How to check the remaining battery life of your iPhone

Apple has been criticized in the past for a plethora of battery issues, and honestly, there are few modern drawbacks more annoying than feeling like you can’t use your phone for more than a few minutes without needing to plug it in to charge it. So it helps to know where your iPhone battery is in terms of capacity and performance.

According to Apple, the lithium-ion batteries in your devices are designed to work up to 80% capacity by approximately 500 full charge cycles. As the battery capacity decreases, you will have fewer hours of use before you need to recharge it. Batteries degrade naturally over time, and they certainly don’t perform 100% for long (and can never do it after you start using your device).

We have covered how to check the battery life of your iPhone, which is easy to see in Settings> Battery> Battery status. This will show you the current capacity of your battery compared to when it was new and gives you options to maximize battery performance.

But you might also be interested to know how many times you have charged your phone as this can also give you an idea of ​​how much battery life is left. If you are well past 500 full loads, the performance drops may make more sense. There is an easy way to do this, and that is also found in your device settings (h / t ZDNet).

How to view your iPhone’s charge history

1. Go to Settings> Privacy> Analytics and improvements.
2. Activate Share iPhone scan (or Share iPhone and 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 proceed to the next steps.
3. Faucet Analytical data and scroll to entries starting with “aggregated by log “ and select the most recent date available.
4. From there you look through a wall of code for “number of battery cycles“—You can either scroll (there is a lot of data to sort) or copy and paste the report text into a text editor or document that you can manually look for. The number under this entry will tell you how many charge cycles your battery has undergone.

Note that being above 500 doesn’t mean your battery is dead and needs to be replaced. In fact my diary says 517 full charge cycles, and my max capacity is still at 88%.

It’s also helpful to know that a charge cycle doesn’t take up your battery. from zero to 100 at a time, so you don’t need to let your battery die and then fully charge it. A the charge cycle is counted when 100% of your capacity is discharged, even if you fill it in between.