Android 101: Save battery by keeping Wifi alive

It seems on my Nexus 5 with the latest update (Marshmellow??) it's the opposite.
I.E. you choose ALWAYS because the setting has been re-phrased:

"Keep Wi-Fi on during sleep: Always; Only when plugged in; Never.

I have mine on never yet it still seems to cut off in stand by mode... HTC ONE M8 and same with my now HTC ONE 10

Yes folks, as stated above, different phones address this from opposite sides. Some phones settings say "keep wifi alive during sleep?" Which you want to choose ALWAYS instead.

This article refers to a phone that settings read the opposite, "turn wifi off during sleep/idle?" In which case you would choose NEVER.

Hope this helps, be sure to double check what your device setting is asking before making your choice.

?????

choosing NEVER will only increase data usage and battery drain !! (phone will switch on 3g/4g which takes more energy and takes data from your plan...)

to save battery and data, you should choose 'keep wifi on during sleep: ALWAYS' (to always stay on WiFi)

read with interest the tip on keeping wifi on during sleep. when I checked how my S3 is set up the question is 1)Keep wifi on during sleep- and the options are Always, When plugged in, Never.
So in that instance one would want to check Always.
thanks-good education.

Thank you for this tip. I couldn't figure out why nothing was getting pushed with my new tablet!

It all depends on the type of your phone or tablet and your location and movement pattern. I also thought WIFI should stay on, but my Galaxy Tab drained power very fast since I bought it.
After 1 year I enabled WIFI to sleep when the screen is turned off and now the standby time grows from 1.5 days to 5 days!!!
I don't care for the extra data because a have an unlimited plan.
My advice: Test your system and decide for yourself. Don't believe every pseudo-scientific explanation seen here ;-)

Excellent! is exactly what i need. Thanks!

I have the android samsung sgh 1727....when I set my wifi to NEVER....it reverts back to ALWAYS....? Can anyone help with this situation.

does not actually work. I use an Atrix 4G and these directions are spot on for my andriod. It wasn't until I repeated the steps that I realized that I had already chosen "Never" for my WiFi to stay on. Yet, it's still always cutting off when my screen goes idle. So, I thought my battery saver app was overriding my phone settings so I went to my app and checked settings there. Settings are set for my app to not be able to enable & disable Wifi at it's own convenience. I uninstalled the battery saver for a while and my Atrix still disabled WiFi when the phone goes idle.

Hello. I have a confusion about this matter. I don't always use 3g, so i don't always keep 3g on. When i need it to run, i just set it on manually. However, I have Wifi connection at home and when i'm at home, i set wifi on, and when i'm out, i just turn wifi off manually. Now here is the question: Is it useful for me to set the sleep policy option to "never", or will it be more battery saver if i leave it as it is?

Thanks.

thanks for the TIP i was a blackberry user and then i switched to android, one day i noticed my mb in my data plan were over, same mbs i had with blackberry, some guy from the phone company told me it was because android consumes much more data than BB and turning WiFi off certainly didn't help too much. Thanks for this post, it saved my day, now i can keep WiFi on all the time and use 3G only when i am out on the street.

Why have a smartphone?

Among other reasons to get email, and how smart is it if you have to keep checking it manually? not very, and how much use is push mail when the darn wifi keeps going to sleep? none! none at all!

That's why this tip saved me from slamming my "smart" phone against the wall in total frustration.

But awesome tip = awesome phone, cheers dude :-)

This was a great article, I started using this along with Auto Wifi Toggle, and the results so far have been great, 12 hours on and still at 80%, while the phone was in pretty much standby for the first 6 hours, it stayed at 99%.

My only concern is that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are not necessarily the best friends in the world and I for one truly hate taking phone calls phone-to-ear, so I always keep Bluetooth on with a BT headset connected. I'll give this tip a try and will report if I get more Bluetooth-vs-WiFi conflicts out of this.

EDIT: WOW, this actually helped A LOT! Excellent tip. As for Wi-Fi+Bluetooth woes, it doesn't seem that bad -- only when Wi-Fi loses its signal it interferes somewhat with Bluetooth but as long as you don't venture too far from the hotspot, no issues.

Could this functionality have been hidden amy deeper?

I use an Elixir widget to keep 3G data access off unless I need it, and around the house, I have constant Wi-Fi access. So it makes more sense for me to have Wi-Fi turn off when the screen is off, since there is no data access most of the time, there is no battery cost there. That way, when I leave the house, I do not have to remember to turn Wi-Fi off.

Thanks for this tip!

It's a coincidence that I did this earlier today, in the morning. I had factory reset my phone a while and wondered why it would disconnect to 3G, and wondered if I did something wrong then remember this setting.

My thunderbolt was auto set to Never.. So that didn't help me.. ;-(

Guess it was just me, but when I had my N1, I had set the WIFI radio to never sleep, and, well, it killed my battery faster, like 10% an hour. Putting the WiFi back to default (sleep when screen is off) allowed me to make it a full day+ again.

Guess what I'm saying, is try it both ways to find the mode that works for you. :-)

(I don't run a lot of data intensive apps, so that is probably why my results are opposite of those here. My only apps are Email which checks every 30 minutes, Weather which is once an hour, and news, which is once every 4 hours. And my only push app is Good for Enterprise.

With that usage, it's more efficient for the phone to wake up the 3G, send it's 1K of data, and go back to idle.)

I wish. If I leave wi-fi on the phone is dead in 2 hours. I have a program that automatically turns off wi-fi and mobile data when it goes idle. That alone extends my battery to 8+ hours of normal use and more if it sits there idle. I can forget about the phone and still have juice the following day. I have a HTC Thunderbolt.

the goodnight app keeps my phone from disturbing me with sounds all night. It only lets thru selected numbers. It's a must for me.

Great tip... Those damn electrons have been running hog wild I guess...

Spare parts+ from the market is an easy way to change these settings too. no root required.

This is really good advice, that many people get confused and think it NEVER would save battery.

Heck it even says so on many versions of Android where the sleep setting has text that specifically says that NEVER will use more battery.

This leads many astray, because while it might save battery if your phone/tablet does NOTHING while it sleeps, that is NOT how we use our devices. Most of us have stuff running on our phones 24/7.

But when wifi sleeps, every mail check, facebook, check, google talk connection, has to be re-established over 3G. Whereas with a wifi connection, your phone can essentially close its data channel on 3G, drop to GSM only for phone and text messages. Way less power.

Even on Wifi Only Tablets NEVER will save battery, because without it, every mail check has to use polling, wake up the radio, negotiate a DHCP address, establish a connection, contact the mail server and ask for any mail. Whereas, with NEVER, Mail (especially Gmail and Exchange and most Imap) simply keeps a socket open, and lets the wifi drop to a low power state. When the socket becomes readable because mail arrived it simple resumes full power and reads the incoming mail.
Way more efficient.

Y5 from the market is a handy app that goes well with this tip.

It automatically turns on your wifi radio when you are nearby a wireless network that you have previously connected to. Then when you leave the area, Y5 knows this and turns your wifi off for you automatically.

It's a great little app. Now I never have to worry about turning on and off my wifi to save battery. Y5 does it for me.

https://market.android.com/details?id=pl.polidea.y5&feature=search_result

One of the reasons I read AC everyday is to learn new things, thanks for sharing this tip!

I never knew about this, but just checked and mine was set to never sleep by default.
I have a stock HTC Evo 3D.

This may be true if you are always in an area with WiFi. But beware and make sure you turn off WiFi when you leave your house. When the WiFi radio is searching for a connection, particularly on the Thunderbolt, it uses a huge amount of power. So while you are driving around, you'll find your phone drains the battery quickly if leave WiFi on. I use the Auto WiFi Toggle app to minimize battery usage. It turns off WiFi when it disconnects because you got out of range of your WiFi, and then turns it on every 15 minutes for a second or two to check for a new connection.

Thank you for posting this. I had forgotten how to do this and it bugged the crap out of me to have to wait for my WiFi to reconnect every time I would bring my phone out of sleep. Pretty much the only time I am not on a WiFi connection is in my car on my commute. Even then I have found enough open networks to have a connection almost the entire way home.

This is a great tip. I never understood why you'd want to turn off wi-fi in standby unless you were turning off all data altogether, e.g. airplane mode.

I wonder why this setting isn't on by default. It says when you turn it to the never setting that there may be more battery drain but actually the opposite is true.