When you think of ways to reduce battery drain on your phone, things like limiting background app refresh, turning off automatic updates, disabling GPS, and removing widgets come to mind. And to be fair, they help. But if there’s one thing that can improve battery life more dramatically than anything else, it’s adjusting your phone’s display settings.

Unlike most battery-saving tricks, tweaking display settings doesn’t slow down your phone, affect notifications, or limit what you can do. It simply uses your screen more efficiently.

Your phone’s display draws 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 works. It has to be bright enough to compete with sunlight, sharp enough to show every detail, and fast enough to handle smooth scrolling and video. All of these take 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 millions of pixels, and each one needs electricity. Then there’s 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 be draining faster than expected, tweaking the display will make the biggest difference.

Tweaking the brightness and using dark mode can do wonders

Brighter is not always better

If there’s one thing that quietly eats up your battery all day, it’s screen brightness. When your screen is cranked up more than it really should, your phone works overtime to power all those glowing pixels. Even toning down your glow a bit can make a significant difference.

If you don’t want to keep this bar sliding up and down, you can turn on adaptive or auto brightness instead. It uses your phone’s light sensor to determine how bright it should be based on the surrounding light. Over time, it also learns your preferences and fine-tunes things, so the screen isn’t blinding indoors or dim outside.

Dark mode is another thing that has the biggest impact on battery life. Most phones these days have an OLED or AMOLED display, and on those screens, black pixels aren’t just dark, they’re actually turned off. This means fewer pixels are lit at any given time, resulting in better battery life.

Shorten screen timeouts and always rethink the display

A few seconds that add up quickly

Your phone doesn’t need to wake up until you think it does. Screen timeout is the amount of time you stop interacting with it. By default, it is set to 30 seconds on both Android and iPhone, but if you have increased it, it is better to reduce it to 15 or 30 seconds.

Those extra seconds might not feel like much, but they can add up when you’re sitting idle with your phone dozens of times a day. Also, your phone already has a feature that can keep the screen awake while you’re looking at it. This means you don’t have to worry about turning off the display when you’re reading something important.

The always-on display feature is already enabled on most phones, and it’s pretty handy for checking the time and notifications at a glance. However, since this causes the display to stay awake, it affects battery life. If you’ve checked your phone’s battery usage menu, you’ll probably see it sitting near the top.

Although the always-on display feature is more efficient than keeping the entire screen on, it still uses power. If you want to extend battery life, you can always consider turning off the display. If you really like using it, you can prevent it from displaying the wallpaper or set it to only appear at certain times.

I don’t always use my phone for 5 valid reasons

Between the burn-in risk, poor notifications and constant distractions, the display isn’t always worth it.

Reduce refresh rate and tone down animations to save battery

Just in case you are still not satisfied

If you’re using a flagship phone, it probably has a 120Hz refresh rate display. And yes, it looks fantastic. But all this smoothness comes at a price. A higher refresh rate means your screen is refreshing more times per second, which requires more power.

For better battery life, you may consider changing your refresh rate to 60Hz. The difference may seem a little noticeable at first, but once your eyes adjust, you’ll barely notice it.

On the other hand, if you are using a budget or older phone, you may want to consider reducing or turning off these animations your phone shows. To do this, you’ll need to access developer settings on Android and accessibility settings on iPhone.

Battery life is one of the most important aspects of your smartphone and tweaking the display settings is a great way to improve it without compromising performance. Even if you apply just one or two of the above tips, you will definitely feel the difference.