Apple hasn’t had the best track record when it comes to battery life in their products. Notoriously, Apple has slowed down the processors in their iPhones in an attempt to both drive consumers to buy newer devices and to maintain a “reasonable” battery life as the battery’s capacities decayed. One of the things you can do as a user to increase your iPhone’s battery life is to stop apps from being able to update content in the background. This guide will cover how to stop apps from being able to refresh content in the background.
Disabling background app refresh stops apps from being able to update their content when not in use. For example, a news app would be stopped from being able to update new headlines. By reducing the activity of apps in the background, the drain on the battery should be reduced.
The background refresh settings can be found in the Settings app. The settings are located in General > Background App Refresh. The top setting “Background App Refresh” can be used to select when apps are allowed to update their content in the background. There are three possible values: Off, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi and mobile data.
Below the general setting is a list of all the apps installed on your phone, ordered alphabetically. Here you can block or allow apps to refresh their content in the background on an app-by-app basis.
Tip: Disable whatever you don’t need – for example, apps you don’t often use, or ones that don’t need to refresh in the background.
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