How to Save Battery Life in iOS 9 With Low Power Mode

One frequent complaint of smartphone users is the limited amount of battery life our tech devices have. With the constant trend toward making devices thinner and lighter, battery life is a key tradeoff to be considered, and some users find their devices not lasting as long as they'd prefer.

For those pushing their devices to the limit, Apple has added a new feature to iOS 9 that is designed to help you conserve those last few drops of juice when you wont be able to charge your iPhone anytime soon. The new feature is known as Low Power Mode, and it can increase your battery life up to three hours but at the expense of some functions of your device. It is only available on iPhone devices running iOS 9.


Enabling Low Power Mode only takes a few steps.

1. Open the Settings app on your iPhone.


2. Select Battery from the menu list.


3. Toggle Low Power Mode to the On position.


4. The battery icon will turn yellow to indicate that you are using Low Power Mode.

Low Power Mode reduces your iPhone's performance and cuts out some background activities. For example, mail must be fetched manually, background app refresh is disabled, and motion and brightness are reduced.

Benchmarks have shown the iPhone's CPU performance with Low Power Mode on is significantly reduced in an effort to save on power consumption, so while simple tasks may continue to work just fine on an iPhone in Low Power Mode, more demanding ones may become sluggish.

You don't have to keep Low Power Mode on all of the time; you can manually shut it off whenever you want. However, the general impression of users has been that the real-world slowdown is not so severe that you can't continue to use your iPhone.

With iOS 9, you will receive a prompt when your iOS device goes below 20 percent of its battery power left. The popup will allow you to quickly toggle Low Power Mode on so you can still use your device for only the most necessary of functions until you are able to recharge it.

This feature might be familiar to Apple Watch owners, as Power Reserve is a somewhat similar feature designed to allow the wrist-worn device to continue functioning as a basic watch as the battery drains toward zero by cutting off all other functions of the device.

Low Power Mode is a nice addition to iOS 9 for improving the performance of your iPhone's battery.