How to Find Out How Much Battery Power Is Left on Your IPhone
Apple has been criticized in the past for a myriad of battery issues, and to be honest, there are a few modern inconveniences more annoying than feeling like you can’t use your phone for more than a few minutes without plugging it in to charge. Therefore, it is helpful to know where your iPhone’s battery is in terms of capacity and performance.
According to Apple, the lithium-ion batteries in your devices are rated to operate at up to 80% power for approximately 500 full charge cycles. As the battery capacity decreases, you will have fewer hours of use before you have to discharge it again. Batteries naturally degrade over time, and they certainly do not work at 100% for a long time (and perhaps never will happen after you start using your device).
We’ve covered how to check your iPhone’s battery life , which is easy to see in Settings> Battery> Battery Status . This will show you the current capacity of your battery in relation to when it was new and give you the ability to maximize battery performance.
But you might also be interested in knowing how many times you’ve charged your phone, as that can also give you an idea of how much time your battery has left. If you’ve hit 500 full charges, the performance degradation might make more sense. There is an easy way to do this, and it is also found in your device settings ( h / t ZDNet ).
How to view your iPhone’s charging history
- Go to Settings> Privacy> Analytics & Improvements .
- Turn on Share iPhone Analytics (or Share iPhone Analytics & Watch Analytics if you have an Apple Watch). This should be enabled by default, but if it is not, you will have to wait a few days for the data to compile before you can follow the next steps.
- Tap Analytics and scroll to the entries that start with Aggregate Log and select the most recent date available.
- From here, you browse a wall of code for ” batterycyclecount ” – you can either scroll (that’s a lot of data to sort) or copy and paste the report text into a word processor or document that can be manually searched. The number below this entry will tell you how many charge cycles your battery has gone through.
Please note that a reading above 500 does not mean that your battery is low and needs to be replaced. In fact, my log shows 517 complete charge cycles and my max capacity is still 88%.
It’s also good to know that a charge cycle doesn’t drain your battery from zero to 100 in one go, so you don’t have to let the battery drain and then fully charge it. A charge cycle counts when 100% of your capacity is discharged, even if you discharge it in between.