March 29, 2024
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Posted October 4, 2013 at 9:17pm by iClarified
These are some tips on how to improve the battery life of your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch running iOS. Some of these tips apply to just iOS 7 but many can be applied to older versions of iOS as well.

Let us know how much your battery life improves in the comments!


Disable Background Application Refresh
iOS 7 brings the ability for apps to refresh their content when on Wi-Fi or cellular and even use location services. To preserve battery life, we recommend disabling Background App Refresh completely. Note that doing this will kill location services for your applications, so you won’t be able to use Navigation in the background – therefore you may want to fine-tune this setting based on your preferences. In addition, you may want to close applications you aren't using via the Multitasking Switcher (Double press the Home button and swipe an app preview up and out of the list).
● Settings > General > Background App Refresh
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch


Turn Off AirDrop when you’re not using it
You should turn off AirDrop when you do not need it. This prevents you from using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when not in use when the device is in “discoverable” mode. Simply swipe up on control center to turn it off.
● Control Center
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Turn Off Automatic Downloads and Updates
iOS 7 brings the ability to automatically update apps, however that works in the background and can take a toll on your battery life. Tap the settings icon, scroll down to iTunes & App Store and turn off all automatic downloads. If you still want automatic app updates, try enabling them while turning off cellular data.
● Settings > iTunes & App Store
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Brightness
Brightness is the most obvious battery-draining cause on the iPhone. Obviously, try to limit and reduce your brightness at all times. Going a step further, you can disable automatic brightness to improve battery life since the phone will no longer check the ambient light and determine the “best” brightness.
● Settings > Wallpapers & Brightness
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Control your Push Notifications
Apple’s iOS is designed to in a way preserve battery life when using push notification. That is, the number of push notifications you receive have a minimal effect on battery life. However, when receiving notifications that cause your screen to light up and phone to vibrate, your battery life will be affected. We recommending setting some notifications to not show any alerts. You can set alerts to 'None' on a per app basis.
● Settings > Notification Center
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Disable Email Push
Push emails immediately send an email or 'push' from a server to your phone, rather than requiring you to manually refresh the mail app. You can set the mail application to fetch instead of push, or even better, set to manual for best battery life. You can fine tune this setting for each email account, but for best battery life performance, set all accounts to “Fetch Manually.”
● Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data > Push
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Frequent Locations
iOS 7 brings a new “Frequent Locations” feature. While this new addition can be great for your “Today” tab in Notification Center by giving you an estimated time of arrival to your most visited locations , it can affect battery life. To turn this off, visit
● Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services, then toggle the Frequent Locations to the off position.
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Location Services
iOS has many system location services that check your location to improve compass calibration, cell network search, and more. We recommend turning off most of these system services to improve battery. However, if you use the compass often, or travel often, some settings should be left on such as “Compass Calibration” or “Setting Time Zone.” We leave “Cell Network Search” on as well.

Apps must request approval from you as well. If you really need location services for an app, obviously leave them on. However, you might not want some applications to fetch your locations, so feel free to toggle them off here as well. For instance, if you don’t care for Twitter tweeting your location, turn it off!
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Disable Wi-Fi & Bluetooth when not in range, Turn on Wi-Fi when in range
Be sure to always turn off Wi-Fi when you’re out of range of a known network. This prevents the iOS device from constantly checking for known networks in range. Whenever you can use Wi-Fi, use it! Wi-Fi is much more efficient than cellular data so you can save battery this way. Be sure to set Ask to Join Networks off to stay connected to that network. Similarly, be sure to turn off Bluetooth at all times that you can.
● Settings > Wi-Fi
● Settings > Bluetooth
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Disable Cellular Data
If you don’t care for using cellular data for some apps and services, turn them off. iOS has many different toggles for cellular data use and some are hidden, so be sure to check all of them listed below!

● Settings > Cellular
● Settings > Safari > Reading List
● Settings > iTunes & App Store
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Reduce Motion
iOS 7 brings a nice parallax effect on icons and alerts, but this constantly tracks your motion to provide the effect. Reduce motion to prevent this and improve battery life.
● Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Don’t use Dynamic Moving Wallpapers
iOS 7 comes with dynamic wallpapers that move around based on the movement of your device. These moving backgrounds consume much more battery power than regular wallpapers so we recommend that you stay away from them and use Still wallpapers.
● Settings > Wallpapers & Brightness > Choose Wallpaper
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Disable Siri Raise to Speak
Disable Siri's raise to speak function to prevent the iPhone from constantly checking the proximity sensor to see if the device has been raised to your ear.
● Settings > General > Siri
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Turn Off Spotlight Search to prevent file indexing
Spotlight indexes your entire device’s filesystem to provide instant search results of your most used contacts, apps and more. Indexing can cause a strain on the battery life, so try to turn OFF any items on the list that you don’t use to prevent the OS from indexing that type of data.
● Settings > General > Spotlight Search
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Vibrations
Having your phone constantly vibrate can affect battery life as well, but having a vibrate feature is extremely useful. Try to disable vibrate for some contacts/notifications/text messages.
● Settings > Sounds

Cellular Data
If you’re in a 4G Area only, we recommend turning off LTE connectivity. Leaving LTE on actually drains the battery by constantly checking for an LTE signal (and if your carrier does not have LTE in your area, this is a waste). Similarly, if you’re in a 2G area only, disable 4G/LTE connectivity as well.

However, if you are in an LTE area, we recommend leaving LTE on since Apple actually cites better browsing (in hours) on LTE versus 4G connectivity.

● Settings > Cellular > Enable LTE
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Auto-Lock
Set Auto-Lock to 1 Minute to reduce the amount of time it takes for the iPhone's display to shut off. Better yet, always lock the device immediately after use to prevent the ~1 minute your display would be on.
● Settings > General > Auto-Lock
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Use Airplane Mode when in an area without cellular service
If you’re in a known dead zone that has no cellular service, turn on Airplane mode until your reach an area with cellular service. This prevents the phone from constantly checking for a signal, and can be a main cause of battery drain.
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Turn off iTunes Wi-Fi Sync in iTunes
If you don’t use Wi-Fi Sync, and often leave your iTunes open on the same network as your iPhone, turn off Wi-Fi sync.

Turn off Home Sharing
Streaming a movie or song from a computer to your iOS device can cause a huge battery drain. We recommend not using home sharing at all unless it is a feature you really like.
● Settings > Music
● Settings > Video
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Set up as new iPhone
If you previously had a jailbreak, and no longer have one, try setting up an iPhone as new instead of restoring form backup. This way you don’t restore unnecessary files.

Equalizer
Some users claim that turning off iPod equalizer will improve battery life, but in our tests (and others across the web) this does not seem to be the case. But if you really want to, turn off equalizer.
● Settings > Music > EQ
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Limit Ad Tracking
There are some reports that limiting ad tracking might improve your battery life. You may want to experiment with this setting to determine if it makes a difference on your device.
● Settings > Privacy > Advertising > Limit Ad Tracking
How to Tweak iOS to Improve the Battery Life of Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch
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Comments (28)
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gamerscul9870
gamerscul9870 - February 7, 2015 at 10:25pm
I preordered an ampy! Power saver strategies are now useless but kinetic chargers have been going on since 2011. The ampy though is portable and works as good as outlets but it doesn't require battery packs, it captures motion for power.
2peteshakur
2peteshakur - February 7, 2015 at 8:57pm
i turn my phone off when i go sleep! ;)
Hitman
Hitman - October 14, 2013 at 7:52pm
iPhone talks to Windows phone --> Hey, want to play a game with me.?.?.?. "Windows phone-->" I am sorry I can't, I caught a virus and need to re-install my OS..... "iPhone-->" Again.?.?.?. I will wait until you get it fixed and we can try then.... "Windows phone-->" it might take a while... "iPhone-->" Thats right, we are talking about microsoft.!.!.!.!.
gamerscul9870
gamerscul9870 - October 14, 2013 at 8:17pm
iPhone: look we took both pics, oh you have greater zoom, at least I don't need to look ugly to be a good camera! Let's look at the data leftover, oh look, the big megapixels on you shows how picture quality eats up memory, too bad I don't need to be that less blurry to take up anything. You have a bigger screen, no worries, I have one hand use and bigger specs! Nokia: but the commercial with everyone getting close-. iPhone: why be far back it's like showing off yet that's your only reason you are better, what else can you do? Nokia: ...
Maulik
Maulik - October 5, 2013 at 8:52am
Power off your iPhone :p
Ahmed
Ahmed - October 5, 2013 at 5:46am
Push email consumes less power than fetch.
Alejandro Iván
Alejandro Iván - October 5, 2013 at 9:14pm
Not really, probably in some cases this could happen, but I don't think so. Push notifications, in order to work, have to mantain a constant socket open (a connection that is never dropped) in order to get "instant" messages. That means work 100% of time. Fetch, in the other side, opens one connection every X minutes (usually 15 to 30 mins), checks your e-mail accounts and closes the connection. That's about 14 and a half minutes without a data connection, so it saves battery. Maybe your iPhone is doing some other things that are eating your battery juice?
Vueapp
Vueapp - February 20, 2014 at 3:25am
There is another trick. You can turn off the check for emails. Then install gmail app and have the push notification alert you of new emails. Of course this works with gmail accounts only.
 AzteKa
AzteKa - October 5, 2013 at 5:41am
I love my iPhone yes
angkung
angkung - October 5, 2013 at 2:39am
Dont'n buy = turn off
Jack Sparrow
Jack Sparrow - October 5, 2013 at 2:24am
Really a turn off! Turning to Android
TheRealNoGoodNick
TheRealNoGoodNick - October 5, 2013 at 5:22am
Or downgrade/buy a mophie case if you only have battery problems!
 AzteKa
AzteKa - October 5, 2013 at 5:42am
The mophie it's a good case
Mo
Mo - October 5, 2013 at 1:13am
I agree with Mamu. Well said
Mamu
Mamu - October 5, 2013 at 1:07am
Yes I was gonna say the same thing. Purchase a £10 Nokia and use that instead. The whole purpose of buying these smart phones is so that you can use all the facilities and options. Otherwise pointless using it if your going to turn everything of to conserve battery power.
TheRealNoGoodNick
TheRealNoGoodNick - October 5, 2013 at 5:26am
You do realize Nokia is just used as a camera and it looks like one, that's all microsock ever works on, nothing else! Windows 8 is what working backwards is compared to ios 7. This is just one random square size and color with white icons, plus the more mp's the less data you'll have leftover! iPhone 5s shows actual work other than adding mp's b/c mp's eliminate blur, that's it!
Thoune
Thoune - October 4, 2013 at 11:52pm
Turn off everything? Turn off the phone is the easiest way then !!!
Darryn
Darryn - October 5, 2013 at 12:28am
Best comment (y)
David
David - October 5, 2013 at 4:28pm
Rather then turning off everything better change your phone to Nokia 3310. You will get 100% battery life at any point of time.
gamerscul9870
gamerscul9870 - October 5, 2013 at 11:04pm
And use the backwards os on it not that many use? It's just a phamera because they over beefed up megapixels and it even looks like it, more mp's mean less data in the phone.
Ron Dean
Ron Dean - October 4, 2013 at 11:43pm
Mophie juice packs are a must. Live off it basically.
Charge It!
Charge It! - October 4, 2013 at 11:36pm
Always carry USB cable and power adaptor. Buy car charger. Buy battery backup.
gamerscul9870
gamerscul9870 - October 4, 2013 at 11:49pm
Except the car my mom had to settle for immediately had broken plugs after few months of buying the car!
gamerscul9870
gamerscul9870 - October 5, 2013 at 5:32am
Nate my bait of love here is my advice to you about what he means! He has his problems and you have yours, and I know something that will spice up your attitude to eliminate the bad feelings, come to the bedroom and we will talk ;)!
Bugged Out
Bugged Out - October 4, 2013 at 10:50pm
Just get a dumb phone, 'cause by doing all this stuff that's what u have.
rr76
rr76 - October 4, 2013 at 10:46pm
just charge it at night when youre asleep!!!! Simples!!!
Galdamita
Galdamita - October 4, 2013 at 9:50pm
And the last one.... turn off the iphone!!
Yo
Yo - October 4, 2013 at 10:06pm
Additional sarcastic suggestion.
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