iOS Battery Saving Steps
1: Plug it in overnight
This might sound like odd advice, but one of the best things to do after updating to iOS 10 is to plug in your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, let the screen turn off, and do nothing for an extended period of time. Letting it sit plugged in overnight while you sleep is perfect for this.
This can help because iOS 10 does a lot of indexing and scanning of your pictures and data in the background, for features ranging from Spotlight to new Siri abilities to the Photos sorting and searching functions. While you can certainly use your iPhone or iPad while those background tasks are taking place, the device might appear slower or might seem to have a rapidly draining battery, when in fact it’s just iOS 10 doing what it needs to do to be entirely usable. For large devices that are nearly full of photos and other stuff, the indexing and maintenance processes can take many hours, sometimes extending beyond even 12 hours. So wait a day or two and make sure it has been plugged in and not in use for a notable amount of that time.
2: Restart
A common trick that may help battery life is to restart the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. You can do the typical restart of turning the device off and then back on again, or force reboot. Sometimes a simple device reboot does the trick.
3: Follow the Battery Life Advice in Battery Settings
New to iOS 10 is the ability for the device to specifically recommend battery saving suggestions to prolong battery life. Typically this means making adjustments to usage like reducing the devices screen brightness.
Go to Settings > Battery > look for “Battery Life Suggestions”
You’ll see what is offered for your device, then follow that advice. And yes, it’s good advice.
You can then tap on each item to jump directly to it in Settings. And yes really, reducing your screen brightness will have a big impact on battery life.
4: Disable Background App Refresh
Background App Refresh is a nice feature but in practice it tends to consume more battery life by allowing apps to do more activity in the background. Thus, disabling Background App Refresh tends to increase battery life, and many users don’t even notice the difference from turning it off.
* Open Settings and go to to “General”, choose “Background App Refresh” and turn the top switch to the OFF position to disable the feature
5: Use Reduce Motion
Reducing the amount of visual effects in iOS may offer a minor improvement to battery life:
* Go to Settings > Accessibility > Reduce Motion > ON
Note doing this will cause iMessage effects to not work so only adjust Motion if you don’t care about the fancy message lasers, slams, and confetti type effects.
6: Disable Location Services You Don’t Need or Use
Location services and GPS usage can hit the battery particularly hard if they are used extensively, so disabling some of the location features can help your battery last longer.
* Open Settings > Privacy > Location Services
* Adjust settings appropriate for your usage, setting to “Never” or “While Using” as needed per app and feature
This is universally good advice for prolonging battery life and doesn’t apply just to iOS 10.
