If your smartphone battery is showing signs of weakness and tends to run down faster than before, it's probably because you have one or more applications that are using a lot of power. Fortunately, it's easy enough to identify them and manage their activity.

To find out which applications are using the most power on your smartphone, go to the Battery section, which you can easily find in your phone's settings, whether your operating system is Android or iOS. You'll then see a list of all the latest applications you've used. They'll be ranked according to their respective battery use.

You'll even be able to find out how long some of them have been running in the background, if at all. Streaming and browsing applications are usually those that use the most power.

Contrary to popular belief and common practice, it's best to leave your most frequently used applications open, rather than systematically closing them. Restarting them over and over again will use more power, and will ultimately be detrimental to your battery. Closing a mobile application only to reopen it a few minutes later not only drains battery life, but also puts pressure on the device's RAM. The less powerful a smartphone is, the more necessary it is to keep these applications open. In any case, you have everything to gain in terms of performance and battery life.

On the other hand, whatever your smartphone, you can always choose whether or not to allow each application to consume data in the background. On Android, you can activate the Data Saver in the Network & Internet section of your Settings, while choosing which applications you authorize to run in the background. The same applies to iOS, in the Background App Refresh section.

Finally, don't hesitate to restart your smartphone. This will close all active applications, including those running in the background, and erase any accumulated temporary files, giving your device a fresh start. There are also a host of battery-saving tricks you can try, from reducing screen brightness to temporarily turning off location settings, for example.

 - AFP Relaxnews