How to Keep Your iPhone Battery Healthy

All rechargeable batteries wear out over time. Your iPhone battery has a limited number of charge cycles, and each full charge cycle slowly reduces how much charge it can hold. A brand new iPhone battery is rated at 100% capacity. Most Apple support guidance suggests that battery health above 80% is considered normal — but once it drops below that, your phone may struggle to last through the day or may shut off unexpectedly at low charge levels.

The good news is that how you charge and use your iPhone greatly affects how quickly the battery degrades. With a few habits, you can keep your battery healthy for a longer period.

One of the most effective tools is built into iOS. Apple introduced a feature called Optimized Battery Charging in iOS 13. And it is turned on by default on most iPhones. This feature uses machine learning to learn your daily charging pattern. If it notices you usually charge overnight, it will charge your iPhone to about 80% quickly, then pause and wait until just before you wake up to finish charging to 100%. This prevents the battery from sitting at 100% charge for hours at a time — which is one of the main causes of battery degradation.

Heat is the other major enemy of battery health. Leaving your iPhone in a hot car, direct sunlight, or using it heavily while charging all generate heat that accelerates battery aging. Try to avoid charging your phone on a bed or couch where it cannot dissipate heat.

Letting your phone die completely (reaching 0%) on a regular basis is also hard on the battery. Keeping the charge somewhere between 20% and 80% as much as practical is better for long-term health, though fully charging sometimes is fine.

Several features on your iPhone consume battery faster than others. Keeping screen brightness very high, having many apps using background app refresh, leaving location services on for many apps, and having push email checking constantly are among the biggest drains. Reducing some of these in your settings can extend your daily battery life a lot.