We asked, you told us: Phones still need aggressive battery management

Smartphone batteries are growing ever larger. Some of Samsung‘s mid-range phones regularly push the 7,000mAh threshold. Other brands coming close to this figure, too. However, a large battery doesn’t always guarantee lengthy battery life.

Software management also plays a part. That said, Samsung has also recently been slated by the DontKillMyApp team for One UI’s aggressive culling of apps in the background. While this improves power consumption, it also leads to missed notifications and longer app loading times for users.

With this balancing act in mind, we wanted to know from our readers if phones in 2021 really still need aggressive battery management tactics. Here’s what you told us.

Do phones still need aggressive battery management?

Results

We posed this question across YouTube, Twitter, and a poll on our website. All three platforms provided similarly slanting answers.

Over 39,000 votes were cast on YouTube. 72% of respondents believing that battery management still has a place on modern phones. Twitter garnered over 3,600 votes. Just under 68% of readers sided with the YouTube crowd.

Must read: How to maximize your battery life | What causes smartphone battery drain?

Notably, respondents on the website poll were less appreciative of battery management. We saw just 56% side with the rest, but a larger portion of this crowd didn’t feel aggressive battery management had a place on smartphones. Looking through the comments, a number of these users also believe battery management should be done by the user.

Here’s what you told us

• PhoenixWitti: I prefer Samsung’s approach, which allows me to opt IN for battery-killing apps and processes. One of the reasons I get phenomenal battery life on my phones is that I’ve been limiting always-on apps, and flat-out killing others. All manner of Google tracking is OFF on my phone. Many sensors are OFF on my phone. Samsung is just making things easier for users.
• AbsolutelyGeneral: It seems it’s being argued it’s not a good thing to kill background apps. Why exactly? Is it better to leave them running, wasting battery rather than the couple seconds or less to bring them back to life? What sort of mission critical functions is the entire world running that necessitates ALL apps to be running all the time?
• Albin: Generally I prefer to manage the battery and background uses myself, mainly with screen controls and Greenify, and disable Android’s and OEM’s automated intrusions.
• Steven Henriquez: I’m sure we can manage our apps ourselves.
• FAF89: They might need it, but we should have the option to turn it off, people buy phones with 6GB of RAM for a reason: multitasking

That’s it for this poll. Thanks for your votes and comments. If you have any additional thoughts about aggressive battery management on phones or the results of this poll, drop them down below.