Find Out Which Of Your iPhone Apps Use More Battery

If your iPhone's battery seems to run down quickly, use the Settings app to figure out which app is the culprit. You can see yoru battery use by app, by day and even by hour.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to figure out what is using up the battery on your iPhone. 
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So I often hear people say that their iPhone looses battery pretty quickly. I often ask them, well do you look to see what's using the most battery and a lot of people don't know how to do this. It's really simple and it's right there in your Settings App. 
So in your Settings App scroll down until you find Battery. Then go into that. Then wait for the screen to load. Now you're going to see right here a chart. You can either see the last 24 hours or the last ten days. This is going to show you your battery usage. This green line here at the bottom represents when you had the phone plugged in. So, for instance, overnight. Then you could see how much battery power your iPhone had during that time. So anytime that there was a steep drop-off you can easily see that. You can also see when it's charging up. Here you can even see how the iPhone charged up to about 80%, stopped, and then charged up the rest of the way just before morning. 
Now if you continue to look down further you'll see Activity. This represents you using your iPhone. The dark blue lines are using the iPhone when your screen is on and the light blue ones are when your screen is off. So in other words when it is doing background tasks. So you can see there were a couple of background tasks performed overnight. Probably looking for updates, doing maintenance, and things like that. All-in-all I really haven't used my iPhone too much in the last 24 hours. 
You can switch to the last ten days by tapping here. Then you're going to see each day and how much battery was used and then how much you used your iPhone. You again have the dark blue for screen use and light blue for background use. So you can see here I used maybe about 60% of my battery here on Saturday. 
Now let's go back to 24 hours. Let's look below this. Here you're going to see a list of Apps starting with the one using the most battery. In this case Goggle Home used 36% of my battery. Exposure Notifications in the background 27%. Find My 16% and so on. Now this may look like a lot but considering I didn't use my iPhone much in the last 24 hours it's not really that much. If I switch to Show Activity I can see I only used Goggle Home for ten minutes and I could see, for instance, Weather I only used for three minutes. It even breaks it down. One minute for the screen, two minutes in the background. If you don't see this breakdown here just tap on any app and you can see how it toggle goes On and Off. So I can switch by Battery Usage and Activity by just tapping here in the top. So that's useful for determining what is really using a lot of battery. I can't get too much from this since I didn't use any app very much. 
Let's go up here to the top and switch to Last 10 Days. So not only does this change the charts up here but now I could see that I used in the last ten days Safari for a hour on the screen. That's the top battery user here. I can switch and see it used 19% of the battery over the last week. This is typically where you could really figure out what is going on. Say you have an app that you're using that you don't even realize takes a lot of battery. It would maybe appear here at the top with a very large number. Sometimes this makes sense. If that is the app that you use all the time then it makes sense it's using the most battery and it's not really a problem. But if an app that you don't consider yourself using very much and it's still beating out apps that have more screen time than this one, then you know that app is very energy heavy. So that's the thing. Not all apps use battery power at the same rate. Some apps use a lot of graphics, change the screen a lot, or are using a lot of Wi-Fi, or mobile. It is draining the battery all the time. You can tell that by looking critically at the numbers here. 
Now, if you want, you can also go into these charts and select any one of those to focus on that day. I'm going to look at this Saturday here. If I tap on that you can see it focuses in on that in battery usage and activity. I could see here which apps I used during that day. You can even switch to 24 hours and then tap on any given slice in here just to see battery usage during that one hour and which apps you were using and how much battery power they used.
So there's a ton of data here. I encourage you all to go and look right now, even if you're not having any trouble, just to familiarize yourself with this app. The next time you find yourself with all of a sudden 20% of your battery left you can quickly go in and figure out what took up the most battery power today. Maybe even look at the chart and figure out, say, if you forgot to plug your phone in last night. All the information is there. You never have to wonder about what is using up more battery power because you can tell using this part of the Settings App. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “Find Out Which Of Your iPhone Apps Use More Battery”

Estelle Klein

3 months ago

Very useful, BUT have i been charging too much because when i get up in the morning, sometimes i have very little battery left. Are apps on in the background? Any other suggestions? Thanks
Estelle

Gary Rosenzweig

Estelle: Charging too much? When you get up in the morning, the battery should be full. Are you not plugging it in at night?

Dianne Mannheimer

How do I know which apps are running in the background at any time and how to I close them? Occasionally all open apps will appear on my screen and I can sweep up and close them but I don’t know how to get to see which apps are open.

Dianne: Unless you have never launched the app since restarting, or have force-quit the app, it is "running." But background apps shouldn't take up much power at all, unless they are supposed to. Like an app tracking your bike ride should be running and using power while it is tracking. Pull up on the bottom of the screen to get to the app switcher. But don't force-quit an app unless you are having trouble.

Sherrie Vick

I see that yes, I am using the messages and phone most often, but is there anyway to lesson how much battery any particular app takes?

I thank Leo for suggesting your newsletter, and for you to put such ways to help non-techies to figure things out!

Sherrie: Not really. If you need to use an app, and it makes your day more productive or better in some way, then use the app. But this is useful for troubleshooting problems, or maybe using an app less that you don't really need to use, like a something that just passes the time.

Find Out Which Of Your iPhone Apps Use More Battery

Comments: 6 Responses to “Find Out Which Of Your iPhone Apps Use More Battery”

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