Ever since Apple unveiled the Battery Health feature for its iPhones and iPads operating systems, many users have been looking at the declining numbers of their battery health every day, concerned that their device’s battery will soon need to be replaced.
If you’re one of these folks, we’re going to show you 13 effective ways to increase iPhone battery health.
How to increase iPhone battery health
1. Avoid extreme temperatures
Every battery has an optimal operating temperature. Lithium-Ion batteries, primarily used in portable devices such as phones, are very temperature sensitive and deteriorate when exposed to extreme heat or cold.
Using your iPhone in excessively hot or cold environments can result in dangerous voltage fluctuations that can damage both the battery life and its circuitry.
Of course, your iPhone will automatically shut down in extreme temperatures to avoid such damages; however, some people might force their phones to operate under extreme temperatures despite the automatic shutdown.
Please pay attention to what the manufacturer suggests; let your phone cool down if it has been exposed to direct sunlight – if you don’t, this could be a cause of your iPhone turning off even though it has battery left.
On the other hand, do not use your phone in temperatures below minus five degrees Celsius.
Instead, take your phone somewhere with mild temperatures before powering it on again. Therefore, to maintain the health of your iPhone battery, avoid extreme temperatures.
2. Keep the battery over 10% at all times
Your iPhone is powered by a lithium-ion battery that packs a lot of energy in a small space. The lithium-ion battery is susceptible to frequent complete discharges as it will impact the battery’s internal structure.
These batteries have multiple densely-packed power cells that charge and discharge in hundreds of charging cycles to keep your iPhone working.
However, discharging your battery life down to zero will physically harm the cells by causing the degradation of some materials inside the battery. Total discharges can cause your phone to lose up to 70% of its initial capacity.
Although your iPhone is designed to keep some charge even though the battery percentage displayed reaches zero, it is strongly recommended not to use up the battery life until the phone shuts down.
3. Don’t charge your phone all day or overnight
Any particular battery will eventually lose some capacity due to charging cycles, but keeping your iPhone plugged in deteriorates the situation.
A lithium-ion battery resembles a sponge in that it is easier to absorb when dry. As batteries and sponges approach saturation, it becomes more difficult for you to charge them.
Therefore, pushing the power cells to top off their capacity can reduce their lifespan and overall capacity over time.
iPhone smart charging guidelines recommend disconnecting the phone at under 80% charge as it will take less time and helps the battery’s life expectancy.
However, the adapter and control circuit inside your phone will protect your batteries from becoming overcharged. Nevertheless, don’t charge your battery life up to 100 percent unless you need to use your phone for a long time.
4. Identify the apps that use unnecessary power and disable them.
Some applications require large amounts of processing power because of how they are built. So, if you frequently use these apps on your phone, you’ll need to recharge it more often because of how much battery power they consume.
As a result of this behavior, the battery life will reach the end of its life cycle sooner, and its health will continue to degrade week by week.
Thus, Identifying and disabling high-powered apps is considered one of the best and most effective ways to increase the battery life and keep it healthy, whether iOS or Android.
The question now is how to identify and stop the high-powered apps on Apple iPhones and iPads?
First, you have to enter the iPhone Settings. Then, select the Battery option. This page shows the list of active applications on the phone and the amount of their battery life consumption over the last seven days and 24 hours.
To increase the battery life of your iPhone or iPad, disable those high-powered applications and, if possible, uninstall the unnecessary apps.
5. Enable low power mode
Low Power Mode is a feature that conserves battery life by turning off some functions, including notifications.
This feature enables automatically when your battery reaches 20% or less; you can also set to the Low Power Mode whenever you want to reduce battery life consumption.
To activate this option, follow the steps below:
- Navigate to Settings, and then tap on Battery.
- Next, enable the Low Power Mode option.
6. Reduce the duration of the screen auto-lock
The screen of all mobile phones is one of the main parts that consume battery power. The bigger and sharper the phone’s screen is, and the longer it stays on, the sooner it will run out of battery life.
Therefore, reduced screen time is one of the most effective methods to ease the strain on your phone’s battery and enhance its health. To do this, follow the steps below:
- Go to Settings and then select Display & Brightness.
- Select Auto-Lock, then specify how long you want your iPhone’s screen to remain on after you last touched it. The ideal duration is 30 seconds.
Note: There is a better solution to increase the iPhone’s battery health, related to turning off the phone screen in less time.
In this method, you have to press the power button once you are done with the iPhone to turn off the iPhone screen.
In this case, you will get the best performance from the device battery because you have practically turned off the screen manually as soon as you are done with the phone and have not allowed the device’s screen to consume extra energy.
7. Disable or Optimize Location Service Performance
Location service is another feature that drains battery power and puts excessive stress on any phone’s battery life.
When this feature is enabled for various applications, they will constantly try to track the phone’s location with GPS service, and to do so; they will drain the phone’s Battery.
Meanwhile, many iPhone applications do not necessitate access to the location service. Thus, denying those apps access to the location service is one of the ways to improve the health of your iPhone’s battery.
In order to completely disable this feature, follow the steps below:
- Go to Settings, then tap on Privacy.
- Next, select Location Services and disable this feature.
Note that your location tracking feature will be completely disabled by following these steps.
Another option is to enable this feature, but from the list at the bottom of the page, define the conditions under which you want to use the location service.
8. Disable the push feature in emails and use the fetch mode
Usually, when you receive a new email, your iPhone email app displays a notification immediately without delay.
This is possible because the iPhone email application constantly communicates with its servers to deliver notifications as soon as new information is received.
The delay-free notification is called “Push.”
On the other hand, this feature significantly increases the phone’s power consumption, putting excessive stress on the battery and, as a result, reducing battery health.
You can disable the Push mode for emails and use the “Fetch” mode to keep the iPhone battery healthy.
In this case, the communication of the email application with its servers, or better to say, the updating of the email application information, is done at specific intervals (for example, once every 15 minutes). To use the fetch mode, follow the steps below:
- Navigate to Settings, and then tap on Mail.
- In the Mail section, select Accounts, and then tap Fetch New Data.
- Next, disable “Push.”
You may now select the Fetch option next to each of your accounts to define how frequently you want information updated.
9. Increase iPhone Battery Health by Reducing Screen Brightness
As we mentioned earlier, the phone’s display drastically drains the battery life, putting undue strain on the batter. As a result, lowering the brightness is another way to keep the battery healthy.
Naturally, the higher the screen brightness, the more energy is required to power the LCD backlight. So, by lowering the screen brightness, you will reduce your iPhone’s battery usage to improve its battery health.
It is recommended to disable the “Auto-Brightness” option since it constantly adjusts the screen brightness and activates the device’s ambient light sensor. To disable this option, complete the following steps:
- Navigate to Settings, Accessibility.
- Then tap on Display & Text Size.
- Next, disable the Auto-Brightness option.
10. Disable Wi-Fi and mobile data
We recommend disabling these two features if you aren’t using your mobile data or Wi-Fi because keeping them enabled will increase battery usage.
However, it is worth noting that mobile data consumes more power than Wi-Fi, so always try to use Wi-Fi over mobile data if possible.
11. Disable Auto-Refresh Apps in the background
Most of the apps installed on your iPhone are running in the phone’s background and are in the mode of updating or so-called refreshing their data.
Many of these applications also use the internet to refresh their data and communicate directly with their servers. Note that these apps will update and refresh their data even if they are not running and active.
It’s worth noting that disabling this feature also prevents messaging and social apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Instagram from sending notifications because they can’t update the information in the phone’s background.
So if you don’t use these apps frequently, we recommend that you turn off Auto-Refresh. To do this, follow the steps below:
- Go to Settings and then tap on General
- Next, select Background App Refresh and then disable it.
12. Use Airplane Mode
When you enable Airplane mode, all connections and communication capabilities of the phone will be interrupted.
There are situations when this feature comes in handy, such as where your network connection is weak or non-existent, but you still don’t want to switch off your phone.
You may be wondering why someone would want to turn their phone off or activate Airplane mode when their network connection is weak or non-existent.
This is because the phone is constantly attempting to connect to the SIM card network in this situation, and this effort consumes a significant portion of battery power.
To avoid this problem, we recommend that you activate the Airplane mode.
13. Reduce Motions
The user interface of Apple iPhones has a lot of visual effects that you may not usually notice many of them.
However, these special effects and motion lead to battery consumption and gradually affect it, so if there is a way to disable them, we will see an increase in iPhone battery health!
Follow the steps below to reduce motions:
- Navigate to Settings, and then select Accessibility.
- Next, tap on Motion and then enable Reduce Motion.
Conclusion
Since people tend to keep their smartphones for a few years, it is crucial to take care of your iPhone’s battery life.
Despite the fact that lithium-ion batteries can store a lot of energy in a little amount of space, they are temperature and charge behavior-sensitive.
The life cycle, on the other hand, is a significant weakness of lithium-ion batteries, and we recommend that you reduce the strain on the battery life to reach the 500 life cycle relatively late; in other words, keep the battery healthier.
