After testing, and running my iPhone’s battery flat, I’ve come up with the following ways of making your iPhone battery last all day. And the nice thing is that these methods are quick and simple, and don’t involve making drastic changes to iOS.
The first one, but also the most effective, and that is to switch on Low Power Mode.
As the name suggests, activating this setting puts your device into low power mode. And it really does work, giving you about three hours of extra battery life. If you are worried about your battery not making it through the day, this is the setting to activate.
This will turn off or reduce mail fetch, background app refresh, automatic downloads, and some visual effects.
Here’s a list of what Low Power Mode reduces or affects in order to increase battery life:
- Email fetch
- “Hey Siri”
- Background app refresh
- Automatic downloads
- Some visual effects
- Auto-Lock (defaults to 30 seconds)
- iCloud Photo Library (temporarily paused)
iOS pops up a notification offering to turn on Low Power Mode when your battery goes below 20 and 10 percent, and will automatically switch it off when the device is charged back up to 80 percent.
You can also turn this on manually, either from the Control Center panel, or from Settings > Battery, or invoke the Siri command “Low Power Mode on.”
The other thing that dramatically improves battery life is turning down the screen brightness. Knocking it down when you are indoors or not in bright sunlight really makes a huge difference to how long your battery will last.
You can either drop the brightness from Settings > Display & Brightness or from the Control Center screen. You can also invoke the Siri command “brightness to 0%” if you are a VoiceOver user. The command also works from 0 to 100% if needed, depending on your vision.
VoiceOver users can also enable the Screen Curtain by a 3 finger triple tap. This feature will have a greater effect on the OLED iPhones.
You can also carry around a portable battery power bank. These days, power packs are so small that you can pop them in a pocket and not think about them, and yet they pack enough of a punch to add hours to your iPhone’s battery life. Tweaking with other iPhone’s settings (such as notifications, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) in order to try to get a bit more battery life is tedious and there’s a risk that I’ll forget to undo the settings later.
