Most smartphones are now equipped with lithium-ion batteries and iPhones are no exception. The capacity of these batteries inevitably deteriorates over time. While there is nothing you can do to prevent this from happening, you can still slow it down. Discover the good practices for maintaining your battery and so extend the lifespan of your iPhone.
How does a lithium-ion iPhone battery work?
The age of a lithium-ion battery is measured by charge cycles. According to Apple, a functional battery used under normal conditions is expected to retain up to 80% of its capacity after 500 charge cycles.
A charge cycle is the use of the entire capacity of the battery, either at one time or several times. For example, if you are using 50% of your battery, this will count as half a charge cycle. If the next day you spend 50% of your battery (even having recharged it in the meantime), a cycle will be counted.
Best practices for maintaining your iPhone battery and extending its lifespan
Run away from the heat
Lithium-ion batteries are sensitive to extreme temperatures. The cold temporarily slows them down, by crystallizing the liquid electrolytes contained in the battery, which prevents electricity from circulating properly. Heat, on the other hand, can permanently damage battery components. Indeed, it transforms their internal structure, which prevents the device from optimizing the current flow.
Our tips for protecting your iPhone from heat:
Make sure your iPhone is in an environment where the temperature is between 0 and 35 ° C.
Avoid leaving it in direct sunlight or in enclosed, poorly ventilated places such as a car, where the temperature may rise rapidly.
Use a thick case which, in addition to protecting your iPhone, will insulate it from heat.
Finally, don’t let the iPhone overheat while it is charging. For this, try not to use it while it is charging. Do not leave it plugged in once it has reached 100%.
Manage your applications
Applications run in the background, consume data, send notifications … So many things that can drain your battery! To optimize it, here’s what you can do:
Suspend the operation of applications that you do not use or that are not essential to you. Turn off background refresh and less important app notifications.
Regularly update your applications, but do watch out for beta versions. Some can overheat or drain your battery quickly if not fully optimized.
And let’s put an end to an urban legend that is still widespread and denied by Apple executives themselves: force quitting apps does not save battery, on the contrary. Indeed, relaunching an application after quitting it consumes more resources than if it had been left open in the background.
Hardware optimizations
The devices with which you charge your iPhone must also meet certain criteria:
Use good quality charging material, either original or Apple certified. Lightning cables carrying the MFi mention (Made For iPhone, or “designed for iPhone”) are the most suitable. Make sure the cable and power supply are both of good quality if you purchased them separately.
Use the vouchers wireless chargers : Although very practical, some chargers equipped with Qi technology generate a lot of heat. To overcome this, choose one equipped with a heat dissipation device (integrated fan, aluminum).
Finally, if a case can protect your phone from external heat, it is best to remove while recharging. This can in fact prevent the heat from dissipating.
Software optimizations
To save your battery, there are a few uses and settings to be made in your iPhone settings:
Do not leave the battery fall to 0. Dropping below a certain percentage damages the battery. It is even advisable to recharge it as soon as it reaches or drops below 20%.
Conversely, avoid letting your battery charge beyond 80%. Beyond this percentage, the battery tends to heat up. Also avoid charging your battery up to 100%, unless you plan to use it intensively during the day without the possibility of recharging it.
Activate the Optimized charging. Introduced with iOS 13, it improves your battery health through machine learning. This allows you to determine your charging habits and adapt charging to them. This feature avoids in particular maintaining the load at 100% unnecessarily. For example, if you plug in your phone before you go to bed, the battery will be kept at 80% most of the night, and then ramp up to 100% before you wake up. It also tells you the time when the charge will be complete.
As with applications, be sure to keep the up-to-date operating system. However, avoid using beta, because sometimes these are not optimized for the hardware. They can drain the battery very quickly and cause overheating.
Optimize screen use : have you ever thought about the battery consumption caused by the screen? Do not leave the brightness to maximum and activate the feature Automatic brightness. Also, if you have an iPhone equipped with a OLED display, you can save up to 30% of the battery (and relieve your eyes) by activating the Dark mode. With an OLED screen, each pixel emits its own light: a black pixel is therefore off, which consumes less energy.
Go for the Wi-Fi rather than 4G. Wi-Fi is faster, so screen time for a given task is logically less. Be careful, however, to use the correct Wi-Fi settings: deactivate the option of automatic connection ; If you connect to multiple networks in one place, manually select Wi-Fi to have your iPhone automatically connect to the nearest hotspot without looking for other connections or trying to connect to an already known network. At last, avoid slow networksbecause they make you consume more screen time.
The question of fast charge : This feature is available on iPhone models released from 2017 (iPhone 8 and later). Despite popular belief, this one is not bad for your iPhone, provided you use an original charger or MFi.
Disable AirDrop, to prevent your iPhone from wasting energy constantly searching for devices to connect to.
Activate mode energy saving. It minimizes battery consumption when it is low. Note, however, that this mode may slow down or prevent certain features.
Discover our article: 6 tips to know on iOS 14
In conclusion, if you want extend the life of your iPhone, you have to pamper your drums. Since it is designed to withstand a number of load cycles, it should be worn as little as possible to make it last as long as possible. But no matter what, expect your iPhone’s battery to drop over time – all you can do is slow it down.
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