Stop draining your battery! 10 ways to improve the life of your iPhone

If you regularly find your phone battery scraping single figures, here are 10 ways to prolong the day-to-day life and long-term battery health of your iPhone.  

1. Turn on Optimised Battery Charging

With iOS 13, Apple introduced a new feature dedicated to prolonging your battery’s lifespan. Go to your Battery Health settings and enable Optimised Battery Charging – your phone will learn when you use it and ensure it’s fully charged just before you need it.

For example, if you plug your phone in overnight, it’ll juice up that last 20% just before you wake up. This is designed to prevent overcharging, which is bad for your battery health.  

2. Reduce your screen brightness

A good quick fix – turning down your screen brightness will reduce battery drain in the short and long term. Access it quickly via the Control Centre. You can also turn on auto-brightness and let your phone adjust itself based on the environment.  

3. Lose location services

Check how many apps are using location services. You can optimize your battery life by turning off Location Services altogether, or app by app, in your privacy settings.  

4. Activate Low Power mode

Turning on Low Power Mode in the Control Centre means your iPhone will switch to delivering just the essentials when your battery hits 20%, delaying that next charge. 

5. Identify the apps that are eating energy 

If your battery has started draining more quickly than it used to, check your Battery settings. They’ll show you how much power each of your apps is using. You’ll be able to see if one app in particular is using a lot of energy, which leads us to… 

6. Update your apps and software

A buggy app or software release can cause a huge battery drain. These issues will often be resolved in a subsequent version, so make sure everything’s up to date.  

7. Rest your case

If you keep your phone in a case, and it tends to overheat, Apple recommends removing the case while you’re charging it up. A bulky case can trap heat, creating less than optimum conditions for your battery. And if you’re prone to uploading holiday pics from your sun lounger, it’s good to know that exposing your phone to temperatures of more than 35℃ can cause permanent battery damage. 

8. Turn off Background App Refresh

Your apps work hard in the background so that they’re up to date when you open them. All this toil takes its toll on your battery, though, and it might also be using up valuable data. You can turn this off in your General settings.  

9. Fetch mail less regularly

If you don’t need to be alerted the second an email hits your inbox, limit how often your phone searches for new messages. Go to Passwords & Accounts and hit Fetch New Data – you can reduce the amount of battery your phone uses on this task by fetching mail less frequently or just checking it yourself manually.  

10. Upgrade it

You can, of course, make sure your battery’s always in good nick by upgrading your phone regularly. This does have an environmental impact, however, with literally tons of old phones being discarded every year. Look for ways to do this as sustainably as possible, with companies like Raylo, who will lease you a new iPhone for a monthly price. When you give it back, they’ll ensure it’s refurbished and reused, which is a big plus for the planet.