How to save battery life on mobile phones? - Here are my thoughts

Recently, a colleague of mine asked me a question, "How to ensure the mobile apps do not consume too much battery life?" I thought this was an interesting question as I have always faced problems with battery, due to my insane usage patterns :-).That being said, below were the steps I have taken which have helped me conserve battery life on my iPhone (This holds good for android phones too) and helps me give a feeling of control over the apps I have installed and my phone as a whole.Here goes-In general a mobile app will use too much battery life when-

1. It uses location services like Facebook, FourSquare, . What happens here is the app continuously keeps updating the current location of the user periodically, in certain time intervals and it drains lot of battery life. Same holds good for actual GPS apps like Apple, google maps, mapquest etc.

Solution

You can disable this by going to Privacy -> Locations Services on your iPhone and there is something similar to this on android phones. This will force the application to get the user consent before figuring out the GPS coordinates.

2. If the app uses lot of images/animation and if it is constantly running in the background, the battery life drains.

Solution

For this, make sure you kill the application after you use it by double clicking on the "center button" located at the bottom of your iphone and manually close that app.

3. Music related apps drains a lot of battery. Spotify, Pandora, iTunes. Same applies to Video players, Podcasts too.

Solution

Same as above

4. Screen brightness is one more thing which drains battery life.

Solution

The optimum way to fix this is go to Brightness & Wallpaper -> Select auto-Brightness for optimum battery life.

5. "Notifications" is one more thing to keep in mind. This is not a problem if you are using 5-6 apps. But, when you have 45 apps like me on your phone :-), then you have a problem.

Solution

you may want to control the Auto push notifications from different apps by going to Settings -> notifications.

Here you can individually control each apps notification mechanism.

6. "Browsing" is one more thing which obviously drains battery. From reading the news via BBC, Flipboard to reading books, articles etc all amounts to draining of battery life. This sometimes is unavoidable.

7. Recording Videos and playing the will of course affect battery life.

These are all the possible things I can think of right now which affects battery life, hope this helps in answering this question. If you have any other tips please feel free to share it here as it would be helpful to me and other readers.

Thanks all!!! Happy Testing!!!