Battery saving is a land of snake oil and half solutions. It truly is difficult to find an application that actually saves you battery since most battery saver measures are manual, including turning the brightness on your screen down, turning down the frequency that apps sync data, and other tried and true methods. In most cases, you see a bigger improvement when you understand what causes battery drain and how to identify and mitigate your biggest causes. Still, if you want to try out some apps that might help, here are the best battery saver apps for Android.
Battery Guru (root and non-root)
Price: Free / Up to $19.99
Battery Guru is an excellent battery saver app. It doesn’t work like booster apps or service terminators. Instead, it helps you keep your battery health as high as it can be. The app contains notifications for battery temperature limits and charging limits so you don’t wear out your battery sooner. Additionally, some battery-saving modes can help reduce battery drain so you charge less often. It has a Doze Mode customization tool so you can make it even more aggressive if needed. However, that last feature requires root or for you to input some ADB commands to give the app permission to do those things. It’s great for power users.
Greenify (root or non-root)
Price: Free / $2.99
Greenify is one of the most popular battery-saving apps. It identifies apps that wake up your phone more frequently. It can also help keep them from doing that so often. The app also has modern features for Android Nougat and beyond with Aggressive Doze and Doze modes. This app is useful for both root and non-root devices. However, you’ll get more functionality and power with root. All of the features are free. There is an optional donate version that runs for $2.99 if you want to support development.
GSam Battery Monitor (root and non-root)
Price: Free / $2.49
GSam Battery Monitor is another popular battery saver app. It won’t do anything to save you battery life on its own. However, it can provide you with information about the apps draining your battery. You can use that information to improve your own battery life. It can show details on wakelocks, wake time, and even CPU and sensor data. It faced some difficulties with the latest versions of Android. However, you can use an ADB command to give GSam access to more granular app usage stats and other controls. There is also an optional root option if you use a rooted phone, but the ADB option should work for most people, root or not.
Naptime
Price: Free / Up to $13.99
Joe Hindy / Android Authority
Naptime is a battery saving app from Francisco Franco, developer of Servicely, which was previously on this list. Naptime helps preserve battery by basically making Android’s native Doze Mode more aggressive while also doing things like disabling sync and other such things while the phone is in Doze Mode. It’s a lighter touch and it uses systems in place that are shown to actually save battery life. It’s mostly for root devices. However, the developer has a short tutorial on how to get it to work on non-rooted Android devices. It’s definitely a power user app, but it’s not terribly difficult to do.
Doze Mode and App Standby
Price: Free
Android’s native capabilities far outshine what you can find in app form. Doze Mode puts your whole device in a hibernation mode of sorts. Apps can only sync occasionally and in batches as dictated by the OS. Thus, it saves a ton of battery life. App Standby restricts data usage by apps you don’t use very often for additional savings. These are enabled by default in modern versions of Android and you really can’t control them. However, by simply not using apps and by leaving your phone to chill for a while, the modes activate and reduce battery drain by a whole bunch.
Other battery-saving methods
Google is slowly closing the doors on Android when it comes to stuff like accessibility, developer tools, and the like. Thus, the really good battery saving apps are for root users only. Thankfully, there are some small tricks that improve battery life no matter what device you own. Here are some quick, simple tricks that do actually work:
- Uninstall apps you don’t use – That way they don’t run in the background and consume battery life. This also increases your storage.
- Lower your screen brightness – This is sometimes unavoidable in certain situations like direct sunlight. However, the lower your screen brightness is, the less energy your screen uses. Your screen is usually the top source of battery drain. This is also the only battery saving trick that works on LCD screens.
- Use black themes, wallpapers, etc on OLED screens – Most phone OEMs these days use some kind of OLED, POLED, or AMOLED display. OLED screens display black by shutting off individual pixels on the screen. Thus, using blacked-out themes, wallpapers, and other elements allow portions of the screen to remain off at all times. This doesn’t generally save a lot of battery life, but every little bit helps.
- Don’t play games – Mobile games are notorious for their battery-chugging capabilities. Those who need to stretch their battery life may want to wait to play games until they are near a charger or at home.
- Use Wi-Fi whenever possible – Cellular connectivity generally drains the battery faster than Wi-Fi. The less often you’re on a cellular network, the better. This has the added benefit of using less data, a boon for those with limited data plans.
- Turn off connections you’re not using – We’re talking stuff like Bluetooth, your Wi-Fi radio, etc. This isn’t nearly as big of a deal as it used to be, but your phone does still scan for connections even when you aren’t near any so you can save a little bit.
- Use battery saving modes on your phone – Most manufacturers include battery-saving modes that apps can’t replicate. They generally turn down functionality and performance but improve battery life dramatically. It usually turns sync off, lowers your screen brightness and resolution, and some devices have battery modes that decrease CPU clock speeds for better battery savings.
- Don’t use vibration or haptic feedback – Both of these require a little vibration motor to turn on and cause vibration. The motor drains the battery over the course of a full day. Turn them both off if you can live without them or, at least, use them sparingly. It doesn’t seem like much, but if you enable haptic feedback on your keyboard and then post a full 260-character tweet, that’s 260 times the vibration motor ran. It adds up.
- Don’t use booster apps – They work by trying to kill processes that may consume battery. However, with how Android works, those processes just open again shortly after they close. The act of closing and opening the background processes over and over again takes up more battery than it would if you didn’t use a booster app at all.
- Turn off 5G if you can – 5G is the latest mobile data technology. The tech for it isn’t all that efficient yet and definitely drains your battery faster than 4G LTE most of the time. This option isn’t available to everybody, but turning 5G off when possible can save you some battery life. In many areas, 5G isn’t all that much faster than 4G anyway.
- Change other Android settings: There are plenty of other Android settings you can change, and here are our top 5 picks.
- Other tips: We have some other tips linked up just below in case you’d like to go even deeper.
If we missed any of the best battery saver apps for Android, tell us about them in the comments. You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists.
FAQ
They can if used correctly. However, it’s not because of anything the app does, but rather how the user reacts to the data from the app. Root users have better options, but since hardly anyone roots these days, battery saving apps for the general populace is less useful.
