How to See What Apps Use the Most iPhone Battery Life

When you experience bad iPhone battery life it’s not always the way you’re using the iPhone. With iOS 8 you can see what apps use the most iPhone battery life with just a few taps.

Once you discover what apps are using the most iPhone battery life you can stop using the app so much, turn off background app access or remove the app to get better iPhone battery life on iOS 8.

For years you could only guess at what app used the most iPhone battery life, but with the free iOS 8 update Apple now includes the option to see the apps using your iPhone battery life.

We’ll show you how to see what iPhone apps use your battery the most, what the listing means, and how you can stop an app from draining your iPhone battery life. This works on any device running iOS 8. That includes the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 5s, iPhone 5, iPhone 4s and iPhone 5c. You do need to upgrade to the free iOS 8 update to unlock this feature.

How to See Apps Using the Most iPhone Battery Life

These directions walk you through how to find out what apps use the most iPhone battery life on your iPhone. This is better than simply looking for the overall apps that are the worst iPhone battery life hogs because it is specific to your iPhone and your usage.

Go to Settings -> General -> Usage -> Battery Usage. This shows you a list of apps that use your iPhone battery life the most. You can view this or the last 24 hours or over the last several days.

With this list of apps and services that use the most iPhone battery life you can start making changes to get better battery life on your iPhone.

The list shows the apps in order of the battery life they used and a small piece of information about the usage.

For apps that only show an app name it is listing the iPhone battery life you use when you are actively using the app. Most of the listings will only show the app name and icon.

Sometimes you will see “background activity” listed under the app name. If you see this, the app is using battery life to get updates when you are not using it. This can be a chat app like Hangouts or a mail app that is checking for messages all the time.

If you want to turn this background access off you can go to Settings -> General -> Background App Refresh -> Turn off access for the app you need to limit. You don’t need to turn off Background App Refresh for all apps, just those you want to limit.

Another warning you’ll see is “low signal” when you are using  service in a poor reception area. When the phone needs to search for a signal all the time it uses more battery life. We normally see this on Home & Lock Screen and Personal Hotspot. The best thing to do is look for a way to get a better signal, or maybe even turn cellular off when you are in really bad reception areas. You can turn off cellular by going to Settings -> Cellular -> Off. With this off you can’t make calls, so you don’t want to leave this off all the time, but it can help in some situations.

If neither of these options help you can uninstall the app from your iPhone. Tap and hold on the app you want to uninstall, the app will start to wiggle, then tap on the small X. That will remove the app. After removing Facebook our iPhone battery life improved, which is just one example.