Apple’s iOS 18, launched earlier this week as developer beta, has a couple of nifty options that give you a better overview of how your iPhone’s battery is doing, as well as more ways to save battery health in the long run.
If you go to Settings – Battery on your iPhone, you might see that some parts of your phone’s charging graph are orange; these indicate that you were charging your phone on a slow charger.
Additionally, your iPhone might also show a notice while plugged into a slow charger, though it’s unclear how slow the charger needs to be for the message to appear. I’ve got the iOS 18 developer beta installed on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, and could not get the message to show, no matter which charger I used, but according to MacRumors, the feature does exist. The notice is also apparently accompanied by a button which should give you more information, but currently leads to a non-existing support document.
In Settings – Battery – Charging, you can now set a charging limit for your iPhone, ranging from 80 percent to 100 percent, in increments of five percent. This was available before, but the only available option was an 80 percent limit.
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If 80 percent is too low for you, you now have more options to choose from.
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
Common battery health lore says that the sweet spot for battery health (at least for the types of batteries that go into an iPhone) is between 20 and 80 percent. But for some users, 80 percent might be too low, so being able to set the limit at 85, 90, and 95 percent might be more helpful in the long run.
In iOS 18, Apple will also allow you to return the limit from a lower level to the maximum for one time only, after which the limit is reinstated. All of this might end up being a little confusing, so make sure your battery health settings are really set the way you want them, or else you might be left wondering why your iPhone has less battery life than everyone else’s.
Finally, while this isn’t precisely a battery-related feature, the new Dark Look in iOS lets you make everything on your display, including the icons, significantly darker, which should save some battery life (the amount might be very small, but hey, every milliwatt/hour counts).
