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Apple

Quick Tip: Disable Background App Refresh, Parallax & Automatic App Updates (iOS)

Vincent Seow

• 1 min read

Battery life appears to still be an issue for iOS 7 and some of the default settings for the features of this OS could be the reason for this. Some things you can do to alleviate the power drain is to disable Background App Refresh, Parallax (pretty cool motion effect), and Automatic Downloads.

Turn off Background App Refresh:

ios7bgapprefresh

  • Go under "Settings" and "General"
  • Look under "Background App Refresh" and adjust the slider
Turn off Parallax (Reduce Motion):

ios7parallax

  • Look in "Settings", "General" then "Accessibility"
  • Find "Reduce Motion" and adjust the slider so it's on (green)
Turn off Automatic App Updates

ios7autoupdate

  • Head to "iTunes & App Store" under "Settings"
  • Adjust the "Updates" slider under "Automatic Downloads" to off
There's also the usual of toggling your screen brightness and picking only the radios (e.g. Wifi, 3G, LTE, GPS) that you actually use. Have any of your own battery saving tips? Feel free to share them in the comments below.

I'll be covering some tweaks you can do for Windows 8.1 next week, so stay tuned.