Android 5.0 Lollipop comes with some major under the hood enhancements that should theoretically improve battery life. However, things have been exactly the opposite for users who have updated their device to Lollipop.
For some, the impact on battery life has been almost negligible, but for others, Android 5.0 has reduced the battery life on their device to almost half of what it was on KitKat. Despite coming with Project Volta and ART, the decrease in battery life on Lollipop can be attributed to other bugs that it ships with, and unoptimised drivers from OEMs.
Worry not though, you can always follow some tips and tricks mentioned below to increase the battery life of your device running Lollipop.
Reboot your device
One of the simplest and most effective way to prevent unnecessary battery drain on your device running Lollipop is to simply restart it.
Among the major bugs present in Android 5.0 is a memory leak that gobbles up all the free RAM thereby severely reducing the performance of the device. By rebooting your Android device once in every 24 hours, you will be able to avoid the bug from taking up all the free RAM of your Android device.
Turn off Ambient Display
With Lollipop, Google introduced a Moto Display like feature called Ambient Display, which automatically turns on the screen to display all notifications when a user picks up their phone after a period of inactivity. While Ambient Display makes sense on AMOLED devices like the Nexus 6, Moto X and the Galaxy Note 4, it can drain significant battery on devices with LCD screen.
Ambient Display only lights up certain part of the screen to display the notifications, which when combined with the black background, consumes extremely low power on AMOLED devices. This is, however, not the case on Android devices with LCD displays, where the whole display needs to be switched on to display the notifications.
You can turn off Ambient Display by going to Settings -> Display and toggling the Ambient Display switch to off.
Switch off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth etc.
Some of the usual battery saving tips that are valid not just on Lollipop, but any other OS and device, include reducing the screen brightness, turning off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when they are not in use and switching Location accuracy to Battery-saving mode.
You can find some other general tips to improve battery life on any Android device here.
Uninstall old apps
It is also possible that some older apps that you have installed on your device are incompatible with Lollipop, and are thus occupying resources and draining battery life in the background. You can check for unnecessary drain from apps by going to Settings -> Battery, and uninstall them accordingly.
Factory Reset
Sometimes, starting over again will help in removing all the clutter and junk from your Android device and help in improving its battery life. A factory reset will especially be helpful for users who upgraded their device to Lollipop through an OTA update.
While painful, consider factory reset as an option if none of the steps above failed to have a noticeable impact in improving the battery life of your device.
Enable Battery Saver
In the end, if none of the tips from above work, you can try and enable the new ‘Battery Saver’ mode in Android 5.0 to squeeze more battery life from your device. In this mode, all the animations in Lollipop are turned off, the display brightness is clamped down and the processor is underclocked in a bid to reduce power consumption, and thereby improve battery life.
To enable Battery Saver mode, head over to Settings -> Battery and select the option to enable Battery Saver.
Did any of the tips above help in improving the battery life on your Android device running Lollipop? Drop in a comment and let us know.
