We’ve all found ourselves in a pickle due to a dead smartphone battery, and if not, you’ve been living with a charger perpetually on your person. What is it that kills a smartphone’s battery so quickly?

As it turns out, a lot of things impact your smartphone’s capability to hold and maintain a charge over time. Let’s run through the list of factors that you could encounter, and how you can address them.

How a Smartphone’s Hardware Impacts Battery Life

Every different model of smartphone varies in terms of the hardware that is used to build the device itself. Take the size of the battery itself, for example. Larger batteries should be able to hold more power, and therefore should be expected to last longer.

There’s also the display that needs to be taken into account. The larger the screen is, the more that needs to be lit, and the more power that will be required to do so. This difference becomes even more pronounced with the display’s brightness set to be higher as compared to lower, and what a device display’s refresh rate is. The various connections that your phone facilitates—like Bluetooth, for instance—also pull from the battery as they are enabled and especially when actively being used.

A device’s chipset will also impact the battery life. While we don’t plan on getting too far into the weeds, newer chipsets can do the same as old ones could, just doing it faster and with less heat and energy expenditures.

Essentially, if hardware is involved, it’s going to create some draw on your battery, with this draw becoming more pronounced the more often that this hardware is called upon.

How a Smartphone’s Software Impacts Battery Life

While you rely on your smartphone’s hardware to enable its functionality, it’s the software that allows you to make practical use of the device. However, your software also creates more of a drain on your battery, largely because it requires your hardware to work. Some apps drain the battery as you’re using them, while others work in the background and leech away your battery life.

This is all before we even consider how the operating system has an impact, too. Similarly to the situation concerning a device’s chipset, a newer OS will more likely work more efficiently, but there’s still the issue of numerous background tasks all pulling from your battery reserves, all the time. Every time one of these dozens of processes fires off, a little bit of power is expended. Over time, this adds up.

How a Smartphone’s Condition Impacts Battery Life

Finally, it has to be said that newer, fresher devices will work better. Each and every time you charge your phone, you increase its battery life by a second or so. This also is also contributed to by the fact that a hot battery doesn’t work as well as it would at room temperature, along with the unfortunate coincidence that a smartphone heats up as it is used. As such, it pays off to try to keep your smartphone at a moderate temperature as often as possible, and avoid leaving it in a hot car.

So, What Have We Learned?

• There are a lot of factors that can hasten the time it takes for your smartphone’s charge to be depleted.
• In terms of hardware, minimizing the time your screen is on and deactivating connections to things like Bluetooth when not actively in use can help preserve your battery life.
• In terms of software, closing applications completely when not being actively used or at least minimizing their background activities can help your battery last longer.
• To minimize the impact that your device’s environment has on the battery, try to keep it at a controlled temperature.

Hopefully, these tips will help you keep your phone active and available for more of your time during the day.