Background refresh off saves iPhone battery

iPhone batteries are not very big. With a simple trick it is possible to do much longer with your iPhone battery: turning off background refresh.

Well-intentioned, but an energy guzzler

Apple wants to give the users of an iPhone the maximum user experience. Part of this is that the apps that run on the iPhone always keep track of the latest status and communicate with their network. The technical term for this is background refresh, also known as background app refresh.

The disadvantage of this is that it requires quite a bit of calculation work for the processor, which therefore consumes a lot of power. It also costs about 4-6 MB of data traffic per hour. And that is of course bad news for your battery, because it drains faster that way. Because the battery life depends on the number of times it is charged, the battery life is also reduced. Fortunately, it’s not that hard to disable background refresh.

How do you disable the background refresh?

First, open ‘settings’.

Then choose ‘General’. Then scroll down and tap “Refresh background app.”

Now a list appears with every app that has permission to keep running in the background. Each app has a slider. For any app that you don’t think it’s necessary to keep running, slide the slider to ‘Off’ for this app. It is then no longer active in the background.

Would you rather disable background refresh for all apps at the same time? Then choose this option at the top of the page and then select one of the following options.

WiFi and mobile data is the default setting, which therefore does not save data and energy
Only WiFi saves data, but only limited energy.
Off: Disables all background refresh for each app. So also for messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram and the like. This is the most energy efficient option.