Your iPhone's new operating system comes with plenty of advantages, but iOS 7's not without its drawbacks. Battery life just ain't quite what you'd want it to be, but we've got some tips to squeeze the most out of that sucker and stay juiced all day long.
iOS 7 comes with a whole bunch of new features that are handy
if you need/want them. If you don't, they're just eating away at that precious battery life behind the scenes, and give you exactly zero help for your trouble. So shut 'em down.
Turn off parallax
Parallax is fun, but it's the definition of "extra." And maybe it even makes you dizzy. Who needs it? Not you. You can turn it off in accessibility settings, by going to
Settings>>General>>Accessibility and setting
Reduce Motion to on.
Turn off AirDrop/Bluetooth if you're not going to use it
AirDrop is great when you are AirDropping. The rest of the time it's just fidgeting in its seat, looking for another device to play with. Turning it off is easy, just swipe up your
Control Center, and hit the toggle.
Stop searching for Wi-Fi
There's no need to have your phone searching for Wi-Fi when there's no trusted network in sight. You'll save yourself some trouble if you get in the habit of turning off Wi-Fi from the Control Center when you leave the house. Alternatively, you can go to
Settings>>Wi-Fi and turn
Ask to Join Networks to off. This way your phone will hop on Wi-Fi's it knows, but won't look around for more without direct orders.
Disable location services (for apps that don't need it).
Google Maps needs to know where you are, yes. But Facebook? Hop over to
Settings>>Privacy>>Location Services to get a full list of the apps that are asking about where you are. You can probably turn off about half, and cut down on
a lot of GPS polling.
Turn off background app updates
Immediate app updates are rarely a
huge deal, but having enough battery can be. Go to
Settings>>iTunes & App Store and then scroll down. You'll see
Updates under
Automatic Downloads. Turn it off. Just don't forget to stop by the App Store and update manually now and then.
Turn off background app refreshing
The brutal downside of good multitasking is running things in the background (duh). But if you go to
Settings>>General>>Background App Refresh, you can disable background-runnin' for the apps that aren't important. Or all of them if you want to go all the way.
Disable auto-brightness
Chances are, auto-brightness keeps you more well-lit than you need to be. You can shut it off and get your mood-lighting on by going to
Settings>>Wallpapers & Brightness and flipping the toggle. While you're there, crank that backlight all the way down, or as far down as you can handle. If you step outside, that's what the Control Center is for.
Go on a push notification diet
Not every app needs to push its notifications; that stuff takes power. Go to
Settings>>Notification Center and scroll down to the
Include section. Then go on a toggling spree.
Don't push; fetch.
If your email isn't
that important, or you have a couple accounts, go turn the low-priority ones to fetch instead of push. This one is pretty dependent on how often you get emails and how crucial they are, so you'll have to feel it out, but you can set to fetch in
Settings>>Mail, Contacts and Calendar>>Fetch New Data
Turn off Siri's "Raise to Speak" feature
If you want Siri to eat less of your precious battery, turn off his or her
Raise to Speak feature in
Settings>>General>>Siri>>Raise to Speak. Or, if you're really not fond of the dude/lady turn him/her off to go dream of electric sheep.
Turn off 4G (if times are tough)
Disabling 4G is going to hurt a little but, but desperate times can call for desperate measures and LTE is a battery-burner. You can choke off the data-hose by going to
Settings>>Cellular>>Enable LTE/Enable 4G
And treat your battery right in general
But even without all these tweaks, it pays to treat your lithium-ion battery right from the start, especially if you have a new gadget
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