So the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus has been here for a while and lots of rapacious people have already scooped up the phone.
One of the main selling points for the iPhone 6 was better battery life. For example, the iPhone 6 plus boasts up to 24 hours of talk time on 3G; however, what Apple doesn’t tell you is that those stratospheric numbers are only under optimal conditions.
In other words, your battery will drain faster if you have less than five bars because the signal is weaker.
But all is not lost! Today, I’m going to give you 6 tips to maximize the battery life on your iOS 8 iPhone. This is especially important for people running iOS 8 on an older device such as an iPhone 4s because those phones don’t manage power resources as sagaciously as the iPhone 6.
Here are the top six things you can do to maximize the battery life on your iOS8 device:
- Annihilate avaricious apps
- Locate location tracking apps
- Dim the display
- Paralyze Parallax
- Block background app refresh
- Wack your wonky widgets
Let’s start with the easiest and most obvious thing you should do: see which apps are consuming the most resources and kill them.
1. Annihilate avaricious apps
Tap over to Settings then flick down to General. Near the bottom you’ll see Usage. Tap that then hit Battery Usage.
After a few seconds you’ll see a list of all the apps you’ve used in the last 24 hours and the last 7 days. The list is sorted by the hungriest apps at the top.
In my case, you can see Safari is slurping the most battery juice.
To stop an app from starving your device, double click the Home button and swipe left and right until you find the app to close. Then just swipe the app thumbnail up to close it from your phone.
In iOS8, as you browse for the app, you’ll notice that the app’s icon near the bottom of the screen will line up with the app preview in the middle of the screen. This is how you can be sure that you’re closing the right app. The app icon will align directly beneath the app preview.
In the screenshot below, you can see the Safari icon is centered and immediately under a preview window of the Safari app.
Swiping preview up and off the screen kills the app.
Goodbye Safari!
2 Location Location tracking apps
I know data privacy is huge these days but not all location tracking apps are bad.
For example, the FindMyiPhone app needs to have location tracking enabled so that if you lose your iPhone you can find it and even wipe it remotely from iCloud.com. Also, other apps such as Google Maps and Yelp need Location tracking for basic navigation services.
So what should we do?
Well, iOS 8 actually gives us granular control over each app that tries to determine your location.
For example, you can tell the Compass app to never reveal your location or only allow location access while using the app.
If you flick down to System Services you can fine tune even more location settings.
For example, you can disable location services for events that are related to Diagnostics & Usage or Popular Near Me.
Take a minute or two to check out all the options you have here.
3. Dim the display
Dimming the display is one of the fastest ways to save battery life.
Just flick up from the bottom of the screen to open the Control Center and then drag the brightness slider closer to the left side of the line.
You can also invert the colors so that instead of displaying brighter colors such as white, iOS 8 will display black.
To see what I’m talking about, go to General, choose Accessibility and flip Invert Colors to on.
4. Paralyze Parallax
Parallax is a subtle but sometimes annoying effect that makes it appear like your icons are floating above the screen.
When you tilt the phone the icons subtly attempt to adjust themselves relative to the background to make it appear like they’re hovering; it’s a mild 3D effect.
It works off the idea that in real life, different things have different angular shifts based on how far they are from the observer. iOS8 attempts to virtualize this by adding parallax to the home screen.
If you don’t notice the parallax effect I’m talking about that’s okay but your battery will notice it so we should disable it.
To disable it and save battery life, tap on over to General.
Go to Accessibility and flip Reduce Motion to on. (meaning – the little white knob slider is pushed to the right and the left side is green)
5. Block Background App Refresh
To save battery, apps running in the background refresh at certain times, like when your device is connected to Wi-Fi, plugged into a power source, or being actively used. iOS learns patterns based on how you use your device and tries to predict when an app running in the background should refresh. It also learns when the device is typically inactive, like at night, to help keep apps from refreshing when you’re not using your device.
So Background App Refresh intelligently refreshes apps based on how your device is being used. That’s great – but you can still save your battery by preemptively selecting which apps you want to allow background refreshing. All others will be banished.
To tweak which apps get refreshed, tap your way through Settings, General and scroll down to Background App Refresh.
If your phone is really starving for power I would just disable it for all apps by swiping off the Background App Refresh option here.
Once you find a power source you can turn it back on again.
6. Wack your wonky widgets
Widgets are tiny, self-contained information modules that appear in the iOS 8 notification center. You can take a look at yours by swiping down from the top of the screen.
Widgets are really useful because you can instantly get public transportation data or weather updates without ever really launching an app. The widget is always there ready to give you the latest information.
But this convenience comes at a cost of battery drain. Since widgets are constantly communicating with the internet they constantly need energy.
Swipe down from the top of your phone and make sure the Today tab is selected then flick down and hit the Edit button.
Now you can see all your widgets.
Simply tap the red circled to remove a widget and the green circles to add them.
The Bottom Line
When your phone is famished you should do everything you can to make it happy again.
By closing apps and dimming the display you significantly reduce battery drain. Also by disabling parallax, background refresh, location tracking and wild widgets you’ll also maximize your battery until you can find your trusty charger!
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