While we wait for the battery life improvements promised by iOS 9, we’re taking a look at some nifty tricks to get more out of your iPhone‘s battery now.
There are obvious ways to save battery life: turn the screen brightness down, deactivate Bluetooth, and use Wi-Fi rather than cellular connections where possible. But, we have some more in-depth suggestions for iOS 8 devices to improve battery longevity.
Try out these five tips and we pinky-swear you’ll get more from your handset’s battery in future.
1) Stop the parallax effect
The parallax effect on the iPhone (where the background image appears to be on a different plane than the icons) looks pretty, but it drains your battery. Turn it off.
Go to Settings, then tap on General, then head to Accessibility and toggle the Reduce Motion option to “on.”
Amy-Mae Turner
2) Kill background app refresh
The feature is set to “on” by default, which means your apps will automatically refresh with new data. This eats power though, so you should turn the option off for as many apps as you can stand.
You can disable background app refresh completely or scroll through your list of apps and stop it for all nonessentials. You’ll find Background App Refresh by heading to Settings then General.
Amy-Mae Turner
3) Say goodbye to location tracking apps
A surprising amount of apps want to know where you are and burn battery power trying to find out. If you head to your iPhone’s Location Services menu, you can manually turn the feature off to save yourself a good dollop of iPower.
From Settings, head to Privacy, then Location Services. Now you can stop location tracking altogether, or work your way through the app list to determine which apps really do need to know where you are.
Amy-Mae Turner
4) Disable notifications
Every little notification that wakes your phone eats a teensy bit of power. Stop all unnecessary notifications to give you more juice in the long run.
Head back into your Settings and look for Notifications. While you’ll likely want to leave a few essentials (such as Phone and Messages) turned on, you can click into every other app and toggle Allow Notifications to “off.”
Amy-Mae Turner
5) Stop fitness tracking
If you’re not the sporty type, you probably didn’t know that your phone is constantly monitoring motion. This, of course, takes power.
You can turn the feature off by going to your Settings, then Privacy, then Motion & Fitness. Simply toggle the Fitness Tracking option to “off.”
Amy-Mae Turner
Photo via Kārlis Dambrāns/Flickr (CC BY ND 2.0)
