My Galaxy Tab A11 used to need charging twice a day, and I never questioned it. Overnight, and then once again during the day without fail.

I’d already tried an Android app freezer to stop unused apps from working in the background, but the tablet’s Android 16 restrictions blocked most of what made it useful. So, I turned to Samsung’s own built-in option instead, one buried in Settings that I’d walked past for months without ever touching. And by the end of the week, that twice-a-day habit was mostly gone.

Sleeping apps didn’t do much

A handful of dormant apps changed nothing

Samsung already identifies unused apps and recommends putting them to sleep. So I started with Sleeping apps. I added around ten apps in total plus the few the system had already flagged. Then I went back to using the tablet normally for a couple of days.

Nothing really happened. I was still charging twice a day. In fact, I almost left it at that because if putting ten apps to sleep didn’t do anything, adding a couple more didn’t seem worth the effort.

But I was forced to try again because my apps consistently reloaded when I switched between them due to low memory. One way or another, I needed to reduce background activities draining my battery.

So I moved almost everything into Deep sleeping apps

Which is also when the reload problem disappeared

Then I realized Samsung splits this into two levels, and the difference between Sleeping and Deep sleeping apps matters more than I expected before trying it.

On September 20, I stopped holding back. I navigated to Battery > Background Usage limits > Deep sleeping apps, and moved around 80% of my apps into Deep Sleeping apps. That totaled forty-nine apps.

That included Samsung’s bloatware apps I never touched, social media apps, games, YouTube, Netflix, and other apps I rarely open. I left Chrome, Docs, WhatsApp, Gmail, Slack, and a few others running in the background so I could keep working.

The feature description says Deep sleeping apps stay inactive in the background and don’t get updates or notifications until you open them. What I noticed, however, was more interesting than the description.

The apps still worked normally when you tap them, but once minimized, switched away, tapped home, or locked the screen, they disappeared from Recent within a minute. I actually watched that happen dozens of times.

That’s forty-nine apps that stopped waking up on their own, checking for updates, or pulling my tablet’s battery in the background.

But I found a real downside, though. Deep sleeping apps show up exactly as they were in the app drawer, no gray, and nothing marking them as frozen. So, I’ve opened apps by accident more than once with no intention of using them.

One overnight charge started carrying me through the day

I finally broke my charging habit

I split the week to check the numbers properly. On September 18 and 19, before I got aggressive with Deep Sleeping, the tablet averaged 124% daily battery usage. From September 20 to September 24, that fell to 93.6%.

That’s slightly above a 24% drop in battery use. I used the same apps plus a few more I was trying out on the same device. I just had fewer apps pulling the battery down with me most of the time.

September 24 was the clearest example of the improvements. I started the day at 97%, and by 7:35 PM, the battery was sitting at 18%. I checked it twice because I assumed I’d misread it. I was expecting it to be nearly dead because I ran a couple of tests with a couple of new apps, and I’d used around 12 hours of screen-on time that day.

I wasn’t running a controlled battery test, so I can’t claim an exact percentage improvement. But there’s been a big shift from the routine I got used to. There were some slip-ups where I plugged in out of habit anyway, but it was just pure muscle memory, not because I needed to.

I don’t need another app freezer on my tablet anymore

This is roughly the same job SuperFreezZ was doing for me, minus the side loading, inconsistencies, and the permissions my tablet wouldn’t grant anyway. So I uninstalled it.

It’s not automatic here either. I still decide which apps go into Deep sleeping and manually add them. For instance, my banking apps went into deep sleep because I get many important notifications via email, so I was okay missing push notifications.

Some of this could just be Android doing what it always does in the background, or me just paying closer attention to a device I was actively watching for a week. But the recent apps’ behavior was consistent, and a tablet that needed two charges most days doesn’t casually drop to one just because I was watching it more closely.

Some people go the opposite direction and turn off app-killing entirely because they need certain apps to stay active.

For me, I had too many apps in the background, and a more aggressive approach was the right call.

A week in, I stopped worrying about carrying a charger everywhere. Turns out Samsung had what I was searching for the whole time.