Whats running on my iPhone?

What drains your mobile phone battery the most? If you use your smartphone frequently, your iPhone battery will obviously start to drain the more screen time that you put in each week.

However, it’s also worth checking the iPhone and the things it does in the background – even when you illuminate your screen to check your notifications, this will use a small amount of power.

So if you’re looking to prevent battery drain on your iPhone and maximum your battery life, here’s what you need to know.

See what processes are running on iPhone

It’s fairly easy to see which processes are running on your iPhone, but unfortunately it’s not quite as easy or in-depth as it is on other Apple devices.

On a Macbook, you can quickly use the Activity Monitor to see all the apps that are running in the background. There’s no Activity Monitor in-built into iPhone, so if you’re an iOS user we need to find another way to see the tasks running and how much battery they’re using.

Check Manually

The quickest and easiest way to see which specific apps are running in the background is to Double Click the Home button.

Here, you may find that multiple apps or processes run in background on an iOS or iPadOS tablet.

It will show your current app, but also all of the recent apps that you’ve used on your device if you’ve forgotten to close apps after you’ve used them.

These apps are still running in the background whilst you’re not using them. If you have these processes running in the background, they’ll slowly drain the battery life of your iPhone.

So, you need to force quit apps that you scroll through to ensure that you’re using minimum battery life and extend the lifespan of your iPhone.

But, this doesn’t give us any insight into system tasks and system level processes running on your iPhone and the amount of battery power that they may use.

However, the more curious can also discover system process levels using an alternative method via checking your battery usage settings or via an app.

Analyse Battery Usage

You can easily look at the battery usage on your iPhone by simply going into the Settings app on your device.

Then, click into Battery and then Battery Health & Charging to see the amount of battery that certain apps use on your device.

Most apps will use very little, but some individual apps will burn the majority of your battery usage down pretty quickly.

You can turn Background app refresh off on your device if you want to save some extra battery life – this will stop apps from downloading updates in the background.

This helps us to see which apps have already used battery on your iPhone, but it won’t show you anything about current usage.

Use a System Monitoring App

The best way to see background processes from both your actively running and background running apps is to download a third party app to do this.

An app like System Activity Monitors can help you do this without much issue, and it will show you what’s running on your iPhone so you can analyse the data.

You’ll then be able to use the app to see your background tasks, as well as all of the memory usage that’s being taken up by open apps on your iPhone.

Whilst not as in-depth as possible on desktop macs, it’s still a good solution that can help you to know which apps are killing your battery usage.

Conclusion

If your iPhone battery usage is going down faster than usual, this could mean that your applications are using more energy than they should.

The good thing is that iOS devices generally have a good way that you can identify your usage across the board so you can see which apps are draining your battery life the most.

After doing this, you’ll have the data on the usage of your battery life in real-time. So you can use the basic iOS task manager to see all the apps you’re using and those that are running in the background.