Android phones are getting more powerful every day. With bigger and brighter screens, powerful processors, and high-end features, poor battery life is still a common problem on modern smartphones.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at Google’s AI-powered adaptive battery feature, which is designed to help improve the battery life of your Android phone. How does it work and how can you tell if it is enabled on your smartphone?
What does the adaptive battery do?
Introduced with Android 9, Adaptive Battery is a battery saving feature that uses Google’s DeepMind AI technology. It’s the result of a collaboration between Android and DeepMind AI, and it aims to improve battery life on Android phones over time by learning your usage patterns and optimizing your apps accordingly. So how does adaptive battery work?
Usually hundreds of processes are running in the background on your Android phone. Some are useful and should work all the time, like location services that can be useful for tracking your phone if it goes missing, but others aren’t that important and stopping them will improve battery life.
Adaptive Battery takes into account each app and feature you use, the length of time you use it, how much battery it consumes, and when you typically charge your device. Once you’re familiar with using your app, you’ll limit the background activity of all other unnecessary apps that you don’t use often.
By learning your charging pattern, Adaptive Battery will attempt to extend battery life until the time you normally charge your phone. Sometimes to achieve this (usually when the battery is low), you can also reduce your phone’s performance and background app activities.
The effect of all these limitations on the overall performance of your phone will be negligible, and doing this also reduces idle battery drain – the amount of power used when your phone is idle.
To accomplish this, Android sorts all your apps into buckets based on how often you use them.
The screenshots above from the App Standby section in Developer Options show how apps are ranked when Adaptive Battery is on versus when it’s off.
The image on the left shows the feature enabled, while the one on the right shows it disabled. You can see that the apps that were previously in states like Restricted, Working Set, Rare, etc. are all set to the Active state when Adaptive Battery is disabled. This means that they consume more battery by running in the background.
App Standby buckets help the system prioritize app resource allocation based on how often or how often the user uses an app. Our guide on the best options for Android developers might come in handy in case you want to learn more about waiting apps.
How to enable or disable adaptive battery on your Android phone
Adaptive Battery is enabled by default on smartphones running Android 9 or higher, but if you need to check or disable it, here’s how you can do it:
- Open Settings and touch Drums.
- Tap on customizable preferences and tap the switch next to Adaptive Battery to enable or disable it.
The process is very easy and you don’t need to do anything more than that. However, sometimes with all these optimizations and limitations, you may experience performance or memory issues with some applications.
If that happens, you can manually change the battery optimization settings for individual apps.
- Open Settingstap on Applicationsand later All applications to get a list of installed applications.
- Now find the app you are having trouble with and open your Application information section by tapping on the name. Scroll down and tap on App battery usage.
- choose the Unrestricted profile if you have performance issues in the app. Doing this may increase the battery usage of the app, but it will also improve the performance of the app.
- If you think any app is running in the background unnecessarily, please choose the option Restricted profile, and the application will no longer remain in memory. You may also not receive notifications from the app.
Should you use an adaptive battery on your Android phone?
In general, adaptive battery is a useful feature to save battery. Its goal is to improve battery life and it tries to achieve that by optimizing the software for apps and features. However, we have also seen users get better battery life after turning it off.
So it seems that Adaptive Battery results vary depending on how you use your phone. So we suggest you give it a try and find out what works best on your device: Adaptive Battery On or Off. Also, if you want to try more battery saving measures, our guide on automating your Android phone will surely help you.