How to use deep sleep mode on Android devices?

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With such an extensive catalog, it is common to have dozens of applications and games installed on your phone. What makes smartphones truly smart is how effectively they can handle the dozens and hundreds of services constantly running in the background to retrieve messages and perform the various functions required to maintain applications. While Android has matured over the years and made noticeable improvements in task management – which has allowed usable battery performance despite an increase in power-hungry components such as faster chips and brighter displays – app deep sleep mode can significantly increase the system’s capabilities.

Killing certain apps and services may seem counterintuitive at first – it actually causes a few annoyances from time to time, including delayed notifications. However, with a large number of popular Android apps that can drain your battery, it’s crucial that your phone can dynamically handle background apps to improve both performance and battery life.

If you have a Samsung phone or tablet running the relatively new version of One UI, you have granular control over which apps stay active in the background and which don’t. Read on to learn how to make better use of deep sleep mode for apps on your Samsung device.

Using deep sleep mode on Samsung devices

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Samsung regularly secures its place on the list of Android phones with the best battery life. Leaving the default battery and app management settings can still give you decent screen time, but it’s best to know how to manually change the deep sleep apps list for services you rarely use if you need it.

Launch the Settings app and go to Battery & device maintenance > Battery > Background usage limits.
To have your device automatically manage background apps, turn on “Put unused apps to sleep.”
Below are three lists you can add apps to. Click “Deep Sleeping Apps” and start selecting the apps you don’t want to ever run in the background.
Use the “+” icon to select apps, then tap “Add.” If you accidentally added an app to the list, tap the three vertical dots, select “Remove Apps,” and then select the apps you want to remove.

Apps added to the deep sleep list will never run in the background. For example, if you put a social media app like Instagram to sleep, you will no longer receive any notifications. Apps in a deep sleep state will work perfectly when you launch them and will only go into suspended mode by default when you exit them. The “Apps that never sleep” list does exactly the opposite and ensures that added apps are never disabled in the background.

Deep sleep mode for apps on other Android devices

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Once configured, Samsung’s app deep sleep mode can extend battery life by preventing apps you don’t use every day from running in the background. But what about smartphones from other Android manufacturers such as Xiaomi, OnePlus and Google?

While most Android vendors don’t have the ability to blacklist certain apps in the same way that Samsung does, very similar functionality is available in the Android operating system. Go to Settings > Apps > App Battery Usage to view the list of apps installed on your phone. This menu may have a different name depending on your Android phone. Click on an app and you’ll be presented with several options to control the battery usage of a specific app in the background.

By default, most apps are set to the intermediate “Optimized” mode, which intelligently manages battery usage. “Restricted” mode, as the name suggests, restricts most background app activities. If notifications from several important apps are delayed, set them to “Unlimited” mode. By tweaking a few of these built-in options, you get closer to maximizing your device’s battery life.