For a very long time, the idea of battery-saving apps has appealed to users, whether on smartphones, tablets or laptops. But as surprising as it may seem, they are not as useful as they are made out to be. On the contrary, a battery-saving app may actually drain more battery. Or even worse, the app could include malware designed to steal data from your device. So why do so many people still install them?
Phones have come a long way from gadgets for calling and texting to feature-rich devices that can do almost anything. This came at a price: lower battery life. Most of us charge our phones every day, or even more frequently. Then came design changes like larger screens and thinner bodies, adding to the problem. Although recent technological developments have largely compensated for this, users are still struggling to find ways to extend battery life, even if it requires installing third-party apps.
If you browse the App Store or Google Play, you’ll see countless apps in this category, most billed as one-click solutions. You press a button and the app instantly optimizes the energy efficiency of your smartphone. But that’s not how it usually works.
Battery-saving apps can make things worse for you
First of all, modern smartphones have a wide range of built-in optimizations designed to extend battery life. These monitor activity and limit anything unnecessary, from network usage to background apps. Most phones come with Optimized Battery Charging, a feature that learns your device’s usage habits and accordingly optimizes the charging rate to increase battery life. You also have the Charge Limit feature on modern iPhones and similar features on Android devices to improve overall battery life.
A battery-saving app does much the same thing. So you essentially get no additional value, but you sacrifice some storage and system resources. Likewise, the app may conflict with these built-in optimizations and override the defaults, resulting in poorer battery performance. Many battery-saving apps also terminate idle processes, which, again, provides no real benefit on modern smartphones. Instead, it can actually increase battery drain, as many of these processes try to restart and shut down again, leading to an endless loop that’s not good for your phone’s RAM or battery.
Finally, we can’t ignore the impact of battery-saving apps themselves. Most run continuously in the background to monitor your phone’s activity and performance, consuming both resources and power. Your phone now has to deal with an additional process, usually more aggressive than the others.
Disabling unused features works better
While battery-saving apps are largely a myth, it begs the question: what actually helps extend your smartphone’s battery? First, you need to let the operating system, whether Android or iOS, take care of the apps in the background. It is more efficient than ever. If you want, turning off background app refresh will help because it will reduce background activity. Likewise, turning off features you don’t actively use (for example, turning off Wi-Fi when using mobile data or turning off Bluetooth when no devices are connected) reduces battery drain.
Your phone’s screen is also one of the most energy-consuming components. Slight adjustments to display settings, like manually reducing brightness or enabling adaptive brightness features, can play a major role. Switching to dark mode is also helpful, as displaying bright white colors uses more power than darker colors on OLED displays. Apart from that, disabling location and microphone permissions for apps that don’t need them is also helpful. Many apps access it in the background, leading to higher battery consumption. For example, voice assistants can use power if they listen to wake phrases like “Ok Google” or “Hey Siri,” so turning off the wake word feature can help.
All told, these simple changes will deliver longer battery life than most battery-saving apps. The only reason to consider a third-party app is when you want to get deeper insights into battery health, charging, and other related data. However, on newer versions of Android and iOS, most of this information can be found in your phone’s settings.