How to find out which apps are draining your iPhone or iPad’s battery life [Video]

BY Gautam Prabhu

Published 14 Sep 2014

Battery life is a precious commodity on the iPhone, so it is important to optimize the settings on your iPhone to ensure that you can extend its battery life as much as possible based on your usage.

A lot also depends on the type of apps we use on our device. One of the biggest culprits for poor battery life are third-party apps running in the background.

iOS 8 finally brings OS X feature of naming and shaming such battery hogs. Follow these instructions to identify the battery hogs, and also find out what you should do next.

How to find battery hogs in iOS 8

  • Launch the Settings app
  • Tap on General
  • Tap on Usage
  • Tap on Battery Usage

iOS 8 - Battery usage

This will show you all the apps and internal services like Home & Lock screen that are consuming battery on your iPhone. By default it shows you the battery hogs in the last 24 hours. You can also check the battery hogs in the last 7 days by tapping on the Last 7 Days tab as you can see in the screenshot above.

What next

Now that you’ve identified the apps that are draining battery life on your device, here are some of the things you can do to extend your iPhone’s battery life, especially if it is third-party app:

  • If you can live without the app then the best thing to do is delete the app.
  • If you want to use the app, then you should seriously look at disabling Location Services and Background app refresh features for the app as they can end up consuming a lot of battery for apps like Facebook.

How to disable Location

  • Launch the Settings app
  • Scroll down and tap Privacy
  • Tap on Location Services
  • Then tap on the app name
  • Select While Using the App [This will ensure the location services are only used by the app while you’re using it. If you don’t want to app to use location services at all, then select Never from the list.]

iOS 8 Battery life tip - While Using the app

How to disable Background App refresh

  • Launch the Settings app
  • Tap on General
  •  Tap on Background App Refresh
  • Tap on the On/Off toggle next to the app you want to disable the background app refresh functionality.

iOS 8 - Background app refresh

That’s it. You should probably keep track of the battery hogs on a regular basis and take the necessary steps to ensure they don’t affect battery life on your device drastically.

Let us know how it goes.