Smartphones have become an integral part of our daily lives, but one element that still remains a challenge is their limited battery life. Although the battery life of smartphones has improved drastically in the past few years, it is still not sufficient enough for most users. Smartphone manufacturers are doing their job of trying to improve the battery life of smartphones but as a mobile app developer, you can ensure that your app doesn’t drain the battery of a smartphone faster than necessary.
So for this purpose, we have shared a few tips that can help you optimize your mobile app for extended battery life. Let’s get started.
Use Efficient Code and Algorithms
To have a battery-friendly mobile app, you need to ensure that the code and algorithms that you are using are efficient and battery-friendly. One of the major reasons why a mobile app consumes so much battery life is that the code and algorithms used in the app are not efficient enough. To prevent this from happening with your mobile app, make sure that you avoid unnecessary computations, excessive memory usage, and resource-intensive operations by minimizing CPU usage, optimizing memory usage, and reducing network activity.
Properly Manage Background Tasks and Services
Properly managing background tasks and services can reduce the amount of battery that your app consumes on an Android phone or tablet. To optimize background tasks and services, make sure that you execute background tasks only when necessary and group notifications or deliver them in batches for efficient push notifications. Although these are tiny changes, optimizing these can significantly reduce the battery consumption of your mobile app.
Use a Battery-Friendly UI Design
The user interface of any mobile app is one of the few things that have a major role in deciding how much battery the app will consume. If the UI design of the app is battery-friendly, it will lead to reduced battery consumption and more efficient usage of resources. On the other hand, having a non-battery-friendly UI design will lead to your mobile app draining the phone’s battery in no time.
Therefore, you should make sure that you have a battery-friendly UI and to do that, you can minimize the use of heavy animations and transitions, and replace them with simpler ones, you can implement a dark mode option for less battery consumption, and provide options for adjusting screen brightness.
Use Battery-Efficient Third-Party Libraries
Whenever you are using third-party libraries in your app, you should always try to use those that are known for their battery efficiency and battery-friendly nature. Although there are various third-party libraries available, some are known to be more efficient than others.
Therefore, you should use libraries like Picasso/Glide/Coil for Android and Nuke/ SDWebImage/Kingfisher for iOS to efficiently load and cache images while for networking you can Alamofire for iOS and Retrofit for Android to optimize network requests.
SHAREit is a mobile app that uses resource-efficient third-party apps to reduce battery consumption and you can Download SHAREit for Android from here.
Optimize Location Services
If your mobile app is using location services, then it might be consuming more battery than other apps because location-based services consume more battery than others. To reduce this, you can use geofencing instead of continuous GPS polling and adjust the location accuracy based on the app’s requirements because high accuracy is not necessary for many apps.
Use Battery Profiling and Monitoring Tools
Since every app is not perfect, you need to continuously profile and monitor the issues to make your app more battery-efficient. For this purpose, there are various battery profiling and monitoring tools available, both for Android and iOS. With the help of these tools, you can identify the areas that need optimization and work on those areas to improve the battery life.
For Android apps, you can use the Android Profiler to identify areas that need optimization whereas for iOS devices you can use the Xcode’s Energy Usage Analyzer to monitor the energy consumption of your app.
