How to see what’s using your battery on Android

Battery life is arguably one of the most precious commodities in modern life. When your phone runs out of charge at the moment when you need to make an important call, send a message or record a video of a cat doing something amusing, it can be catastrophic. Ok, maybe not, but it is still very inconvenient when your phone runs out of power before bedtime.

Here are a few simple ways to see what could be causing the rapid drain on your battery life… and stop it happening.

How to check battery usage in Android

• Settings > Battery > Usage  details
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• When trying to deduce what’s eating up your battery charge, there’s no need to keep a record of which apps you use because Android has built-in tools to monitor this very thing. Open Settings and tap on the Battery option. Next select Battery Usage and you’ll be given a breakdown of all the apps that are draining your power, with the most-hungry ones at the top.
  

Some phones will tell you how long each app has been actively used – others won’t. If you’ve spent an hour perusing the images on Instagram, then this will naturally have a detrimental effect on your power, as keeping the screen on for that amount of time is quite a drain.

While our test phone here doesn’t display it, other phones (such as Huawei and Honor) will also show you how much each hardware component has drained the battery, since it isn’t only software, as we just said.

Tapping on an app will open an additional page where you can see not only how long the app has been used by yourself, but also how much it’s been active in the background. Should you see an app that is high in the latter, then it might be having problems which are contributing to your shorter battery life.

To try to fix this you can choose to Force Stop, which will kill the app until you restart it, or you can use either the Background restriction or Battery optimisation features to reduce the impact the app is having on your battery life.