The 4 Best Ways To Stretch Out Your Phone’s Battery Life When It’s About To Die

At some point, we have all anxiously watched our phone battery hover around the danger zone of 5% or less.

Phones are lifelines, and when your device is dying, every percentage counts. Maybe you need the phone to book your ride home. Maybe the power went out in your apartment and you need your phone to stay informed and connected until more help arrives.

For my own small and big emergencies, I know from my unofficial testing that my phone can only last about four minutes once I hit 1% battery, and then it putters out in a quiet death. But could I squeeze out a few more crucial minutes?

Whatever the emergency, all of us need to learn how to conserve power on a phone when we need it most. I asked two phone experts about what works best.

If you need to conserve your dying phone battery efficiently, use the built-in tools that your phone already has. On iPhone settings, toggle on your phone’s low power mode, and on Android devices, go to battery saver mode.

Turning on this phone-survival option reduces your network connection, pauses automatic downloads and limits or turns off visual effects and background app activity.

When your phone is on the brink of death, you want to slow down all battery-draining activities and limit how fast the phone’s processor runs, said Arthur Shi, a battery expert and electrical engineer for iFixit, a website that allows people to share tech user manuals and sell phone parts for do-it-yourself repairs.

“The lithium polymer battery in your smartphone is essentially a bag of volatile chemicals that we’re trying to draw power out of when we use it,” Shi explained. “What low power [mode] does is it tries to prevent the huge spikes of power draw that might slump the battery below ‘low power.’”

“If I look down at my phone, and it’s at 3%, the first thing I think through is, ‘OK, can I turn the phone off?’” Shi said. Doing this is his go-to strategy for reducing the drain on his phone battery.

It may seem counterintuitive, but if you are only using your phone for a specific purpose, like waiting for a call at a specific time, turn off your phone until you need it or until you can recharge it.

Even during normal use, your phone’s screen brightness is taking up a “somewhat significant” amount of your battery’s energy, Shi said. So when every percentage counts, go to your phone’s settings and dim the screen display brightness to as low as your eyes can stand to see.

“The dimmer it is, the less juice it uses,” Shi explained.

“The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios use quite a bit of power,” Shi said. “I would keep cellular on if I’m waiting for a call, but if I am not waiting for cellular, I would just turn on ‘airplane mode.’”

The advantage of toggling on your phone’s airplane mode (iOS, Android) is that it will automatically toggle off both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections.

Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said when he is “super desperate,” he will put his dying phone on airplane mode, especially when he is traveling through roads with poor cell service.

When you notice that your phone is draining rapidly through an area with poor cell service, this is often because the phone is “trying to look for a cell signal and it can’t find it, and just keeps doing it over and over and over again,” Klosowski said.

As someone who chronically keeps her phone battery close to death, I decided to try a few of the interventions the experts recommended. When my phone recently hit 1% battery, I immediately dimmed the display brightness of my phone screen until I could barely see what was in front of me. I turned on my phone’s low power mode to redirect processing power to the phone’s critical needs, and I continued scrolling through social media to see if it made any difference.

This time, my phone lasted 11 whopping minutes more before it tragically died in the middle of my aggressive swipes through Instagram stories. And if I had been in a real emergency, those extra seven minutes I gained would have been critical.

Just know that these battery-saving tips are not an exact science, so every phone’s timing might be different.

“The battery meter on your phone is a good estimate of how much battery is left, but at most, it’s an estimate,” Shi said. “Most companies are pretty conservative with estimates, so you usually have a little more than what it actually shows.”