How to optimise the battery life on a Galaxy smartphone

Top of a Galaxy smartphone showing battery at 100%

Galaxy phones are designed to offer high performance and excellent battery life. However, battery life depends on how the battery is used and different devices have different battery life. To find out how to optimise the battery on your phone try following some of our tips.

General tips:

  • When charging your phone for the first time, wait for the battery to be fully charged.
  • Aim to keep your smartphone between 20-80% charged (you don't need to wait for the battery to run out of charge completely before charging your phone).
  • Install the latest software version and keep apps updated. These updates may contain important battery-related improvements and can fix known malfunctions.

Please note: The steps and images shown in this FAQ may vary between devices. If the steps do not match your device try and follow the closest match on your device.

The easiest way to save power is to turn on Power saving from the Quick panel.

Power saving icon

You can also check the battery consumption data directly from the settings menu:

1 Go to Settings
2 Tap Battery

You can adjust which settings are changed when you turn on Power saving mode.

1 Swipe down the top of the screen to reveal the Quick panel
2 Tap and hold the Power saving icon
Power saving icon
3 Adjust the power settings according to your preference

When Power saving mode is activated, a leaf icon will appear at the top of the screen.

Charging your battery to 100% for a long period can reduce its lifespan. With Battery protection, you can adjust how your battery charges to make it last longer. To do this:

1 Go to Settings
2 Tap Device care
3 Tap Battery
4 Tap Battery protection
5 Select from Basic or Maximum. You can also choose to activate Adaptive protection by tapping the switch

Long screen time-out settings or high display brightness can substantially reduce the battery. To save battery, consider lowering your brightness setting, deactivating auto-brightness, reducing the sleep timeout setting and adjusting your screen resolution and wallpaper.

  • Use display standby: Put the display on standby every time you don’t need it by pressing the Power button.
  • Reduce "Screen timeout" delay: You can decide how long the screen remains active after the last touch. The screen timeout is set to 30 seconds by default. You can choose between several settings in a range from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. Go to Settings > Display > Screen timeout.
  • Change the Always On Display settings: Go to Settings > Lock screen and AOD > Tap the switch next to Always On Display to turn it off.
  • Reduce screen brightness: Swipe down from the top of the screen to reveal the Quick panel, then use the slider to adjust the brightness. Alternatively, go to Settings > Display.
  • Deactivate auto-brightness: Go to Settings > Display > Tap the switch next to Adaptive brightness to deactivate it.
  • Activate Dark Mode: If device has AMOLED display, switch to Dark Mode. If you are using a previous Android version, the function may be called “Night mode”. Go to Settings > Display.
  • Reduce the screen resolution: Go to Settings > Display > Screen resolution > Select a lower screen resolution then tap Apply.
  • Activate "Accidental touch protection": Prevent your phone from taking unintentional action while holding it in your pocket. Go to Settings > Display.
  • Check your wallpaper: Live wallpapers can reduce battery life. Regular wallpapers are more battery friendly. If your device has an AMOLED display, dark wallpapers help with battery life. Go to Settings > Wallpaper and style.

To save battery, choose the features that you would like to activate or deactivate according to your usage. For example:

  • Deactivate Bluetooth when it's not in use.
  • Deactivate Wi-Fi when you're not using it or when you are using mobile data instead.
  • Deactivate GPS or improve its accuracy.
  • Activate Flight Mode when you're not using the phone connectivity.

To access these options quickly:

1 Swipe down the top of the screen to reveal the Quick panel
2 Tap the relevant icon to activate or deactivate

Battery optimisation

Battery optimisation takes place automatically every day and allows you to keep the performance of the device at its best. It carries out several actions:

  • Storage cleaning.
  • Delete unused files and close applications running in the background.
  • Manage the battery usage when it is not compliant.
  • Search for blocked applications and malware.

 

To optimise the battery manually, go to Settings > Device care > Optimise now.

Background usage limits

You can use this setting to limit how much battery power selected apps use.

1 Go to Settings
2 Tap Device care
3 Tap Battery
4 Tap Background usage limits
5 From this page choose from Sleeping apps, Deep sleeping apps and Never auto sleeping apps to decide which apps you want to limit. Apps that are put to sleep use less battery power as they are prevented from operating in the background.

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