Proven Tips to Extend Your Smartphone’s Battery Life: A Comprehensive Guide

Extending the battery life of your smartphone is a must have knowledge in this era!

You got your shiny new smartphone and the first thing that comes to your mind is, How I use this phone for an extended period of time?? You don’t want to mess with it like your old phone. Here are some important and helpful tips to extend the battery life of your phone or any lithium-ion based battery pack.
Let’s jump into some basics,

• Lithium-ion batteries function basically from ion movement between the positive and negative electrodes.
• After some time, all batteries decrease their performance due to several reasons. Ageing, exposure to elevated temperatures, wrong charging methods etc.
• Most manufacturers specify the life of a smartphone lithium-ion battery between 300 to 500 discharge/charge cycles.
• But one charge cycle is discharging your battery down to zero and fully charging it. 

Let’s see how we can increase the charge cycles of your smartphone battery,

 Tip number 01 – Avoid discharging the battery all the way down to 0%!

• Avoid discharging your phone battery all the way down to, like 10%, 5% before you charge the battery again. People will say things like you have to wait until it hits 5%, but don’t do that mistake. 
• Let me explain, there’s a term called, Depth of discharge (DoD) it basically determines the cycle count of the battery. So, the smaller the discharge the longer the battery will last. You can see it in this graph from a study. As you can see, the lesser the depth of discharge, the higher the battery life cycles.

•     If it makes any sense, it’s like a mechanical device that wears out faster with prolonged, heavy usage. Try to charge your smartphone more often before it goes all the way down to zero. 
•   There’s no memory effect in these batteries like in older nickel-cadmium batteries. So charge it frequently and don’t stress the battery.

Tip number 02 – Avoid extremely unfavourable temperatures!

• Batteries suffer from stress when exposed to heat. Heat is the most harmful factor you can think of for a battery.
• Your smartphone gets hot due to several reasons, handling processor-heavy tasks, exposing to heat sources and also when charging.
• This is the problem with using your phone while charging. If you do that, then it gets hotter because, while hardware generates heat, the charging process also generates heat. So, the battery won’t be able to handle it.  back to the point, don’t overheat your smartphone, it kills the battery.
• High temperatures drain the battery faster and reduce the overall life of your battery. So how to avoid that? 
• The simple things you can do are if the phone gets hot while charging, take off the case and don’t use it while charging, and don’t use it near heat sources like under direct sunlight. If your phone is abnormally hot, take a break, let the phone cool down a little and use it.

Tip number 03 – Don’t leave your charger plugged in all the time.

• You should not plug your charger all the time to preserve your precious discharge cycles. This is a mistake we all make, especially when using laptops.
• Modern quality chargers have safety mechanisms to avoid overcharging and protect the battery, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that you should leave your charger plugged in all the time. 
• It will leave the battery at high-stress levels because it’s at full capacity for a long period of time.
• It’s called trickle charge and this can cause plating metallic lithium, which reduces stability in the long run, and it can lead to system-wide malfunctions and reboots. 
• That’s why manufacturers include long life mode to their devices, especially laptops and even electric vehicles can limit their charging to 80% even if we keep the charger plugged in. 
• So, next time don’t keep your charger plugged in all the time. 

Tip number 04 – Keep your battery charge between 40% – 80% range.

• After some research from the battery university and other researchers, this is the most practical range to extend the battery life while using your device daily. 
• From this method, the battery won’t get high stress levels by peak capacity and it won’t go all the way down, which is also bad for the health of the battery. 
• It’s better to have a phone which can get you through your day with an 80% charge percentage.
• It’s better to unplug your smartphone after the charge hits 80% if you have a long day or a trip you can fully charge it, but for occasional usage scenarios, this method is very helpful to protect the battery. Tesla is also recommending charging their vehicle battery pack between 40% – 80%.

Tip number 05 – Keep a track of installed applications on your phone.

• Limiting running background apps is a very important tip for saving battery life.
• Some apps are constantly running processor-heavy tasks in the background, and it drains the battery faster, because of that, you have to charge the device more than before. 
• You can monitor app battery usage statistics in settings and find out what apps use the battery most and eliminate them. Of course, this applies if that particular app is not that much of use to you.

   These are the most important battery tips I found and of course, there are some pro tips out there. If you have some battery-saving techniques, let us know in the comment section… So, that’s it, hope you enjoyed the article, share this article with someone you think might be helpful. Thank you very much for reading…