Harmful Battery Habits: Signal, Brightness, Notifications

Battery life is a common topic for many smartphone owners, and the near-universal goal here is to maximize the length of your phone’s battery. There are a number of tactics you may take within this realm – but in reality, maximizing phone battery is often just as much about what you don’t do with the phone as what you do. At Bad Apple, we’re happy to regularly assist clients with battery, charging and numerous related issues as part of our phone repair services, which also span themes like water damage, screen cracks, sound issues and a huge range of pother problems you may be experiencing. We’ll provide you with all the expertise you need on how to optimize your phone’s battery performance – including several habits or behaviors that many smartphone owners take that could be easily eliminated to increase battery capacity and limit these issues over time. Here are some of the most prevalent such habits to eschew if you want to maximize battery.

Signal Searching

One top killer of phone batteries today is when you’re in a low-signal area and the phone is forced to search for a signal. There are two sides to this: The phone’s attempt to find its own calling signal, for one, but also its attempt to locate a WiFi signal in the area.

The former of these can’t be remedied specifically, outside avoiding going to too many areas where you know you get poor service. The latter, however, can be prevented: Simply change your phone settings so WiFi is turned off unless connected to a known network – or even consider turning to airplane mode temporarily if you know there won’t be enough signal for your data to work anyway. Only your data or WiFi need to be on at any given time, not both at once.

Brightness and Power Features

Another top source of battery issues with a phone is your brightness settings, which can eat up battery at an incredible rate. We generally recommend sticking with auto-brightness capabilities that are offered on modern smartphones today – not only because they’re generally ideal for operation, but also because they help optimize battery life. If you manually adjust your own brightness and keep it very high all the time, your battery will wear down much faster than usual.

Down similar lines, another feature that’s native to smartphones today is low-power mode. This allows the phone’s battery life to adjust while the phone limits certain background apps or other forms of battery usage, allowing you to get further use out of the phone before it dies completely. You should use lower power mode regularly, especially if you know you won’t have a chance to charge the phone for some time and are looking to preserve battery power.

Notifications

We all like to feel popular and get a bunch of notifications on our phones, but this can strain the battery significantly. While you should certainly leave notifications on for the important areas of your life and reminders you absolutely need to see, those who are having consistent battery life problems often find these are limited by simply reducing their overall notification frequency.

For more on habits to limit if you want to maximize phone battery life, or to learn about any of our phone repair or other device repair services, speak to the staff at FixIT Mobile | Bad Apple today.