Android phones are becoming more powerful day by day. With bigger and brighter screens, powerful processors and high-end features, poor battery life remains a common problem in modern smartphones.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at Google’s AI-powered Adaptive Battery feature, which is designed to help improve your Android phone’s battery life. How does it work and how do you know if it is activated 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 there are hundreds of processes running in the background on your Android phone. Some are useful and should work all the time, like location services which can be useful for finding your phone if it’s lost, but others aren’t that important, and turning them off will improve battery life. .
Adaptive Battery takes into account each app and feature you use, how long you use it, how much battery it consumes, and when you usually charge your device. Once familiar with using your app, this will limit the background activity of all other unnecessary apps that you don’t use frequently.
By learning your charging pattern, Adaptive Battery will try to extend battery life to when you normally put your phone on charge. Sometimes to achieve this (usually when the battery is low) it 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, which will also reduce idle battery drain, which is the amount of power used when your phone is asleep.
To do this, Android sorts all your apps into buckets based on how often you use them.
The above screenshots of the App Standby section in Developer Options show how apps are classified when Adaptive Battery is enabled versus when it is disabled.
The left image is with the feature enabled, while the right is when it is disabled. You can see that apps previously in states like Restricted, Working_Set, Rare, etc. are all set to Active state when Adaptive Battery is disabled. This means that they consume more battery while running in the background.
App Standby buckets help the system prioritize application resource allocation based on how often or infrequently a user uses an application. Our guide to the best options for Android developers may be helpful if you want to learn more about sleeping 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:
- Open Settings and press Drums.
- Press on Adaptive preferences and tap the toggle next to Adaptive Battery to turn it on or off.
The process is very simple and you don’t have to do anything more. However, sometimes with all these optimizations and limitations, you may experience performance or memory issues with certain apps.
If this happens, you can manually change the battery optimization settings for individual apps.
- Open SettingsPress on appsand then All Apps to get a list of your installed apps.
- Now find the app you are having trouble with and open its Application Information section by tapping on the name. Scroll down and tap Application battery usage.
- Choose the Free profile if you are experiencing performance issues in the app. This may increase the app’s battery usage, but will also improve the app’s performance.
- If you think an app is running unnecessarily in the background, choose the option Limit profile, and the application will no longer remain in memory. You may also not receive notifications from the app.
Should you use adaptive battery on your Android phone?
Overall, Adaptive Battery is a useful battery saving feature. It aims to improve battery life and tries to fill it by optimizing software for apps and features. However, we’ve also seen users get better battery life after turning it off.
So it looks like Adaptive Battery results vary depending on how you use your phone. Therefore, we suggest you experiment 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.