How to Make Your Phone's Battery Last Longer: Everything You Need to Know

Key Takeaways

• Proper battery care is essential for optimizing performance, ensuring longevity, and slashing those replacement costs.
• If you’re looking to optimize your phone battery, you should:
• Minimize usage while charging
• Keep your phone out of extreme temperatures
• Use features like power saving mode and turn off background processes
• Use accessories like portable power banks to extend battery life

5% seems like a distant dream when you’re rocking a new phone, but it creeps steadily closer as time goes by. Whether you’re well into the lifecycle of your phone or you just ordered a new upgrade, now’s the best time to learn how to maximize your phone’s battery life.

Find out how to increase your phone’s battery life and discover why it makes such a huge difference in usability with this quick ZAGG guide.

Why Battery Care Matters

According to a new TechRadar study, Apple’s claims of an ‘all-day battery life’ equate to roughly 12 hours and some change, as far as the iPhone Air is concerned. However, that number can drop drastically if you’re a power user or if you just really like watching movies on the commute.

That’s just one reason why knowing how to make your phone’s battery last longer is so important. Let’s take a look at a few other reasons why you should learn how to extend your iPhone’s battery life.

Optimizing Performance

Improving a phone’s battery life often directly leads to improvements in performance, depending on your strategy. How does that work? Factors like overheating can shorten battery life and reduce performance simultaneously. Your phone’s processor is designed to throttle performance if the device gets too hot to prevent heat damage.

Ensuring Longevity

Battery care and your phone’s longevity are deeply connected. Every step you take to make your phone’s battery last longer exponentially improves its long-term health. You can even track this by going to your phone’s battery settings and checking its maximum capacity after sustained heavy use.

Improper care can cause your iPhone battery capacity to shrink considerably faster. You might see 100% after giving your phone a full charge, but you’re getting significantly less actual screen time.

Slashing Replacement Costs

If you don’t know how to maximize your phone’s battery life, the endgame is an eventual replacement. Whether you’re replacing your phone’s battery or the phone entirely, that’s hundreds of dollars that could’ve been saved instead if you followed a plan to make your phone’s battery last longer.

Smart Charging Habits

Minimize Heat & Usage While Charging

Apple’s official charging best practices recommend minimizing exposure to extreme temperatures to increase your phone’s battery life. To increase a phone’s battery life, you should:

• Allow it to charge in a cool area free of direct sunlight exposure
• Avoid using your phone while it charges
• If you’re using a thick phone case, consider taking it off before plugging in.

Optimize Settings & Features

Before settling into new habits and figuring out how to extend battery life on Android and iPhones, why not use the features your phone came with? To make your phone’s battery last longer, turn on features like ‘Optimized Battery Charging’. 

Typically, features like this allow your phone to learn your charging routine and optimize your battery cycles around it, typically holding charge at 80% until you need it. This reduces the time your batteries spend at full capacity, minimizing the strain put on them.

Use Power Saving Mode

This one’s a given, but most of us still forget to use it when the time comes. To maximize your phone’s battery life and leave nothing to chance, you’ll want to enable automatic power-saving mode whenever your battery drops to 15%-20%. 

Throttle Background Processes

If you’re wondering how to make your phone’s battery last longer and you’ve already tried the other tips, this one’s bound to make an impact.

Head to your battery settings page and look for the apps that consistently make the biggest dent in your battery usage. If you don’t use these apps too often and can go without the occasional push notification from them, you’ll want to turn off background processes for these apps.

Android phones will even let you turn off background processes for most apps with a single toggle. iOS typically does this whenever the power saving mode is enabled.

Maintain Your Device

Great maintenance has a broad impact on your phone, including its battery life! To make your phone’s battery last longer, you need to ensure you’re maintaining it properly. This includes:

• Protecting it from all forms of damage, such as by using a screen protector.
• Keeping it out of extreme temperatures.
• If you’re a power user, take breaks while using resource-intensive apps like games.

Bonus Tips

Use Battery Accessories

You can take the best care of your phone, but it’s only normal to run into situations where you still need that extra 10%. Even if you know how to increase your phone’s battery life, you’ll want to keep a few battery accessories handy in emergencies.

If you’re on an iPhone, that could be something as simple as a MagSafe-compatible power bank that snaps right onto your phone, such as Mophie’s Powerstation Ultra 25k. These accessories are an easy way to maximize your phone’s battery life and keep it going when you’re out and about.

Use Protective Cases with Heat-Dissipating Features

Knowing how to make your phone’s battery last longer is great, but using a case with heat-dissipating features is a real pro-tip you won’t find anywhere else. These cases use special materials like graphene to keep your phone cool when it counts. Get started with these graphene case recommendations:

• Milan Snap for a wide range of colorful options to show off your personality.
• Luxe Snap for a minimalist case that doesn’t compromise on protection. 
• Rainier Snap for a rugged case that can handle virtually anything you throw at it. 

All of these options are MagSafe-compatible, too!

Start Optimizing Today

Learning how to make your phone’s battery last longer is as easy as following a few best practices and maintaining your phone with the right accessories. If you’re ready to optimize your battery life, get started with ZAGG’s heat-dissipating cases. With elevated designs, top-tier quality control, and phenomenal customer service, there’s no better way to stay at 100%.