Turn off this one setting to save your smartphone battery

If you’ve noticed your smartphone’s battery draining faster than usual, you’re not alone. It happens to all of us — and we make sure our charger is always close by.

So what can you do to save the charge in your battery day after day?

We have a super simple solution: Turn off background app refresh. In this week’s tip, we’ll show you how to turn off this setting to save your battery.

Background app refresh is a feature on Android and iPhone devices that allows apps to download data in the background when you’re not using them so you have up-to-date information when you start to use the app again. This can be useful for messaging or news apps so you can have fresh information every time you access them. 

However, this setting can use extra data and battery in the background. While some say that this feature doesn’t affect your device’s performance, both Android and Apple’s power saving modes turn off background app refresh, so we recommend turning it off, too, unless you really need it. Here’s how:

Turn off background app refresh on iPhone

1. Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh > then tap Background App Refresh again
2. To turn this setting off completely, tap Off. You can also choose whether or not you want this setting to work only over WiFi.
3. If you want to choose certain apps to use this setting, tap Back, then toggle which apps you want to turn on and off.

Turn off background app refresh on Android

Turning off this setting may vary by phone. Please check with your manufacturer if the below steps don’t work for your device.

1. Go to Settings > Network & Internet > Data Saver
2. Turn Data Saver on

Like the iPhone, you can also use this setting to choose which apps you would like to use this feature if you don’t want to turn off all apps from refreshing in the background.