How to Save Your iPhone Battery | AT&T Wireless
How to save your iPhone battery
Learn how to extend the battery life of your iPhone, the quickest ways to charge an iPhone, and available iPhone chargers.
Why do batteries drain faster over time?
Normal wear and tear are expected to occur with any iPhone battery, which causes the battery to degrade over time. However, some of our own bad habits can also affect the speed of degradation, so learning how to avoid them can help the longevity of your iPhone battery.
If you're wondering how to extend the battery life of your iPhone in the long run, we recommend following these tips:
- First, it's advisable to periodically check your iPhone battery's overall health by heading to Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging—where you'll get an idea of its chemical age (lithium-ion batteries will naturally lose capacity over time) and a sense of what you can expect from your phone's battery going forward and whether you need to replace it.
- Next, you should avoid charging your phone in environments with extreme temperatures (also known as extreme ambient temperatures). The ideal comfort zone in which your device performs best is 62° to 72° F (16° to 22° C). Heat overall is much more harmful to the battery than cold temperatures, so avoiding exposing, charging, and even storing your device to ambient temperatures higher than 95° F (35° C) is essential.
- Another tip is to ensure your iOS—the iPhone's operating system version—is current. Apple is constantly updating and refining it, improving its ability to manage your phone and better control performance and power enhancements.
- Enabling Optimized Battery Charging is also highly recommended because it's not good for the battery to be fully charged the entire time. With this feature on, your iPhone learns your daily charging routine, and it'll wait at 80% before charging the remaining 20% just before you typically start using your phone—usually when you wake up. This allows the battery to spend less time fully charged, and you'll end up experiencing longer periods between charges over time. To enable this feature, go to your Settings, tap Battery > Battery Health, and toggle Optimized Battery Charging to on.
What drains the iPhone battery most, and how can I improve iPhone battery life immediately?
We've all been in situations where we found ourselves with a quickly dwindling iPhone battery without a way to charge it in sight—and usually, it's at the worst time possible. But not all hope is gone!
If you don't carry a portable charger with you wherever you go (or it too runs out of juice) and you're wondering how to save the iPhone battery here and now, just follow these top tips for conserving the battery in the short run:
- We recommend following the exact percentage of energy left of the battery. The iPhone battery icon in the top-right corner of the screen only gives you a vague indication of how much juice is left on the device, but it's not a very precise measurement of battery life. So, to turn on this feature, head to Settings > Battery and enable Battery Percentage. The battery icon will then show a number, making it easier to monitor battery life.
- Make it a habit to check which apps are hogging the battery and close them while not in use. Certain apps, such as games or those relying on GPS, are likely to drain your battery faster than others. To see which apps are draining the battery the most, go to Settings > Battery. On this screen, review which apps have used the most battery power.
- Take advantage of the Low Power Mode on the iPhone that disables or restricts features, including 5G, visual effects, refresh rate, and screen brightness.
- In cases where the Low Power Mode is a bit too extreme for you, or you prefer to be pickier on which features are disabled or restricted, you can manually turn down the display brightness and shorten the screen's auto-lock activation time to lengthen battery life significantly. You can take care of the screen lock under Display & Brightness > Auto-Lock. To adjust the brightness control, head to the Control Center when you swipe the home screen down to reduce the brightness. Alternatively, you can turn on the True Tone control in Settings > Display & Brightness, which will adjust your brightness setting automatically in response to the lighting environment. Also, some apps allow you to use dark mode, or you can set the phone itself to dark mode by going to Settings > Display & Brightness and tapping Dark to save energy consumption.
- Another option is to turn off background app refresh or limit it to specific apps such as email or social media platforms that are refresh-heavy apps. This can save energy as closed apps on your iPhone keep running until they enter a suspended state, and some keep running to check for updates and new content from time to time, draining battery life. To do this, go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh.
- If you’re desperately trying to conserve energy and your iPhone has a patchy service signal, you may want to turn on airplane mode and disable it only when you must make a call. This helps save energy because battery levels are affected by cell signal quality, and it must work harder to stay connected, draining your battery faster.
- It's also best to disable the Wi-Fi® and Bluetooth and avoid AirDrop to reserve energy, as they are also known to drain a battery. If you usually use wireless earbuds and tend to go on hours without charging your cell phone, you may want to use wired earphones instead to allow your Bluetooth to rest, conserving energy.
- You may be surprised to learn that limiting the number of notifications an app can send can help conserve the battery level quite a bit. As notifications light up the phone display, they accumulate and consume much energy. You can manage the notifications of any given app by navigating to Settings > Notifications. By enabling the Focus feature under Settings > Focus, you can also set a restriction time frame to prevent these pings from coming through.
Does iPhone have a fast-charging option?
Yes, iPhone has a fast charger—known as the USB-C Power Delivery charger—that supports charging speeds of 18W and beyond and allows powering your iPhone battery from flat to 50 percent charge in 30 minutes. But remember that to enable this, you'll need a USB-C-to-Lightning cable and the fast USB-C charger, which Apple no longer includes in the box.
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Tamar Levin is a Sr. Digital Content Editor at AT&T, who specializes in wireless technology and innovation. With dual Master of Science degrees from the University College London, Tamar brings over a decade of editorial expertise to her role. She currently spearheads the Content Standards Council at AT&T. Tamar is based out of Dallas, Texas.