How to Make Sure Waze App is Off

Good morning! You brew your morning coffee while reading the news on your trusty smartphone. Its time for work! You put on your business attire and hop onto your car. Tapping your phone, you open the Waze app to aid you in your daily commute to work. On your way there, you notice there’s a closed road due to road construction because Waze is alerting you. So you pull up on alternative route to avoid the traffic jam. Finally you arrive on your workplace 7 minutes early.

There’s no doubt that Waze is a useful app. But if you keep Waze running all day, it can hog your battery and make your phone die faster. Now you’re forced to spend rest of your miserable day without the comfort of your phone, because its stuck onto the wall, charging. This is surprisingly a common problem on android devices. However, there is a simple fix.

What is Waze?

Waze is a map navigation app similar to Google Maps that puts emphasis on driving/commuting with cars and motorcycles. Waze is focused in community driven map that gives you real time map related information and will guide you from point A to point B with fully voiced navigation and even suggest you alternative routes. This means the critical and dynamic information about the map such as road closures, road accidents and traffic jams are acquired from user reports, then the app filters it and displays it to you.

Waze also has integrated audio player that is also linked with various audio services such as Spotify and YouTube music, making your journey much more vibrant and enjoyable. You can also chat with fellow Waze users that are shown on the map so you wont feel alone on the road. Be sure to do it only when you stop, because doing something else while driving is dangerous.

Why Would You Turn Waze Off?

Waze, being a map navigation app, relies on GPS that is notorious for sucking your battery dry the fastest. The app also uses considerable amount of processing, it may turn your phone hot, which also reduces your battery life. Its obvious why you wouldn’t want to keep Waze on all the time right?

How Do You Turn Waze Off Completely?

There are multitude of ways to accomplish that. I will list all the options available.

Please be informed that these instructions are performed on my device, Xiaomi Mi A2, running on android 10 with android stock theme. Because how the nature of custom manufacturer Android UI works (MIUI, ZenUI, EMUI, etc) these instructions may look or work slightly different on your respective devices.

Enabling Developer Option

You must do this to unlock various essential options to control your phone.
You can do this by tapping settings > About Phone > tap on Build Number 5 times, and it will look like this

Now you can access the developer option via settings > system > advanced > developer options

Now you’re set and ready for further instructions

App Info

The app info contains a good amount of options that are very helpful.
Navigate to settings > apps & notifications > tap on Waze

and then you tap force stop to kill the app.
After that, scroll down a little bit and tap on “battery”

Tap on background restriction and tap “restrict”.
Now tap on “battery optimization” just below background restriction.

Set the parameter to “all apps”, then find Waze.

Once you find it, tap on it and make sure it is on “optimizing battery use”
This will make Waze unable to run in background and will not use any battery unless you open the app directly.

Restricting background apps

Navigate to Settings > system > developer options > apps > don’t keep activities

After that, tap on Background process limit and set it to “no background processes”

This will force close every app that doesn’t run on your screen. Please note that with these option enabled, you would not be able to multi task (by switching between apps) but there will be no app running in background and your phone will run a tad bit faster because there will be more resources available. On some UI like Xiaomi’s MIUI, you can circumvent essential apps (like Whatsapp) from being killed by “locking it down” in the running app drawer.

Using a third party app (Greenify)

You can download task managing third party apps from google play store, although i would not recommend any other app than Greenify.

To use Greenify, simply open the app and tap the giant plus button on the bottom right corner of your screen, then add Waze to the list.

Then you can decide whether you want Greenify to hibernate it automatically or manually.

Hibernating the app basically means the same like force stop the app, but Greenify prevents the app to start automatically unless you’re directly opening it. Be aware that if one of the steps above failed to do the job, try it in conjunction with other steps until desired result achieved. You can always check on running apps (developer option > running services) whether Waze is still active or not.