Over just a few years, the batteries in our smartphones have changed a lot.

Before telling someone to disable Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, lets shed some light on those old myths.

Myth: You Should Completely Discharge Your Battery Before Plugging It In

Batteries used to be stupid.

Older batteries would forget their full capacity, so they wouldnt be able to fully charge again.

So, youd have to let a battery discharge all the way to 0% before charging it again.

Thats not the case anymore, and it hasnt been for a long time.

Theres no need to let it discharge 100% before recharging.

Apple lithium-ion batteries work in charge cycles.

It could take several days to complete a cycle.

The capacity of any pop in of battery will diminish after a certain amount of recharging.

With lithium-ion batteries, the capacity diminishes slightly with each complete charge cycle.

Most manufacturers still suggest youcalibrate your batteryby discharging and recharging it once every one to three months.

Essentially, every discharge shortens the battery life just a little bit.

However,more and more batteries have a digital calibration toolbuilt into them.

These smart batteries supposedly reduce the need to calibrate, though its still recommended when your battery behaves oddly.

You dont want to do this too often though.

Its actually bad for lithium-ion batteries to be regularly drained all the way to 0%.

That counts as a full charge cycle, which in turn decreases the batterys total life.

These days, chargers and smartphones are smart enough to prevent this from happening.

That sounds great on paper, but its pretty ludicrous for someone living in the modern world.

Thats not how smartphones work.

When you leave an app, its frozen, doesnt do anything, and doesnt require any resources.

While you think this may be what you want to do, its not.

All of that loading and unloading puts more stress on your unit than just leaving it alone.

You are meant to be the user of your machine, not the janitor.

The same is true for Android.

Some people swear by task killers to handle close apps and improve battery life.

The problem is,they dont work, and do more harm than good.

On iOS, its called Background App Refresh.

This means apps can load data in the background, even when its not in focus.

When they do this, they use CPU power, which drains the battery.

All this isnt to say that apps arent the problem.

Certain software, like messaging apps,absolutely destroy your smartphones battery life.

Apps can still kill your battery if theyre poorly programmed or just extremely demanding.

Smartphones also now have great metrics so you could track which apps are doing so.

On iOS, head to tweaks > Battery to see similar information.

However,while you shouldnt use cheap, sketchy knockoff or counterfeit chargers, affordable off-brand chargers are fine.

That includes using chargers that supply a different number ofampsthan the phone expects.

Off-brand chargers wont do this.

What usually kills your battery the fastest is the screen.

Illustration by Sam Wooley.