Tip of the Week: Get More Battery Life Out of Your Android Device With Doze Feature

The more you use your device, the more often you begrudgingly reach for your charger for its afternoon plug-in session. If you’re like any normal mobile device user, this might be an everyday occurrence, but the average business owner might be limited by the scope of their mobile battery’s lifespan. Enter: Android Doze, a feature that could improve your battery life.

Doze helps your phone retain more battery life by disabling an application feature known as wakelock. Wakelocks keep the device from entering an energy-conserving sleep mode, as this mode can interfere with applications and device functions. Wakelock was initially meant for use with fitness trackers and other applications that need to function while the screen is deactivated. However, app developers took advantage of wakelock for all of their applications--including those that are notorious for being battery-killers with their near-constant notifications (like Facebook).

The user functionality that wakelock was meant to achieve was spoiled thanks to these app developers, which essentially nullifies any power-saving capabilities of this deep sleep mode. Doze seeks to resolve this problem by disabling wakelock and network access once the phone hasn’t been used for a while. Doze keeps your applications from draining your phone’s energy while still allowing the apps to periodically update during “maintenance windows.”

Android has provided users the ability to customize their Doze settings, allowing the user to decide which apps are affected by the feature. To access this customization:

• Open Settings.
• Navigate to Battery.
• Select Battery optimization from the Menu button.
• Select All apps from the top-of-screen drop-down menu.

Doze will automatically affect most of your applications by default in order to optimize the battery. However, if there’s an app that you don’t want to connect to Doze, you can always switch the setting to Don't optimize.

Doze also has third-party apps that are designed to automatically customize their functionality. For example, Doze Settings Editor can turn Doze off when the phone moves a certain distance. Keep in mind that this particular app only works with Android Marshmallow, though.

All of this additional battery life will surely be able to provide you a better user experience. What do you plan on doing with all of your extra battery life? Let us know in the comments.