I’ve had to move to a Pixel 7a as a surprise replacement. I’m content enough with it, performance is acceptable, but battery life is worse than I’d like. How do people get by with a 7a? Buy a bunch of wireless chargers? Buy a magsafe case? I don’t see any battery cases so I imagine that’s not an option. Any recommendations would be great, thanks.
I’m not sure if you are running any custom ROMs but doing so should improve battery life as there is less bloat ware and programs running in the background. If you are not you could still try to debloat your phone as much as possible either by just deleting apps or using ADB commands.
Other than that you can have the battery saver on at all times, in settings you can configure it so that it practically never turns off.
You can go to every application and change the battery optimization to restricted (this will break some applications so you would have to put it back on optimized).
You could also turn off notifications for as many apps as possible, disable 5G if that is not a deal breaker for you, and turn off wifi/bluetooth when you are not connected to anything so it stops pinging constantly.
You could also turn off auto brightness adjustment and manually adjust it leaving it dark enough to see but not at max brightness. You should also change your phone to dark theme from light theme if you have not already done so, and change all applications to dark theme as well.
These should all marginally improve the battery life.
Another advice I can give is if you want your battery to be healthy for a long period of time, like 3 years, never charge your phone overnight where it maxes out to 100% charge. Try to keep it between 20-80%, and if possible this is controversial avoid using fast charging and especially wireless charging as much as possible. They stress the battery out a lot more than traditional charging which isn’t good for your battery health in the long run.
You’re wrong with the part about custom ROMS.Google actually optimized their software pretty well… because they wrote the operating system. You actually get a better battery life on stock firmware. You get a worse battery life on something like GrapheneOS or LineageOS.
Interesting. I have been pretty content with the battery life on my Pixel 7 running GrapheneOS so far
This actually isn’t only true for Google. On most devices you get better battery life on Stock software.
You can search for “GrapheneOS battery life” and see lots of people say it’s worse than on stock, but also some that say it’s better. It might depend on if you’re using Sandboxed Google play or not.
I do not have sandboxed Google Play. It is bare bones GrapheneOS. I wonder how much of a difference that makes.
The 80% and wireless charging is where I draw the line. That’s way too much convenience to lose for me.
I’d just rather have batteries replaced every 2-3 years, which I’ve never actually found myself doing anyway. By the time the battery is going, the phone tends to be on its last legs as well.
Thanks. I’ve done basically all battery saving tricks already. No 5g, careful with Bluetooth and WiFi, brightness, 60hz display, WiFi background scanning, all pure black apps and wallpaper etc. I’ve really combed though every possibility without touching features I really would prefer to keep. I do smart charging (the slow overnight charging) or whatever it’s called, but if I’m not happy with battery at 100%, I don’t know how I’d be happier with it starting at 80%.
Aaaaand it’s still pretty disappointing coming from a Galaxy A52 5G. I’d love any reccos. I haven’t heard about wireless charging giving battery health issues but I’ll check that out.
It’s horrible when you start going this path…
I think there are some ways to improve the battery. But you have to start disabling some of these intelligent fancy options.
Now I’m trying to run android with a few tweaks and see if I can get back my 72 hours of battery life (with light usage) that I used to have in the P5 when I got it.