Former Apple worker issues warning over simple mistake that’s killing our batteries
A former Apple worker has revealed one major mistake we’re all making while charging our iPhones – leaving them plugged in all night and boosting the battery to 100%.
Yes, believe it or not, for optimal performance it is better to keep your battery floating in the sweet spot between 30% and 80% rather than constantly charging it fully and letting it run down to zero.
Back in the day when phones took literally hours to charge it made sense to plug them in before going to sleep and waking up to a full battery.
However, nowadays most smartphones take between 30 minutes and a couple of hours to charge, so leaving it on charge for hours once it’s full is bad for battery health.
And while clever iPhones can learn to hang around at 80% for a few hours before you need to reach full capacity when plugged in overnight, excessive overcharging accelerates battery health.
Of course, battery anxiety means many of us would find it hard to charge our phones in the evening then leave the house without a fully-charged device the next morning, even if it will extend its life.
This is where Tyler comes in, because alongside recommending rarely charging your phone to 100% to limit chemical changes within the lithium-ion battery, he has a ton of hacks to help stretch out your iPhone’s daily life.
How to make your iPhone battery last longer
The first thing, and one of the most important, is to switch off Bluetooth when you’re not using it – and not just from the quick menu, but in Settings > Bluetooth.
Secondly, switch off apps running background app refresh that don’t need it – you’ll be amazed at how many are working away the whole time that don’t need to. Yes, we all love Flight Radar, but it doesn’t need to be on the go 24/7.
Users can switch off individual background app refresh in Settings > General > Background App Refresh.
Alternatively, you can switch your battery on to Low Power Mode, which will automatically stop all background app refresh. Go to Settings > Battery > Low Power Mode.
On a similar note, turn off location services for all apps that don’t need it, or switch to ‘While Using the App’. While you can switch off location services for all apps with one toggle, chances are you really do need it for some, so Tyler recommends individually selecting those which really don’t need it.
Other tips include switching off Hey Siri, turning down your brightness and switching off ‘Raise to Wake’, so your phone isn’t constantly unlocking – and setting autolock to 30 seconds.
However, going back to that first big battery tip, one major solution that does not seem available on iOS 17 (or 16) is setting your phone to never charge beyond 80%. In his TikTok video Tyler suggests this as the first step, but up-to-date devices no longer have that option.
You can still toggle on Optimised Battery Charging, the magic switch that holds the battery at 80% until just before you’re going to use it again, but it will hit 100% if you don’t unplug it (which most of us aren’t going to do in the middle of the night).
Then again, if you’re brave enough to start charging your phone the night before and unplug it before you go to bed (the horror), you can manually stop it at the magic number.
Just don’t blame us if you then have recurring nightmares about sleeping in because your battery died.
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