Mobile phones are great, but they’re not perfect. Sure, innovation has rushed ahead at a frightening pace, ever since the first iPhone dropped in 2008, but smartphones still can’t do everything. As users, we still have to make trade-offs. The biggest and most controversial recent trade-off has been having to give up the headphone jack to make our phones waterproof.
One of the main trade-offs we all make every day is with our batteries. A phone without battery is useless so every day, as our batteries slowly drain, many of us pick and choose which apps and features we want to keep using and which we want to sacrifice so we can keep our phones on for a little bit longer. This has become such a part of our everyday routine that the phone manufacturers themselves have even built in special modes to do it for us. You’ll struggle to find a phone on the market today that doesn’t come loaded with “Battery Saver” mode in one form or another.
This one simple trick will make your smartphone battery last longer
Read Now ►We’re still a long way from this problem disappearing. Battery technology simply has not advanced at the same speed as processor development et al, so until a huge leap is made, we’re not going to get more than a couple of day’s worth of juice out of them. That doesn’t mean our trade-offs have to be so harsh, though. There are simple tricks we can do to help us get the most out of what we have. This latest one could have a huge effect on how long your smartphone battery lasts in between charges.
If you want your battery to last longer, you need to update Netflix now
A recent blog post by smartphone energy management firm Mobile Enerlytics brought to light some rather strange findings relating to how apps can drain our batteries, even when we’re not using them. One app, in particular, has been shown to have a considerable effect on its own: Netflix.
In tests running on Android 6.01 Marshmallow, Mobile Enerlytics discovered that Netflix drained the phone’s battery over 20% while it was sitting idle overnight. A full fifth of the phone’s battery had gone and Netflix was found to be the main culprit behind it. The firm then took to the Google Play Store and found that many user reviews of the Netflix app were citing battery drain too.
The issue relates to a process loop becoming stuck, even when the app is not in use, and running the battery down.
The Mobile Enerlytics blog post does conclude by saying that the issue only affects users running Netflix on Android 6.01, but that still affects a massive 17% of all Android users. The good news is that the information has been passed to Netflix and the company has released a fix via its latest update. Update Netflix now.
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