A change I made on my iPhone that has made a massive difference to my battery life

A change that I made recently has made such a big difference to my iPhone's battery life.  The last two nights, my battery was still at over 50% at 8pm, despite normal usage during the day.

Before that, my iPhone which down to about 20% or less by about 7pm each night - which was a pain if I was about to go out for the evening, and needed to rely on my phone having adequate battery.

The 'Low Battery' mode is great and really does make your iPhone's battery last a significant amount of time while in this mode, but I was curious to see if the below articles had any measure of truth.

Over the past week, I saw the articles that alleged that the Facebook app has been a major culprit in drainage my battery due to a bug in the app.  

So, I deleted the App and reverted to using the Facebook website from Safari instead.  

I saved the Facebook web page as a icon on my Home Screen - which made it look like I still have the App on my iPhone, making it very easy to access.

(If you don't know to save a web page as an 'app icon' on your Home Screen, check out this week's iPad and iPhone handy hint, Turning your favourite web page into an 'app' on your Home Screen.)

So, if you too are suffering battery issues and are looking for a quick fix that will (hopefully) make a big difference, try removing the Facebook app and see what happens.

I will let you know if a see a future news item advising that Facebook has fully resolved this issue.

Facebook apologises for iPhone battery drain issues, releases partial fix | theage.com.au

Facebook app is draining iPhone batteries, say users | theage.com.au

​Updates Sat 31st Oct 2015

Check your Screen Brightness

I have realised since writing the original article above that  I made another change around the same time as deleting the Facebook app.  

I also turned down my screen brightness, which had been at full brightness.  

Check out your own screen brightness in your Control Center (swipe up from below bottom of the screen and adjust the brightness slider (sun symbol).  This might also help to dramatically reduce your battery usage. 

If, after making these changes, you are still trying to work out what's draining your battery, go to Settings -> Battery (a new Settings option in iOS 9) and find out which apps and features are the main culprits.

When my screen brightness was at full tilt, my Home and Lock Screen usage was up around 40%.

Is the News app using battery in "Background"

When I check Settings -> Battery this morning, I was puzzled to see that the new 'News' app was using my battery, showing this usage was 'Background Activity'.  

​This was despite the fact that I had turned off the 'Background App Refresh' feature, to stop any apps working in the background and wasting my data and battery.  (Have you turned off this feature?  

Go to Settings -> General -> Background App Refresh, and turn this off to see if this makes any difference to your battery life.

It seems that when the new News app was added in iOS 9.1, it was installed with the 'Background App Refresh' turned on by default.  How annoying!

So I had to temporarily turn Background App Refresh back on (in Settings -> General -> Background App Refresh), make sure it was specifically turned off for the News app, then turn the main 'switch' back to off - so that NO apps are refreshing in background again, as I had previously specified!

---