If you reach out to happy Android phone users worldwide and ask them what is the biggest shortcoming of their phone – 90% of people will likely mutter “battery autonomy”.

Whereas with cell phones of a few years back users were accustomed to running for several days on a single charge… most Android smartphones will likely require a daily charge to stay functional. And that isn’t entirely linear either: depending on what you do with your phone, you can burn through a full charge in fewer than 5 or 6 hours!

No surprises here, really: these modern smartphones pack a lot of power in a small form factor… and with great power comes blazing fast battery depletion.

In case you’re wondering just what you can do to keep your phone running for the longest amount of time on a single charge, this article will cover all the basics and beyond.

Be Aware of Energy Consumption

To begin with, you should realize how drastically different the power consumption of your phone is, depending on what you’re using it for. Sending and receiving calls does spend a hefty measure of battery, as well as browsing the Internet. But it’s not until you fire up all the processing cores in your phone by running top-of-the-line games that you really start burning rubber super-fast.

This goes to say that if you want to keep your Android from running out of juice, try using it more as a phone and less as a portable computer. If that’s not an option you even want to consider, keep reading through for more alternatives.

Features Worth Suspending

There are several features that you can suspend temporarily to extend the battery autonomy: Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and especially 3G (which tends to be a major power hog). Sometimes you can also activate Airplane mode (even if you’re not on the air) which will keep your phone from sending or receiving calls and texts, thus bringing down the energy consumption.

Reduce Screen Brightness

Another major power drain in most phones – especially those bearing larger screens – is the brightness level, which in some phones can account for more than 50% of all energy consumption. If you keep the screen brightness all the way up, then your battery will be quite unlikely to make it through the day. Ideally, you should let the phone manage this setting by activating the “auto-brightness” feature.

Understand Background Apps

Did you know that even when your phone is idle it can be wasting battery, depending on which apps you have running and/or simply installed? That’s because many apps can actually keep your phone from staying idle more than a few minutes, and in many cases can even reach out to your Wi-Fi connection on a regular basis. You can detect any apps that may be wasting too much power by checking the stats under Settings.

Power Management Apps

There are apps that will handle the battery optimizations above automatically, so you don’t have to worry about it. Juice Defender, Battery Defender, and Tasker are some of the most popular such apps, so we recommend experimenting with these in case you feel like exploring this option.

The Battery Level Fallacy

An important thing to keep in mind while experimenting with tactics to extend battery autonomy is – the battery level indicator is just an estimation. As such, the numbers you see often do not correspond to the actual juice left in the battery. Also, when charging your phone via computer USB cable, the battery level will generally tend to show exaggerated numbers.
To avoid being misled by the battery level indicator on your phone, we recommend charging it directly from the wall socket.

Using Extra Battery

If the optimizations above aren’t cutting it; or if you just don’t have the patience or inclination to over-think these matters – a simple alternative would be getting an extra battery for your phone, to double the potential time of use. Replacing the battery is easy and fast enough… although in this day and age there is arguably a better option (see below).

Using an External Battery Pack

Rather than getting a spare battery for your phone, a more elegant and convenient solution would be to get an external battery pack. These are essentially portable multi-purpose batteries with integrated connectors that can be used to charge most smartphones as well as other devices (such as tablets or even laptops).

They will vary in size from small than a phone to about the size of an external hard drive; likewise, the cost can range from a mere $20 (for a battery pack that holds enough power to recharge your phone once on the go), to $100 or more (for a battery pack that will hold enough power to recharge a phone multiple times, or even recharge a laptop a couple of times).