3 things that may be draining your iPhone battery

...and how to fix them.

If you find that your iPhone battery isn’t lasting through the day, here are three suggestions of steps you can take to improve your phone’s battery life.

1. Tweaking Your Location Services Settings

You find this section under Settings> Privacy > Location Services.

Location Services allow apps to access GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, for example, to determine where you are. If you allow an app to access that information, it will use battery life to do so. While deciding whether to allow an app access this data, not use the data or only use that information while the app is in use, think about whether the app relies on knowing your location to service its primary purpose or a central feature (Maps or Weather, for example). You can use the helpful “arrows” within the location services menu to determine which apps have used your location in the last day.

You can also check if an app is draining a lot of battery due to location services by checking Settings > Battery.

2. Changing Your Background App Refresh Settings

You can find this section under Settings > General > Background App Refresh.

When you switch between apps on the iPhone, you place the apps into a suspended state. With background app refresh turned on, these “suspended” apps can continue to update themselves. While that may be helpful for some apps, this will drain battery life (and consume cellular data or wi-fi as well). You can turn it off or adjust the background app refresh settings on a per-app basis. A good path forward would be to check which apps are the biggest offenders by checking Settings > Battery and decide from there.

3. Adjusting Your Screen Brightness

Settings > Display & Brightness

Your iPhone uses a sensor to determine the brightness of the screen. That sensor, controlled by the auto-brightness feature, will cause the screen to dim in low-light and get brighter in high-light. Turning off the auto-brightness and keeping your screen’s brightness low may save you a little battery life, but it may not make the screen practical for your everyday use. Try it for a day and see how it feels.

Those are just three of the ways to conserve your phone’s battery life. You may also want to consider how you utilize your phone when it isn’t plugged in. Streaming video, games and social media (like Facebook) are big battery users.

If you liked this post, our “6 Hidden Things You Didn’t Know Your iPhone Could Do” might also be useful.