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

Monday September 21, 2015 1:35 PM PDT by Lory Gil
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.

Low Power Mode
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.

Tags: iOS 9, battery life, Low Power Mode
43 comments


Top Rated Comments

(View all)
Avatar
KALLT
41 months ago
A shame that they didn’t include an option to automatically enable it without a popup. I also think that they should have added it to the control centre.
Rating: 10 Votes
Avatar
Westside guy
41 months ago
It's too bad you can't just pick a battery level and tell iOS to automatically turn on Low Power Mode when it hits that point.

I'll go out on a limb and predict this idea will be in a new jailbreak tweak within a few days of iOS 9 being jailbroken, because it's so bleeding obvious.
Rating: 4 Votes
Avatar
macsba
41 months ago
Wonder why this feature hasn't been added to both the iPad and iPod Touch.
Rating: 2 Votes
Avatar
vasili4
41 months ago

Looks like IOS9 turns low power mode off automatically.

I left my phone in low power mode last night, but charging. This morning, I missed the exact message, but it had automatically turned off low power mode and said something like "Low Power mode turned off because you now have sufficient battery charge".

true. this happens at 80% battery level
Rating: 2 Votes
Avatar
JohnApples
41 months ago

A shame that they didn’t include an option to automatically enable it without a popup. I also think that they should have added it to the control centre.


That's actually a great, simple idea. I would much rather have a Low Power Mode in CC than the Camera, especially since my Camera app is in my dock.
Rating: 2 Votes
Avatar
rediffusion
41 months ago
I wish you could set specific times of the day to automatically go into Low Battery mode (i.e. night time, when I'm at work, etc)
Rating: 2 Votes
Avatar
simmonsj
41 months ago
Looks like IOS9 turns low power mode off automatically.

I left my phone in low power mode last night, but charging. This morning, I missed the exact message, but it had automatically turned off low power mode and said something like "Low Power mode turned off because you now have sufficient battery charge".

Edit: Thanks to the other posters who have confirmed this happens when your phone hits 80% charge.
Rating: 2 Votes
Avatar
JulianL
41 months ago

There should be an option to have it enabled permanently.

If you are getting a 6S and are happy with the performance of the iPhone 6 but could do with a little more battery life then one would benefit by keeping low power mode on all the time, since the 6S will have the performance of the iPhone 6 with low power mode activated. Geekbench scores:


iPhone 6S
Single: 2413
Multi: 4293

iPhone 6S Low Power Mode (Approx.)
Single: 1616
Multi: 2704

iPhone 6
Single: 1609
Multi: 2879


Completely agree. Hell, when iOS 9 came out officially I still had my iPhone 5 so I tried that on permanent low power mode and was 100% happy with the performance so how much performance is going unused in my new 6s I dread to think. For me I think I stopped needing any more performance once I got to the iPhone 4. Interesting to see real iPhone 6s/6s-LowPower/6 figures though; thanks for posting.

I realise that some people need/want the performance but I wish that Apple would add a setting with a performance slider. Most of the stuff that low power mode does (reduced motion, no background apps, no push notifications etc) I have set already so the only extra thing that I can't get except with low power mode is CPU downclocking (or probably more likely capping max clock speed). I would love a slider so that I could set how aggressively that is done so that I could experiment with performance vs battery life tradeoffs and set it how I want it, a bit like how many people set the brightness as a trade-off between super-bright read in sunlight setting vs saving battery.

For me the big problem with engaging low power mode permanently (and it can be done of course simply by turning it on via the settings as soon as the phone is taken off the charger) is that it sets screen auto-lock to 30 seconds and that setting can't be over-ridden so the screen dims after 22 seconds of use. That's just not enough time for what I tend to use my phone for and it gets really annoying having to tap the screen or scroll up and down a bit every 15 seconds to keep the screen alive if I'm reading something.
Rating: 1 Votes
Avatar
Nv1990
41 months ago

A shame that they didn’t include an option to automatically enable it without a popup. I also think that they should have added it to the control centre.

You can ask Siri to turn low power mode on and it works try it yourself
Rating: 1 Votes
Avatar
JackANSI
41 months ago

Agreed, although I'd like to be able to go even further. I'd like to set the phone to aeroplane mode as well so that all the radios are switched off when I'm asleep to get absolute maximum power saving. It would also have the added benefit of preventing some call to a wrong number waking me up at 5:00am or some stupid spam text doing the same.


Have you tried "Do Not Disturb"? I have mine set from 11pm to 6am and it actually works great, screen doesn't seem to come on either. It just doesn't shut of the radios for maximum power savings, but it will stop wrong numbers and spam.
Rating: 1 Votes
[ Read All Comments ]