Increase time between syncs/sensor reads as much as possible.
Mobile apps have to periodically perform operations. If a the time between two executions is small, the app will be executing operations more often. In some cases, even if operations are executed more often, it will not affect users' perception.
Increase the delay between operations to find the minimal interval that do not compromise user experience. This delay can be manually tuned by developers or defined by users. More sophisticated solutions can also use context (e.g., time of the day, history data, etc.) to infer the optimal update rate.
Consider a news app that collects news from different sources, each one having its own thread. Some news sources might have new content only once a week, while others might be updated every hour. Instead of updating all threads at the same rate, use data from previous updates to infer the optimal update rate of these threads. Connect to the news source only if new updates are expected.