Does turning off your Bluetooth really save your phone’s battery?
It is a common belief that turning off Bluetooth and WiFi helps save phone battery.
It is often said that these features are significant power drains, continuously searching for connections in the background and sapping your battery life in the process.
While recommendations to turn off your phone’s Bluetooth and WiFi are well-meaning, they are also not up to date with the current technology.
Turn off Bluetooth – fact or fiction?
When you first attempt to pair a device to your phone using Bluetooth, Bluetooth will begin an “inquiry scan” as it searches for devices to connect to. This scan uses more power as the device is trying to establish a connection for the first time.
Once the device and phone have been successfully paired, Bluetooth enters “page mode”. This mode is far less intensive as it only searches for connection requests from existing paired devices.
As Bluetooth technology has improved, the drain on your device’s battery life has significantly decreased.
Bluetooth 4 and successive updates have been shown to only consume 5-8% of battery life, even while in active use, such as when streaming music via Bluetooth.
The power consumption is even less for devices that use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) like smartwatches. BLE only drains about 1-3% battery over 24 hours of usage. Current smartphones tend to use Bluetooth 5.3, which has been designed to minimize its impact on battery life.
Turning off Bluetooth when not in use does not have a major impact on preserving your phone’s battery life.
Turn off WiFi – does that save your battery?
WiFi is designed to get the strongest connection possible. In areas with a strong and consistent 5G option, the device will use WiFi or cellular data without a hitch. In areas without a strong 5G signal, however, the phone will lower to 4G and try to switch back to the stronger 5G connection as much as possible. This ping ponging between different strengths has a significant impact on phone battery. If the phone’s WiFi option is enabled in areas with lower signal strength, the device will use WiFi instead of draining power by switching between data options. A stable WiFi connection is far less intensive than fluctuating data connectivity.
Additionally, apps on your phone have strict limits on how often they can scan for WiFi. On Android 9 and beyond, each foreground app can scan for WiFi up to four times in a two minute period. Apps operating in the background are grouped together and can only scan for connections once every 30 minutes. These scans have an extremely minimal impact on battery life. While the rate is more frequent on iPhones, the impact on battery life is still minimal.
What does work to save your phone’s battery usage?
To save battery on your phone, you can turn on “low power mode”, which is also called “battery saver” or other similar terms.
This feature limits background functionality to reduce power consumption.
Lowering your screen’s brightness is another very simple method to save battery!
So In Summary
Turning off Bluetooth and WiFi does not significantly improve battery life, though it does have other security benefits. Thanks to the improved technology in more recent updates, as well as built-in limits by app stores, both Bluetooth and WiFi do not have major impacts on power consumption. Leaving these features on may in fact save battery in certain circumstances.
Of course, having a handy power bank available is just the peace of mind you need.
Remember that this is purely from a battery-saving point of view. From a security point of view, you want to switch off Bluetooth and WiFi when they are not in use!
