How to save the battery life on your iPhone

If you’ve paired an Apple Watch with your iPhone, the two devices may be in near-constant communication, depending on what apps you use. To save your iPhone battery life, make sure you’re actually using all the apps that you enthusiastically loaded onto the watch when you first strapped it on. If you never use that fitness tracker you installed on January 1, for example, you can delete it. Go to the Watch app on your phone, make sure the My Watch tab at the bottom is selected, and scroll down to the Installed on Apple Watch section. Tap the app you want to delete, then toggle off Show App on Apple Watch.

You can also delete Apple Watch apps directly on the watch itself. Go to the home screen, press on the app in question until the apps jiggle, and then press the X to delete.

If you want to know how to save battery life on your iPhone but aren’t sure which apps are using the most power, there’s an easy way to check. In Settings, select Battery and then scroll down to Battery Usage by App. You’ll see a list of the apps using the most battery, displayed in order from highest to lowest consumption. If you find any Apple juice hogs that you don’t really need, go ahead and delete those apps.

Is Mail using a disproportionate amount of your battery power? You may want to change how often you tell it to fetch new messages. You can do that by returning to Settings and clicking on Mail. Select Accounts and then Fetch New Data. From there, you can determine whether Mail automatically fetches new emails, or does it in longer intervals.

Your phone’s location tracking feature comes in handy in certain situations, like if you’re using the Maps or Weather apps, or if you’re trying to find your lost iPhone. But it can be a privacy concern. And if apps are using Location Services, they’re constantly requesting GPS data from your phone, which taxes your battery. Thankfully, it’s super easy to turn off Location Services. In Settings, go to Privacy and Location Services. You can either toggle it off altogether or adjust permissions for each app individually.

Siri, Apple’s AI-based personal assistant, can be helpful, but she’s also fairly high-maintenance in terms of energy usage. Siri likes to make suggestions on your lock screen based on your daily habits. If you always call your mum at 10am on Sundays, Siri will prompt you to do that – and use up your battery in the process. To put an end to those notices, go to Settings and turn off Apple’s voice assistant. Tap on Siri & Search, scroll down to the Suggestions from Apple section, and toggle off ‘Allow Notifications.’

While you’re at it, you can tell Siri to stop listening to your conversation in hopes you’ll need her. It’s called ‘active listening’ and is useful but a big battery drain. At the top of the same screen, toggle off Listen for ‘Hey Siri.’

If your phone is rapidly running down and you need to preserve what’s left of its battery life, you have a couple of options. You can turn on Airplane Mode to stop your phone from connecting to Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth and GPS services, thus preventing all incoming calls and texts from reaching you. This can be a good option when travelling through remote areas so that your phone isn’t constantly trying to find a (non-existent) connection. The easiest way to turn this on is by swiping down in the upper right-hand corner of your iPhone screen to enter your Control Centre. Simply tap the airplane icon.

Low-Power Mode is another battery-saving measure. It turns off some power-hungry features and takes some power-saving actions. Once your battery dips below 20 per cent, your phone will automatically ask you if you want to activate Low Power Mode, but you can also turn it on manually in Settings. Simply tap Battery and toggle on Low-Power Mode.

To best determine how to save battery life on your iPhone, look at the overall health of your smartphone battery. You can do that in Settings ­– click on Battery, then tap Battery Health to see data about the general condition of your battery, what its maximum charge capacity is, and whether service is recommended. In iOS 13 and later, you can turn on Optimised Battery Charging here so that your phone is not fully charged (and reducing its lifespan) until you really need it to be.

Sign up here to get Reader’s Digest’s favourite stories straight to your inbox!

Source: RD.com