My Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra has been my go-to secondary phone for quite a while now, but there was one thing about it that drove me crazy. I’d plug it in before bed, make sure it hit 100%, leave it untouched on my bedside table, and somehow wake up to find the battery had already dropped to around 94% by morning.

At first, I brushed it off. But after getting tired of seeing the same thing happen every morning, I started digging around for a fix. That’s when I came across a toggle tucked away in Developer options. I turned on Suspend execution for cached apps, and the difference was quite noticeable. My phone finally started holding its charge overnight the way I’d always expected it to.

What overnight drain actually looks like

The slow bleed nobody warns you about

Before I explain the setting itself, it’s worth talking about why overnight battery drain is so frustrating in the first place. The annoying part is that there’s rarely one app you can blame. Every morning, I’d check the battery usage page, expecting to find a single culprit, only to find a long list of apps each using just 1% or 2%.

It turns out that closing an app doesn’t always mean it’s completely gone. Many apps stick around in the background as cached processes. They’re mostly idle, but they can still wake up occasionally to sync data, refresh content, or carry out other background tasks. After a full day of using your phone, dozens of apps can be running their own thing while you’re asleep. I noticed this most with messaging and social media apps. That was the point where I stopped accepting the overnight drain as normal and started looking for a way to keep those background apps from waking up in the first place.

The setting that fixed it

Where to find Suspend execution for cached apps

The setting is tucked away inside the Developer options menu. To unlock it, open Settings -> About phone -> Software information, and tap Build number seven times. After entering your PIN, you’ll see Developer options appear in your Settings menu (under System).

Now open Developer options, then either scroll until you find Suspend execution for cached apps or save yourself some time by using the search bar and typing “suspend.” When you find it, you’ll see three options: Device default, Enabled, and Disabled. In this case, choose Enabled. I picked it because I wanted to make sure cached apps were actually suspended, rather than leaving that decision to the phone’s default behavior.

Now, I know the name sounds intimidating, but here’s what it actually does: instead of letting cached apps run small background tasks, Android puts them into a much deeper sleep. The apps don’t disappear from memory or get closed completely — they’re simply prevented from using your phone’s processor while they’re sitting in the background.

Think of it like hitting pause instead of stop. The app is still there, ready to open in an instant, but it isn’t waking up every so often to do work you never asked it to do. The moment you tap the app again, Android wakes it up immediately, and you can carry on from exactly where you left off. That means your phone spends less time doing unnecessary work while idle, which is exactly what helped reduce the overnight battery drain on my Galaxy S24 Ultra.

From 8% drain to almost nothing

The first morning after I turned it on, I actually checked my battery twice because I was convinced I’d read it wrong. I’d gone to bed with 100% charge and woke up to 99%. Just 1% gone after roughly seven hours. Considering I’d gotten used to waking up to 93% or 94% for absolutely no good reason, it honestly felt like my phone had finally decided to behave. The improvement didn’t stop overnight, either. Over the next few days, I noticed the battery wasn’t draining as quickly during the day, especially when the phone was just sitting in my pocket or lying on my desk doing… well, supposedly nothing.

No, I didn’t hook my Galaxy S24 Ultra up to fancy testing equipment or spend hours staring at battery graphs. I simply used it the way I always have. But when a change is obvious enough that you stop worrying about reaching for the charger as often, you don’t really need a spreadsheet to tell you something’s working.

9/10

Brand

Samsung

SoC

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy

Display

6.8-inch Dynamic LTPO AMOLED 2X, 120Hz, HDR10+, 2600 nits

RAM

12GB

The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is a polished iteration that subtly enhances its predecessors’ strong suits. It sports a more industrial, flat design with a titanium frame and a standout 6.8-inch display that’s brighter and glare-reduced, offering a top-notch viewing experience. The camera system, while showing promise, struggles with consistency, but in terms of performance, it’s a powerhouse with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and a solid two-day battery life.

Not everything was sunshine and 99% battery

That said, it’s not completely perfect. After turning it on, I noticed that a couple of apps were a little slower to deliver notifications. Every now and then, a message wouldn’t come through until I opened the app myself. It wasn’t something I saw across the board, but it did happen to one or two apps. So if you depend on an app for time-sensitive notifications, it’s worth keeping an eye on it for a day or two after enabling this setting. Some apps simply don’t play as nicely while being frozen in the background as others do.

Thankfully, the fix is about as simple as it gets. I excluded the one app that was giving me trouble from battery optimization, and its notifications went straight back to normal. Everything else stayed frozen in the background, and I still got the battery savings I was after.

Would I recommend turning this on? Without a second thought. It takes less than a minute to enable, doesn’t cost a penny, and it’s one of the few hidden Android settings where I noticed an immediate difference. If your Android phone seems to lose more battery overnight than it should, this is easily the first setting I’d try.