Make your Android less taxing on battery

While there are loads and loads of so called “battery saving” apps for Android, they are in 99% one pile of useless rubbish which promises a lot but delivers very little. The problem is that pretty much all of these apps only turn off battery draining functions like 3G/4G, WiFi, Bluetooth, change the screen brightness and that’s about it. If you’re a power user you already have that disabled through toggle switches on your home screen, so why bother with some “battery saving” app that does the same thing and won’t really do anything for your phone if you keep that disabled yourself anyway? Well, now you can make your battery last even longer and avoid crazy battery drain from active apps.

Have you ever used an app, closed it, thinking you actually closed it and that app consumed your entire battery in like 1 hour, because it was hammering the CPU for no reason at all, turning your phone in a boiling brick with empty battery? It happened to me several times, mostly with browsers like Chrome for Android which you can’t even exit properly. Or how bloody Hangouts and Phone apps keep on staying active in memory eating battery much faster even though everyone everywhere always say they do not. I beg to differ, because i have different experience. And I was like super furious when my battery was flat an hour after i got to work, expecting battery to last for several another half a day easily. Well, these apps I’m about to mention will deal with these battery sucking apps.

How they work?

They aren’t task killers, that’s one and most important thing. They don’t kill processes, they just put them into native Android sleep mode (hibernation). The apps are sort of still active, but are placed in hibernation state where they don’t eat resources like crazy but are saved in their last used state. They might take a fraction longer to start than if they are fully loaded in memory, but I really can’t notice much of a difference on my SGS2.

Greenify

Greenify is an app that works like a Disable button in Apps manager but without actually disabling the apps. So, you can still use them any time you want, but you can be assured they never keep on running in memory and consume your phone behind your back. Free version offers “hibernation” of installable apps (from GooglePlay), but for system apps, you’ll have to go with the donate version. It’s cheap and well worth it if you need this kind of feature. But for the most part, free one will keep resource hogs at bay. You just assign the apps you want to keep an eye on with Greenify and then it will do its job by itself. Just make sure you don’t place services or resident apps like antiviruses, alarm clocks and other active gadgets under its supervision, because they might not work when you restart the phone.

Hibernate

The other one is Hibernate. In an essence the same thing as Greenify, does pretty much the same job and also covers system apps that already come with the ROM (also in free version). Only downside is that interface is far less intuitive and user friendly. It works, but you’ll have to fiddle with it a bit.

Here, both apps should take care of the battery hogs and keep you in control. I use both because I prefer the GUI of the Greenify, but since it doesn’t control pre-installed apps, I kinda have to use both (I can’t purchase the paid version of Greenify just yet). So far they seem to behave exactly as I needed them to. They automatically put down apps that would otherwise stay active in the background, keeping my battery safe and my phone also seems to last quite a lot longer now.