Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 Battery Draining Fast – How To Fix It

The Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 is one of the most cohesive and complete tablets I had the pleasure of reviewing this year. With a battery life of about 9 hours, the tablet should last you throughout the entire day.

However, if that isn’t the case and your Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 battery has started to drain faster you need to tweak some settings on your device.

In this article, we’re going to be going over why exactly your Galaxy Tab A8 is experiencing battery drain and how you can fix the issue. 

Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 Settings for Extending Battery Life

There are a few settings you need to adjust to improve your Samsung tablet battery life.

1. Turn Off Adaptive Brightness

Adaptive Brightness uses your A8’s ambient light sensors to conclusively determine whether you are in a dim or bright area. According to that, your display’s brightness is reduced or increased depending on the situation.

While this is a great feature, it also eats up your battery. This is because it isn’t entirely accurate. A lot of times, you’ll be able to read text perfectly fine with a sliver of brightness, but your tablet will still excessively ramp your brightness up. Therefore, it is better to turn the option off and adjust your settings manually.

Here’s how you can turn off auto / adaptive brightness on the Galaxy Tab A8:

• Open the Notification Panel by swiping vertically downwards from the upper right corner
• After doing so, head to your Brightness slider and tap on the small downwards-facing arrow
• After doing so, turn off Adaptive Brightness

Note: With this option disabled, you will have to adjust your brightness more often than usual.

2. Use Dark Mode / Dark Wallpapers

The Galaxy Tab A8 sports an AMOLED display. What does that mean? Well, an AMOLED display turns off pixels, given that they are black. So, if you had a completely black wallpaper, your tablet would be consuming less battery because those pixels would be turned off to give that pure black color.

Therefore, if you are going to be using your tablet often, we recommend turning on Dark Mode through the notification bar. And to also find great dark wallpapers for your tablet to spice up your A8 while also ensuring you have great battery life. 

3. Turn On Power Saving Mode

Power Saving Mode reduces the background usage of applications installed on your tablet. Unlike a mobile phone, where applications and their subsequent notifications are important, we’re pretty sure you’ll be fine if you don’t get your daily Candy Crush notification.

By turning on Power Saving Mode, you’ll stop applications from unnecessarily checking for updates in the background which is quite useful, especially if you have a lot of freemium games installed, as they often try to hog up your battery as much as possible.

Here’s how you can turn on Power Saving Mode on your tablet:

• Open the Settings application.
• Scroll down to Battery and device care.
• After doing so, scroll down to Power Saving and turn it on.

4. Put Unused Applications To Sleep

A lot of applications in the background tend to remain there even after you explicitly quit them. In most cases, these can consume a lot of your battery even if they don’t send any notifications because of some nagging background tasks.

So, you can have your A8 automatically put all these applications to sleep and consider them uninstalled for all intents and purposes until you open them back up again. Here’s how:

• Open the Settings application
• Scroll down to Battery and Device Care and head to Background Usage limits
• Once there, select Put unused apps to sleep

Note: You can always opt for uninstalling an application that you don’t use rather than putting it to sleep.

5. Turn On the Adaptive Battery and Protect Battery

Adaptive Battery helps your tablet acclimate to its current usage and charge / discharge your battery accordingly. Protect Battery aims to protect your battery by ensuring that it’s charged up to and discharged only to specific percentages.

By turning both features on, you can expect to have longer, better battery life by having a tablet that can understand your usage patterns better. Here’s how you can turn on Adaptive Battery and Protect Battery on the Samsung Galaxy A8:

• Open the Settings application.
• Now, tap on Battery and device care.
• Once there, head to More battery settings.
• Now, select Adaptive Battery and Protect Battery.
• You’ll be prompted to restart your tablet. Go ahead and do so.

6. Turn On Battery Optimization

A lot of applications end up soaking your battery regardless of whether they running in the background or not. Thankfully, Android can limit the battery life consumed by these applications by not letting them consume your CPU. 

On a quick side note, I do not recommend turning on battery optimization for instant-messaging / time-sensitive applications. From what I’ve seen, these applications tend not to send out their notifications on time if you turn on battery optimization for them.

Here’s how you can turn on battery optimization on Tab A8:

• Tap on any application.
• Open the Settings application.
• Select Apps.
• Select Battery.
• Head to Optimize battery usage.
• Now, tick every application whose battery you wish to optimize.

7. Disable Notifications

Notifications can affect the battery life of Android tablets. When your tablet receives notifications, it typically wakes up the screen and may activate other hardware components, which can consume power, whcih leads to faster battery drainage. Here’s how you can turn off notificationl apps on Samsung Galaxy Tab A8:

• Navigate to Settings.
• Scroll down and select Apps or Apps & Notifications.
• You can individually manage notification preferences for each app here.

8. Manage Connectivity

Disabling unnecessary wireless connections can help conserve battery life. Bluetooth or LTE connection. LTE connection will drain your battery faster than WiFi. When on LTE, your tablet may constantly scan for nearby cellular towers and available networks, even if you’re not actively using data. This scanning can consume additional power.

Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 Battery Life

The Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 is packed with a decent-sized 7040mAh battery. If you are using it lightly it can go for days without charging, but on average – browsing the web, having video calls, watching movies, etc.

It will last you about 8-9 hours. If you are not seeing these numbers, there might be an issue with your tab.

How Long It Takes To Charge Samsung Galaxy Tab A8

Why Is My Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 Battery Draining?

While there are a lot of reasons why your battery may be draining, generally, a newer tablet should not undergo battery drain for a hardware-specific reason unless you’ve purchased it refurbished or used. 

To keep things simple, we’ll be starting from the most plausible reason to the least plausible reason for why your Galaxy Tab A8 battery is draining and how you can fix it.

• Not Updated: not updating your Android tablet to the latest version of the operating system can potentially lead to faster battery drain.
• The battery has run its curse: Lithium polymer batteries should ideally not be discharged below 20%, as they have a limited number of charge cycles before their capacity begins to diminish.
• Extreme Climate: If you are using your tablet in extreme weather (hot or cold), the battery will not be able to function properly. So, you’ll have less effective charge, which leads to worse battery life.
• Settings: All the settings we mentioned earlier are tweaked incorrectly, leading to a higher battery drain on your tablet.
• Faulty Battery: If all else feels and you experience some weird battery drain, you may have a faulty device. In that case, we recommend returning your device to where you purchased it from or contacting Samsung. 

Best Cases For Samsung Galaxy Tab A8

Why Is My Samsung Galaxy Tab Battery Draining Fast After Latest Android Update?

After Android 13 update some folks were complaing that their tablets battery life have started to drain faster.

The extra battery usage might happen because of new features or system improvements that demand more power. Additionally, the update process itself can be demanding on resources and might briefly use more battery.

Related Articles:

How To Screenshot On Samsung Galaxy Tab A8
Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 Not Charging – How To Fix