How to Increase Your iPhone's Battery Life

I have an iPhone 4 and it's almost 3 years old.

One of the things about Apple is that they charge a lot for their phones. But in return, I get to use it for so much longer than if I would have bought any other smartphones. I've had two major firmware upgrades (decided to skip on iOS7) and it still looks as good as new due to the quality for the materials used on the phone.

Having said that, I found my battery life very dismal these days. I could zap every ounce of battery life in just 4 hours. At first, I thought it was due to the aging battery, but that's when I decided to see if there's any app that is sucking my batteries (I have probably a hundred apps).


And so, after some research, I found the main culprits:

1. Apps trying to use the Location Services  
2. Push notifications services

Stalker Apps

After I turned off permissions for a number of Location Services based apps and notifications services, my battery has significantly improved. You can tell when an app is using Location Services when you see your status bar has this little arrow on the right corner.

Here's how. Go to Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services -> pick and choose which app you least use and turn off their location access

Normally, apps uses location access when it is needed like Waze and Google Maps. I keep those on. But some apps like Google (with the Google Now feature), shopping apps like Maxis Rewards and Groupon, keeps Location Services running all the time. On iOS6, some apps constantly require location services, like Data Usage. And this eats battery life like mad.

Pushy Apps

Secondly, apps that do push notifications also take up battery life. I know Facebook and emails are major consumers (turn them off if you don't want to know when your friend likes your cat photo), but there are a lot of other ones that you don't use and you should turn off notifications for these apps to save battery. 

Here's how. Go to Settings -> Notifications -> Select an app -> Set Notification Center to OFF and Alert Style to None.

That's it for now. Try it and you'll definitely see a marked improvement on your iPhone. Till next time!