5 iPad Settings That Can Instantly Extend Your Battery Life – SlashGear

An iPad is a solid device for creativity, fun, and casual work. It’s portable and packs enough power to handle most tasks you throw at it with ease. But irrespective of what you use your iPad for, it’ll eventually run out of battery and need to be charged before you can use it again. While the number of hours you can get on a single charge varies depending on the iPad model you have and your usage, if the battery is draining faster than expected, it could be due to misconfigured settings.

Before you begin adjusting these settings, though, check your iPad’s battery health first. If the battery capacity is below 80%, a replacement is likely needed. Otherwise, if it’s healthy, there are various tips to prevent the battery on your iPad from draining too fast. Moreover, you can tweak some of the iPad settings to extend its battery life instantly and maximize usage time.

Leaving location services enabled on your iPad all the time is one of the major reasons for excessive battery drain. Sure, many apps request location access when you’re actively using them, but that doesn’t hold for every app; some apps and system services try to fetch your location even in the background. Unfortunately, turning the Location Services option off completely isn’t a viable option, since many apps and services require your location to function properly. What you can do instead is turn off Location Services for specific apps and services. This way, you can prevent excessive drain without affecting the functionality of other apps.

Disabling location access for an app on your iPad is easy. Open Settings and go to Privacy & Security > Location Services. Enable the “Location Services” toggle if it isn’t already, and you’ll see a list of all the apps that currently have access to your location. Tap on an app and choose “Never” under “Allow Location Access.” Similarly, to turn off location access for a system service, go to the “Location Services” page and select “System Services.” Here, take a look at the services you don’t often rely on and turn off their location access. (You can safely disable location permission for services like “iPad Analytics,” “Significant Locations & Routes,” and “Apple Pay Merchant Identification.”) Additionally, be sure to turn off the “Location Services” toggle when it’s not required.

Your iPad automatically downloads and installs new system updates as well as app updates (from the App Store) by default. While this ensures that the iPad is running the most recent iPadOS update, and you get the latest features and security improvements offered via new app updates, it can contribute to higher battery usage. Not to mention, it can also consume significant mobile or Wi-Fi data, especially if it isn’t restricted to downloading updates only over Wi-Fi.

You can prevent this excessive battery drain by turning off automatic downloads for both system updates and app updates on your iPad. To turn off automatic system updates, head to Settings > General > Software Update and tap on “Automatic Updates.” On the next screen, flip the toggle next to “Automatically Install” and “Automatically Download” under iPadOS Updates, and “Automatically Install” under System Files. Similarly, to disable automatic app updates, open the App Store section in Settings. Then, toggle off the “App Updates” option under “Automatic Downloads.” While you’re here, make sure the “App Downloads” option is also turned off. Leaving it enabled is one of the most common mistakes that can hamper your experience on an iPad. When you turn it off, it prevents your iPad from automatically installing free and paid apps purchased on other devices, helping conserve storage space and battery.

When you exit an app on your iPhone or iPad, it enters a suspended state. This means it doesn’t work actively but remains in memory to fetch data and keep the content up to date, so you see the latest information when you open it again. However, this constant data fetching also results in increased battery usage. As such, it’s best to disable background activity for unnecessary apps. You can do this safely for social media apps, news or reading apps, and shopping apps, as they typically don’t push real-time updates or refresh data frequently. Turning off background activity is also one of the effective ways to extend the battery life on your iPhone.

Start by opening the Settings app on your iPad and navigating to General > Background App Refresh. Here, you’ll see a list of all the apps that can currently refresh data in the background. Go over the list and toggle the switch next to the apps you think could function perfectly fine without needing to fetch and update their data frequently. 

App notifications ensure you stay on top of important messages, emails, and other alerts on your iPad. However, they can be quite distracting when you’re trying to focus and may also contribute to quicker battery drain. Thankfully, you can turn off notifications for nonessential apps or apps that send notifications incessantly to limit distractions and conserve more battery.

To turn off app notifications on your iPad, head to Settings > Notifications. Under “Notification Style,” you’ll see a list of all the apps on your iPad. Tap on an app to see the kinds of notifications it can send. From here, you can configure the notification style for the app, or toggle off the “Allow Notifications” button to disable notifications entirely.

Alternatively, if you don’t wish to disable notifications for your apps, you can enable Scheduled Summary instead, which groups non-essential notifications and sends them at your specified time, saving you interruptions and frequent screen waking while ensuring you don’t miss any important notifications. Go to the Notifications page and select “Scheduled Summary.” Flip the switch next to “Scheduled Summary” on. Tap “Continue,” select the apps whose notifications you want to receive, and hit “Add Apps.” Specify the time at which you wish to receive a notification summary every day. You can choose to get the summary multiple times a day. Finally, hit the “Turn on Notification Summary” button.

Aside from constantly updating location services and refreshing data in the background, having unused features such as AirDrop turned on all the time can also increase battery consumption. This applies to radios (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Cellular), too, as your iPad continuously scans for nearby networks and devices. Hence, you should always turn off the features and radios you don’t currently need.

In most cases, turning off the features involves the same steps you used to enable them. For radios, the Control Center offers quick access toggles that simplify turning off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Cellular Data. However, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth toggles only disable connections until the next day. Sure, you can head to Settings to disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but there’s an efficient way to do this using the Shortcuts app. 

To demonstrate, we’ll create a shortcut to turn off Wi-Fi. Open Shortcuts and tap the “+” button in the upper-right corner. Hit the “Search Actions” field, look up “Set Wi-Fi,” and tap it to add it. Tap the “On” text on the action to change it to “Off.” Shortcuts will automatically name the shortcut “Set Wi-Fi,” but you can tap on it to change it to something else. You can create a similar shortcut for Bluetooth using the “Set Bluetooth” action. Finally, add a widget for the Shortcuts app to your iPad home screen and select the two shortcuts. You can then tap these widgets whenever you want to completely turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.