5 Tips to Keep an Older Cell Phone From Dying

The great news is that you don’t need to replace your device just because it can’t hold a charge the way it used to. Most of the time, battery problems come from how we use our phones rather than something being wrong with the battery itself. The way you charge your phone matters much more than you might think. I’ve found that some small adjustments to your daily routine can actually add hours to your battery life.

The first place to start is with your screen, since it uses up more power than pretty much any other part of your phone. When you make this one change to your screen settings, it makes the biggest difference.

Turn Down Your Screen Brightness

The problem is that most people walk around with their screen brightness turned up way too high. You might not even know this is happening because your phone probably changes its brightness automatically based on the light around you. Most devices are set to be brighter than they need to be right out of the box.

Here’s what you should try instead – go ahead and turn off that automatic brightness feature and set your screen manually to stay below 50%. You’ll see the difference pretty quickly. I know one commuter who made this small change and got 20% more battery life on his everyday train rides.

Your screen usually uses up 25-40% of your phone’s total battery power. When you cut the brightness in half, you can add a few more hours to your battery life. This is especially helpful during long workdays or when you’re traveling and can’t find a place to plug in.

If your phone has an OLED screen, you can go one step further by turning on dark mode. What happens with these screens is that each pixel turns off when it shows black, which means it doesn’t use any power at all. So instead of squinting at a bright white screen, you’re scrolling through apps late at night with a dark background.

The only real downside is making sure you can still see everything well. You don’t want to set your brightness so low that you have to strain your eyes or that you miss notifications you need. You just need to find that sweet balance where you can see everything just fine without the screen being too bright. Most people find this works best when they set their brightness to around 30-40% when they’re indoors.

How to Stop Apps from Draining Your Battery

Apps can really drain your battery in ways you might not expect. They keep running in the background even when you’re not actively using them – they’re always checking for updates and sending you notifications. Your phone might just be sitting there on the table and most people never know what’s going on inside it. But these apps keep working away behind the scenes. In plenty of cases, this background activity actually drains your battery faster than when you’re using your screen. Apps use your phone to run all sorts of tasks whether you need them to or not.

You probably know that frustrating feeling when your battery drops from 60% to 40% and you’ve barely touched your phone. Social media apps are some of the worst for this. They refresh your feeds every few minutes and ping their servers to check if you have any new messages. Navigation apps can be just as bad, especially if they’re tracking your location all day long – and this tracking never stops. Every two to five minutes during active hours, your social media apps are checking for updates. Your phone ends up burning through resources just to keep all of these services running.

The great news is that Android and iPhone give you ways to control this behavior. On Android, you can actually limit how much background activity happens at once. First you’ll need to enable Developer Options and then you can look for “Background process limit” in the settings. This tells your phone to be more selective about which apps it keeps active. If you set background process limits, you can extend your battery life by 30% on busy days. Once you get to this setting, you’ll be able to choose which apps should be allowed to run in the background.

If you have an iPhone, you can go to Settings and then check Battery to see which apps are using the most power. From there you can turn off Background App Refresh for the apps that drain the most battery. Just be careful not to turn off everything at once – some apps need to keep updating. You still want the apps that matter like messaging services to work the way they should.

When you look at battery usage data, it tells you which apps have been using the most power over the past week. You should keep your must-have communication apps active while turning off the social apps that drain too much battery.

Set Up Your Phone’s Battery Saver Mode

Most phones come with a battery saver mode built right in. Most people don’t even know this feature exists. It’s pretty easy – you just need to turn it on. Android calls it “Battery Saver” while iPhones use “Low Power Mode.” They both do pretty much the same job.

When you turn this on, your phone goes into a kind of hibernation mode. Battery saver mode takes power away from the nice-to-have features and gives it to the important functions you need. When you’re stuck somewhere with a dying phone, those extra hours can save the day. Your screen will get dimmer and your phone will stop doing as much background work, which helps your battery last longer. You might get an extra hour or two of use, which can make all of the difference between having a dead phone and being able to get home with a working one.

The downsides are pretty obvious once you start trying it. Your screen gets dimmer and those smooth animations slow down. Background apps won’t update as much – so your social media feeds won’t get new posts every few seconds like they usually do. Your iPhone will even turn off 5G and make your screen go dark after just 30 seconds.

Some people stay away from these modes because they worry about how their phone will run. I get why people worry about performance when they need their phone for work. Apps take longer to open and going from one app to another feels slow and clunky. That’s understandable. Your phone will feel a bit sluggish when it’s trying to save power. Still, having a slow phone beats having a dead one.

You can even set these modes to turn on by themselves when your battery gets down to a specific percentage. That way, you won’t have to remember to turn it on manually. Most newer phones let you set this up around your everyday schedule. So if your battery usually runs out around 3 PM, you can have power-save mode kick in at 50% charge instead of letting it drop all the way down to 20%.

The right balance depends on how you use your phone day-to-day. You don’t want to turn off features that you might need for work or if something comes up.

Turn Off the Features That Drain Your Battery

Those little connectivity features actually drain plenty of your battery. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth keep looking for networks and devices even when you’re not using them – and most phones do this every few seconds. Your phone uses up battery power just to keep these connections going while constantly searching for new ones.

The answer is simple. Just turn off Wi-Fi when you leave home and turn off Bluetooth when you’re not connected to your wireless headphones or speakers.

When you turn off these radios, it stops all of the endless back-and-forth between your phone and nearby networks. Most people lose 20-30% of their battery to this invisible drain every single day.

GPS and location services are another big problem. These features make your phone communicate with satellites and cell towers all of the time – even weather apps check where you are. Unless you need turn-by-turn directions right now, go ahead and turn off location services for apps that don’t need to know where you are.

Your screen timeout settings matter more than you might think. That bright display is one of the biggest battery drains on any phone. Try setting your screen to turn off after 15 to 30 seconds when you’re not actively looking at it, instead of longer default settings.

Screen brightness uses about 40% of your total battery on a normal day. If you cut the timeout from two minutes down to thirty seconds, you can add a few hours to your battery life.

You can always change these settings back when you need everything turned on again. Just remember what you’ve turned off so you don’t get confused about why your navigation app isn’t working later.

Think About Other Battery Options for Your Phone

You have probably heard quite a few myths about battery calibration. Some people swear that you need to drain your phone completely before you charge it again. That advice is actually outdated and comes from older battery types. Modern lithium batteries do better when you keep them somewhere between 20% and 80% charge. If you stay in that sweet range, it keeps your battery healthy for a longer time. These lithium batteries break down much faster when you always charge them all the way to 100% or let them drop down to zero.

The newer Fairphone 5 and Samsung Galaxy XCover 7 come with removable batteries that you can swap out yourself. The XCover 7 comes with a solid 4,050mAh battery and it holds up very well when you drop it. If the phone you have now has a sealed design, you’ll need professional help or some technical skill to replace the battery. Most repair shops can work on sealed phones without too much difficulty.

Here’s where the math starts to get interesting. A battery replacement might cost you somewhere between $50 to $100, while a new phone runs anywhere from $300 to $1,000 or more. When you do the math yourself, you’ll see what I mean. Plus there’s the headache of transferring all your apps and settings to a new device.

Power banks give you a completely different way to solve this problem. Just think of times when you’re stuck at an airport gate and your phone drops down to 5%. A decent power bank takes away that panic completely. When you’re shopping for one, look for at least 10,000mAh capacity and make sure it supports fast charging. The size matters too, since you’re going to be carrying it around with you. After a few hours in your bag, you’ll start to feel the weight.

Some people wonder why a power bank feels more reliable than a battery replacement. It’s all about backup psychology. When your internal battery starts to go bad, you have immediate backup power ready to go. You don’t need to make any appointments.

Trade Your Old Phone for Cash Today

These five strategies all work together to protect your phone from battery drain and performance problems. When you combine better display settings with app management and the right power modes, you’ll notice a big difference. Even small changes like turning off the connectivity features you don’t need or trying different battery settings can add a few more hours to your phone’s daily battery life.

I’d recommend trying out these different techniques as you go through your normal week. You might find that some settings work great during your long work days, while others are perfect for when you travel or spend time on the weekends. Most people never actually look at their battery usage data. Once you’ve been making these changes for a few days, check your phone’s battery stats, and you’ll probably see some interesting patterns that you never knew were there. Maybe you’ll find out that one particular app has been quietly draining power in the background all this time. Or you might find that your phone works much better when you charge it the same way every day.

What’s interesting about keeping an older phone running well is how much control you actually have over its performance. Phone manufacturers build their devices to last much longer than most people think.

Speaking of which, when your phone does finally reach the point where it’s time to replace it, ecoATM makes it simple to turn that old device into cash right away. With more than 6,000 kiosks across the country, you can check what your phone’s worth right there and walk away with cash or an electronic payment the same day. 

Find an ecoATM location near you and see how much your phone is worth when you’re ready to start fresh with a new device!