that you actually get from the setting.
Mail fetch basically means, how often should the mail app attempt to ‘fetch’ email from your
different mail servers, and there are various different settings that you can choose from,
which will have positive and negative impacts on your battery.
To get to this setting, head to Settings, then Mail, then Accounts, then Fetch New Data.
First of all, you could choose to switch off Push all together if you like, although you can see
from my accounts, only one account actually supports Push and that’s my iCloud account,
all of these other accounts are Gmail, which doesn’t support the setting anyway.
If I click into this Gmail account up at the top, you can see that I can choose between Fetch and
Manual. Manual means that, until I open the email app and swipe down to force a manual refresh,
email won’t be fetched from the server, and honestly this is enough for a lot of people,
if you don’t get a lot of email and if you don’t really get much in the
way of important email, this might be sufficient for you.
But, if you’d prefer to have the app automatically fetch email, but perhaps on a slower schedule,
choose Fetch. Then back on the previous screen, you can set the schedule for how frequently the
app should fetch mail for you. Either every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes, hourly or manually.
Consider how frequently you actually need your email to be delivered to you,
and consider making changes here if that extra battery life is more important to you.
Location services are a crucial part of what makes the iPhone experience so good, however, many of
the apps that access location data will look to do so much more frequently than they actually need
to, and some apps will do this because it allows them to capture information about you, which they
can use to build a profile about you and your habits. Aside from the privacy implications of
this, this also eats away at your battery life, so I’d advise you to take some control over this.
Head to Settings, then Privacy, then Location Services. Don’t switch location services
off in general, I think that’s a nuclear option, and your phone is going to need
to be able to use the function from time to time, but what I would recommend is
that you scroll down this list of apps, and choose either While using the App or Never.
While using the App is exactly what it sounds like, the app can access your location while
you’re using the app, but not while you’ve got it in the background or closed down.
But there are probably some apps in here that just don’t need that kind of access,
and so you might decide to revoke access to those apps. Remember,
if it messes up your app experience, you can always set them back by coming back to this menu.
Auto screen lock is an important setting that, over time, can have a pretty significant
impact on your battery life. It’s the amount of inactive time that can pass,
before your phone automatically shuts down your phone’s screen. The longer the time, the more time
your phone is potentially displaying the screen for no reason, and therefore wasting battery,
but having this set too low can be irritating for some people, so getting a balance is important.
Head to Settings, then display and Brightness, then Auto Lock. My advice
would honestly be to try this out on 30 seconds, and if you find that’s too small of a timeframe,
begin to push the number up until you find something that you’re happy with.
Honestly, for me, Face ID is so rapid these days that I’m pretty happy having this set to
30 seconds or a minute for the most part, but you need to find a setting that works for you.
The only thing to point out, is that the display will dim before it switches off,
and it does that about 10 seconds before the switch off. So for 30 seconds,
the display is going to dim after around 20 seconds of inactivity, which can feel
way too quick for some people, hence why I think you need to play around with this.
Your phone has a couple of trackers that keep track of you,
and then report back to you, those are screen time and fitness tracking.
Screen time tracks how much time you spend using your phone, and specifically which
apps you’re spending that time on, while fitness tracking tracks your physical
movement using the phone’s various built-in gyros, accelerometers, that kind of thing.
I personally don’t like the screen time functionality, so I have this one switched off,
and to do that you go to Settings, then Screen Time and choose Turn Off Screen Time.
If you want to switch off fitness tracking, head to Settings, then Privacy, then Motion
and Fitness, and switch off Fitness Tracking. I personally keep this one switched on, I like the
fitness tracking function, but you could save some additional battery with this if you wanted to.
Not surprisingly, your iPhone loses a lot of it’s battery power to the display, and there will
likely be times where you’ve got the brightness of your display way brighter than you need it.
There’s a setting to have your iPhone use it’s ambient light sensor to set the brightness of
the display for you automatically, but the setting isn’t where you might think it is.
The setting you’re after is in Settings, then Accessibility,
then Display and Text size, and then down at the bottom, you’ve got Auto Brightness. The display
will then attempt to automatically adjust to your surroundings. You can override it of course,
just open up the control centre and you can adjust the brightness manually here if you wish.
I think people often get this confused with the Auto Dark Mode setting, which is in Settings, then
Display and Brightness, and here where it says Appearance you’ve got an Automatic toggle switch.
This toggles between light and dark mode automatically, and this can save battery settings,
but it’s more of a visual setting. Why Apple didn’t think to include auto brightness in here,
as well as in accessibility, I do not know, but at least you now know where to go to change it.
Your iPhone uses Bluetooth to communicate with external devices,
things like headphones, speakers and all manner of other peripherals.
But you might be surprised to learn just how many apps have gained bluetooth permissions from you,
and it’s possible that when you’re opening certain apps up, they’re firing up your
bluetooth antenna in search of a device when you don’t need them to do so. Some apps even
use Bluetooth to allow them to track your location via bluetooth beacons when you’re out and about,
some retail store apps do this for example, which in my opinion is not just a drain on your battery,
but also an infringement of your privacy, so I think it’s good practice to ensure that
you know which apps are requesting this, and switch off access where you deem it suitable.
To find out which apps currently have your permission to use Bluetooth,
head to Settings, then Bluetooth. Anything toggled on in here has permission to access Bluetooth when
it deems it necessary. Now, some of these are entirely justified, acaia coffee for example,
they make bluetooth coffee scales, and if you want the app on your phone to be able to
communicate with the scales, you have to have bluetooth switched on, so that’s fair enough.
But Starling for example, that’s a banking app, I can’t even think of why or when Bluetooth would
have been enabled for that, so I’m going to switch that off. Waze, that’s a mapping app
and I don’t use that with any bluetooth accessories so I’d also be turning that one off.
My advice here would be that, if you’re in doubt, switch bluetooth off,
because if the app really needs bluetooth to operate, it can either ask you for it
again when you open it, or you can come back in here and grant access again.
Optimised battery charging is a great setting for maintaining the health of your battery,
and therefore a good setting to help minimise the overall drain on your battery.
Optimised battery charging will learn from your charging habits, and adapt itself accordingly.
For example, if your iPhone works out that, in general, you tend to wake up at 7am, it might
charge your phone up to around 80% very quickly when you put it on charge when you go to bed,
but then trickle charge your battery for the remaining 20% over the course of a few hours,
thus ensuring that your phone is ready for you to pick up when you wake up at 7am,
but also that the stress that’s put on your battery while charging is kept to a minimum.
I would definitely recommend turning this setting on,
it’s not going to negatively impact your use of your phone in any way,
and the potential for it to have a really positive impact on your battery life is significant.
Let’s say you’re on a cruise, or you’re hiking in the mountains,
and you know that the area you’re in has little or no signal. Switch on Airplane mode. You can still
have Wifi switched on with Airplane mode, so in the cruise ship example, if your ship has wifi,
you’d still be able to connect to it and use your phone as normal on wifi.
But the reason why this can be a good tip, is because when in a low signal area, your phone will
constantly be searching for a cellular connection, which in turn will drain your battery faster.
Now obviously, if you’re hiking in the woods and you’re desperately
searching for a cellular signal, you can safely ignore this tip,
but if you know that during your hike you’re not going to be able to get signal anyway,
but you’re happy enough connecting to wifi when you get back to your cabin later in the day, this
would be a good practice way to keep your phone from wasting battery while you’re out and about.
So there you go, 10 battery saving settings that you should consider checking out, that could save
you some serious battery life in the future. What do you think, any battery saving settings that
I’ve missed out, that should have been included in the video? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.