Embodiments of the present invention provide a terminal control method and apparatus, and a terminal. The method includes: when a screen of a terminal is switched from a screen-on state to a screen-off state, detecting whether an enabling condition of a power saving mode is satisfied; and if the enabling condition of the power saving mode is satisfied, performing a power saving operation, where the power saving operation is used to reduce power consumption that occurs when an application program in the terminal runs in a background. In the embodiments of the present invention, power consumption in a screen-off state is reduced as much as possible without affecting normal use of a user.