Published Nov 27, 2025, 9:00 AM EST
Pankil is a Civil Engineer turned freelance writer from Ahmedabad, India. As a long-time Windows and Android user, he has extensive knowledge of both operating systems and specializes in creating how-tos and troubleshooting guides.
Pankil has been writing about Windows, Android, and iOS since 2021. He has written over 1200 articles across reputable publications like MakeUseOf, GuidingTech, and TechWiser.
Outside of his writing endeavors, Pankil is an avid football fan and loves to plan his international travels with his wife in his free time.
When you think about ways to reduce battery drain on your phone, things like limiting background app refresh, turning off automatic updates, disabling GPS, and removing widgets probably come to mind. And to be fair, those do help. But if there’s one thing that can improve the battery life more dramatically than anything else, it’s adjusting your phone’s display settings.
Unlike most other battery-saving tricks, tweaking the display settings does not slow down your phone, affect notifications, or limit what you can do. It simply makes your screen use power more efficiently.
Your phone’s display drains more power than anything else
Your screen is doing all the hard work
That beautiful, high-resolution display you look at every day is also the biggest energy hog in your entire device. Your screen is basically a tiny flashlight that never stops working. It has to stay bright enough to compete with sunlight, sharp enough to show every detail, and fast enough to handle smooth scrolling and video. All of that takes constant power. In fact, during daily use, it consumes more battery than the processor, camera, and apps combined.
It makes sense when you think about it. Every time you unlock your phone, that screen has to fire up millions of pixels, and each one needs power. Then there is the always-on display that keeps the screen awake even when you’re not using it. The bigger and brighter the display, the more energy it demands.
That’s why even small changes to how your screen behaves can have a surprisingly big impact. If your battery seems to drop faster than expected, tweaking the display will make the biggest difference.
Tweaking brightness and using dark mode can do wonders
Brighter is not always better
If there’s one thing that quietly eats your battery all day, it’s screen brightness. When your screen is cranked up higher than it really needs to be, your phone works overtime to power all those glowing pixels. Even dropping your brightness slightly can make a noticeable difference.
If you don’t want to keep sliding that bar up and down, you can turn on adaptive or auto brightness instead. It uses your phone’s light sensor to figure out how bright it should be based on the surrounding lighting. Over time, it even learns your preferences and fine-tunes things, so the screen is not blinding indoors or too dim outside.
Dark mode is another thing that has the biggest impact on battery life. Most phones nowadays have an OLED or AMOLED display, and on these screens, black pixels are not just dark, they’re actually turned off. This means fewer pixels are lit at any given time, which results in better battery life.
Shorten screen timeout and rethink always-on display
A few seconds that add up fast
Your phone does not need to stay awake as long as you think it does. Screen timeout is the amount of time your display stays on after you stop interacting with it. By default, it is set to 30 seconds on both Android and iPhone, but if you’ve increased it, it’s best to lower it down to 15 or 30 seconds.
Those extra seconds may not feel like much, but they can add up when you leave your phone sitting idle dozens of times a day. Also, your phone already has a feature that can keep the screen awake when you’re looking at it. This means you don’t have to worry about the display turning off when you’re reading something important.
The always-on display feature comes pre-enabled on most phones, and it’s quite convenient for checking the time and notifications at a glance. However, since it causes the display to stay awake, it does impact the battery life. If you’ve checked your phone’s battery usage menu, you’ll probably see it sitting near the top.
Even though the always-on display feature is more efficient than keeping the entire screen lit, it still uses power. If you want to stretch the battery life, you can consider turning always-on display off. If you really like using it, you can prevent it from showing the wallpaper or set it to appear only at specific times.
I don’t use my phone’s always-on display for 5 perfectly valid reasons
Between burn-in risk, poor notifications, and constant distractions, the always-on display just isn’t worth it.
Lower the refresh rate and tone down animations to save battery
Only if you’re still not satisfied
If you are using a flagship phone, it probably has a 120Hz refresh rate display. And yes, it looks fantastic. But all that smoothness comes at a cost. Higher refresh rates mean your screen is refreshing more times every second, which requires more power.
For better battery life, you can consider switching your refresh rate down to 60Hz. The difference might feel slightly noticeable at first, but once your eyes adjust, you’ll barely notice it.
On the other hand, if you’re using a budget or older phone, you can consider reducing or turning off those animations your phone shows. To do this, you’ll need to access the developer settings on Android and accessibility settings on an iPhone.
Battery life is one of the most important aspects of your smartphone and tweaking the display settings is the best way to improve it without compromising performance. Even if you apply only one or two of the above tips, you’ll definitely notice the difference.