Тhere isn’t much for Samsung to brag about when it comes to battery life on the Galaxy S9 and S9+, so we tip you some of the best tricks to extend it this side of getting a thick battery case…
Seriously, this one should come at the top of your list. The new Always-on display on the Galaxy S9 and S9+ is a pretty thing, with even more pertinent info being placed there for your attention, and the ability to create custom colored graphics to showcase. It is a battery hog, however.
Our modest observations show that leaving this setting on drains about 1% of juice per hour, meaning that even if you don’t do jack with your phone, it will be like you have wasted 1-2 hours of screen-on time on a charge anyway, depending on the usage. Go to Settings>Lock screen and security, or type AOD in the settings search bar, and switch it off.
This one is good. It will turn off Always-on display for you, will throttle the processing speeds a bit on the most power-hungry top end, but not to the extent you’ll notice in everyday interactions, will set a lower logarithmic brightness threshold, and will introduce a more aggressive background app management.
After the display and/or a revved-up processor during gaming, the most power-hungry components in the daily life with your mobile are… the apps. Yep, while you may think that changing the display resolution or choosing a darker theme since it’s an OLED display, will do something, but those can’t compare with reigning in rogue CPU wakes, and push notifications that keep the phone alive at all times.
Seriously, again, no amount of LTE tower pinging, talking on the phone, or any other usual suspect when it comes to wireless radio battery drain can affect your mileage as much as constant Wi-Fi scanning for non-existent networks. This thing is a giant power hog, and you should kill it with fire if you have exhausted all the usual culprits for your battery drain. Bonus points: by default Google tracks you even when Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are off, so if you ditch scanning, you’ll make it harder.
Look at the apps that are using the most power on your Galaxy S9. Unless you just spent an hour gaming, editing video, or chasing Pokemons, chances are that the largest battery drainer on the software side is Chrome. Those countless tabs you have open, with all the scripts and media running on them, don’t come easy on the processor, and Chrome isn’t one to cluster processes, but rather manages tabs separately for stability, resulting in a huge toll on the battery. Samsung has an excellent built-in browser that is not only a bit faster than Chrome in synthetics, but comes with extras, too.
The newest Internet Browser version on the S9 and S9+ features protected browsing (alerting users when visiting sites that try to steal information or install malware), and various interface improvements (including an “Add to home screen” icon for web apps, and a reader mode for news articles). Furthermore, tab switching has been optimized, and is now more efficient on low-end devices with 1 GB of RAM or less. Use that one, and you may see a significant reduction in browsing-related draw.
Go to the Play Store and get them, then look at the third point in our guide, and place them in the « Unmonitored apps » list in your battery settings.
If you are longing for the full Facebook experience still, you can simply keep it in a browser tab, and will be better off still than using the Facebook app.
The ones listed above are your best bets for extending the battery life on your Galaxy S9 and S9+ without sacrificing much of anything in the process, but there are a few other tweaks you can experiment with, supplied below. Those won’t make as much of a difference, but are still fun to toy around with, and see if your mileage will vary. Anything else you might have found to work on the Galaxy S9 and S9+ when it comes to battery life?
