The One Setting You Should Change If Your iPhone Is Always Dying

Changing your email settings should be a big help when it comes to saving battery power. But it’s also important to turn off unnecessary Location Services, Trembly says.

“Location Services are part of what makes the iPhone such a great device, so I’d like to be clear: I don’t recommend that you turn off Location Services entirely,” Trembly says. Trembly suggests following these steps to limit how your phone uses Location Services:

Go to Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services.

Tap Share My Location. If you want to be able to share your location with your family and friends in the Messages app, then leave this on, but be careful: If someone wanted to track you, this is how they’d do it.

Scroll all the way to the bottom and tap System Services. Let’s clear up a common misconception right away: Most of these settings are all about sending data to Apple for marketing and research. When we turn them off, your iPhone will continue to function just as it always has.

Turn off everything on the page except Emergency SOS, Find My iPhone (so you can locate it if it’s lost) and Motion Calibration & Distance (if you’d like to use your iPhone as a pedometer – otherwise, turn that off too). Your iPhone will work exactly as it had before. The compass will still work and you’ll connect to cell towers just fine — it’s just that Apple won’t be receiving data about your behavior.

Tap Significant Locations. Did you know your iPhone has been tracking you everywhere you go? You can imagine the excess strain this puts on your battery. I recommend you turn off Significant Locations. Tap <System Services to return to the main System Services menu.

Turn off all the switches under Product Improvement. These only send information to help Apple improve their products, not make your iPhone run more efficiently.

Scroll to the bottom and turn on Status Bar Icon. That way, you’ll know your location is being used when a little arrow appears next to your battery. If that arrow is on all the time, there’s probably something wrong. Tap <Location Services to go back to the main Location Services menu.

Turn off Location Services for apps that don’t need to know where you are.

What you need to know: If you see a purple arrow next to an app, it’s using your location now. A gray arrow means it’s used your location within the last 24 hours and a purple-outlined arrow means it’s using a geofence (more about geofences later).

Pay attention to any apps that have purple or gray arrows next to them.

Do these apps need to know your location to work? If they do, that’s absolutely fine – leave them alone. If they don’t, tap on the name of the app and choose Never to stop the app from unnecessarily draining your battery.