Yesterday, I decided to investigate my rapid battery drain issue with my new iPhone 14 Pro, which I’ve owned for just one month. To get to the bottom of it, I navigated to “Settings” > “Battery” and captured screenshots from two different days for comparison.

While I’m a frequent user of WhatsApp, staying connected with customers, friends, and my dear mom, I was genuinely surprised to see it running in the background for a whopping 8 hours and 43 minutes. One of these screenshots shows that it took 25% of charge from my battery. So, with a bit of investigation, I decided to make the following changes:

I disabled the media auto-download

I recently made a small adjustment in my WhatsApp settings. I disabled all the options in the Media Auto-download section under Storage and Data.

Why, you wonder? It’s pretty straightforward. Firstly, it prevents background downloads I don’t really need. Secondly, it helps me save my cellular data. That’s about it – a modest tweak for a smoother WhatsApp experience and more efficient data use.

Silenced groups

While being part of various groups is essential for both work and social life, I don’t always require every notification coming my way. It’s important to note that each notification, even if it’s just a tiny bit, takes a toll on my battery. So, here’s the solution: just silence the group. All you need to do is perform a long press on the chat, select the “Mute” option, and choose your preferred duration for muting. This simple step lets me find the sweet spot between staying connected and conserving my phone’s battery. Keep in mind that you’ll still be notified if someone mentions you in that group, though.

Disable background app-refresh

Now, here’s where things start to get interesting. Previously, it was revealed that WhatsApp had been running in the background for a full 8 hours. One thing that was worrying me was that disabling background app refresh would halt notifications, but it turned out to be a different story.

As it happens, each time a new message arrives, WhatsApp refreshes the app to ensure you see the latest messages. However, this can still occur when you open the app manually. So, if you choose to deactivate it, the only noticeable change in your daily routine will be seeing the app update each time you open it after receiving a new notification.

I put this theory to the test and can confirm that calls, notifications, and all other functions still work perfectly.

To disable this feature, navigate to “General” > “Background App Refresh” and then deselect WhatsApp (or WA Business) from the list.

Conclusion

All these steps will probably help me to get a better battery life. But the fact that we need to do all this just to conserve our battery shows that WhatsApp lacks some basic app optimizations. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next updates, although I wouldn’t get to excited about it because this is a real problem and another article shows some of these steps and is a bit older than mine: https://apps.uk/whatsapp-is-draining-my-battery-the-solution/