Improving Your iPhone's Battery Life

Every year, iPhone owners viciously throw their devices at walls, shattering souls and killing dreams, all thanks to poor battery life. Let's fix that!

As great of an update as iOS7 was, there's no question that it uses more battery than previous versions of Apple's mobile operating system.

So instead of banging your head against your ketchup encrusted, crumb-composed desk, wishing that you made better life choices, read this article instead!

The key to better battery life is simple: tell your stupid iPhone to quit worrying so much about things it shouldn't have to worry about! Or, in geeky tech lingo, turn off the background processes that are consuming your phone's precious computing power.

The first thing to do is to go to settings, general, background app refresh. This is probably the thing that is causing your battery to heat up and burn out faster than Usain Bolt in the Mojave Desert. Basically, what background app refresh does is...refresh your apps in the background! So if you have a connection, it'll refresh all of the data contained in the apps you have it turned on for. The real culprit here is Facebook, which is automatically turned on, and updates itself for every little thing your grandma posts to her wall. Just uncheck it, and Facebook will only update itself when you want it to, that is, when you open the app.

Do this for other apps, like news apps, and you'll be giving your phone a new lease on life. Sure, it's nice to have your apps be constantly updated, but you don't *need* it, and the extra hours of battery life are worth waiting a second or two for your feeds to update themselves.

Background app refresh should really only be left on for stuff that must be on all of the time, like an exercise application that needs to know where you are to get a proper reading of all those greasy calories you've burned. All of the other stuff can wait for you to actually hit the app.

The next step is to go to settings, privacy, location services. You can keep this on, as it's useful for stuff like maps, however, you really don't need it for *all* of the things iOS7 turns it on for. You'll probably find that a bunch of apps you never use have location services turned on, in which case, shut those suckers down! You'll also probably find yourself in a situation where you're like, hmm, why does that app need to track my location?! Burn that creepy app to the ground. Your privacy is worth it!

Really, besides maps, most apps don't need to have location services on. So if you want to be a minimalist turn them all off besides that one. Stuff like Facebook and Twitter will probably be turned on, which doesn't make too much sense as I am unsure why Zuckerberg and whoever-the-hell runs Twitter needs to know where we are. So turn those off too, unless you need to check-in somewhere on Facebook or something.

You've probably noticed a common theme here in that social media apps consume a lot of your precious battery, most of the time needlessly so. The truth of the matter is that you can use them perfectly well without them choking your processor in the background and spying on you 24/7.

At the bottom of the location services page, there's a link that says "system services." Hit it. You'll see a bunch of stuff turned on. Most of that is useful, but other stuff is superfluous. You can turn off the iAds, Popular Near Me, and the Frequent Locations services, as they take up a lot of power and aren't really a necessity (who wants their phone to keep track of where you've been anyways).

Another thing you can do is go to settings, mail/contacts/calenders, and turn "fetch new data" off. This will make it so that e-mails are only delivered to you when you open the mail map, and not immediately after they are sent to you. This can use a tremendous amount of power, and while it's nice to be consistently updated, you can always just open the mail app up and check to see if there's anything new there anyways.

Lastly, dance your way to settings, general, spotlight search. Here you can see all of the things spotlight search keeps tabs on. If you never use your iPhone's search function, feel free to shut these all down, as it takes a bit of power for your phone to archive all of that data. If you use spotlight search, you can probably turn off stuff like podcasts, audiobooks, videos, events, voice memos, reminders, etc. Reminders are easy to see anyways, since they blow up on your screen, reminding you stuff! That way, spotlight search only bothers archiving the things you want it to, and it won't waste its time and your battery going through everything else.

Anyways, I hope this was helpful! With luck, you've reconsidered the whole "having an existential crisis due to a phone that only lasts a couple hours a day" thing, and are now once again a proper, functional member of our great society! If I find anymore battery tips I'll let you know, but until then, have fun finally enjoying that phone you paid a fortune for!