So, you downloaded the iOS 7 download, did you? It has a ton of great features that we’ve never seen before, but if you have them all turned on, or use a lot of these new features, you will probably suffer from the need to charge your battery more often. If you have updated, and you’ve experienced a noticeable battery drain, never fear. There are quite a few things you can do to minimize your battery usage.
Turn down the device’s brightness setting. Screen brightness is the number one battery drain. While you’re at it, turn off Auto-Brightness, too. It’s usually brighter than it needs to be, anyway. To quickly access brightness, just swipe up to bring up Control Center and use the slider. To turn off Auto-Brightness, go to Settings > Wallpapers & Brightness.
Use Airplane mode. When you’re indoors, underground, or in some area that has bad cellular service and no WiFi, turn on Airplane mode. In fact, if you have the choice between cellular and WiFi, always choose WiFi as it uses less battery. If you’re really interested in what you can do with customization features, you can choose which apps will use cellular data.
Turn off Bluetooth. If you are not currently using Bluetooth, turn it off. Only turn it on while you need it.
Turn off “Ask to Join Networks” within the WiFi settings. This way, your device will connect automatically to known networks, but won’t constantly search for new WiFi hotspots if you’re out and about, thus saving you tons of battery life.
Be selective when it comes to Location Services. Not all apps need to know where you are. Sure, GPS doesn’t use much, but it does use some battery life. Take the time to decide which apps need to have it on and which ones don’t. Just beware: if you turn off Location Services entirely, your Find My iPhone feature will be disabled.
Choose which apps will wake your device from sleep to post notifications. If you have your settings set in such a way that your phone has to wake up every few minutes for notifications, it’s going to drain your battery very quickly.
Manually fetch your gmail. If your phone is constantly fetching emails every 15 minutes, it’s going to kill your battery. Switch it to manual.
Don’t use dynamic backgrounds and turn off the parallax feature. Yes, the parallax is a fantastically fun new feature, but do you need it?
Delete apps you don’t use. Every app that you have on your device uses battery for background refresh, notification services, and location services. Delete the ones you don’t use, and customize the settings on the ones you do keep so that they use the minimum battery power required.
Turn off Background App Refresh. If you don’t want to turn it off completely, you can pick and choose which ones to turn off. The Background App Refresh setting is found in Settings > General .
Turn off auto-updates. Go to Settings > iTunes & App Store. Scroll down and you’ll find the heading Automatic Downloads. The Updates setting toggle is just under that. Turn it off. This will require you to update manually but it will save you battery power.
Auto-lock your phone when you’re done using it. This will save a minute or several when it comes to battery life. You can also adjust the time the phone stays on after you’re done using it; change it to whichever is the shortest amount of time that works well for you.
