22 Tips to Make Your iPhone 16's Battery Last Longer

[Artemis70]

Even better: if you don’t want to be stressed about your battery DO NOT BUY A SEALED AND GLUED DEVICE WHOSE BATTERY YOU CAN’T EASILY REPLACE YOURSELF, NO MATTER HOW SLEEK IT LOOKS. That’s actually the root of this whole battery problem. No one was worried at all about the cellphone battery until apple came out with its sleek sealed iphone and all other manufacturers followed their example.

We don't all have the same wishes. I prefer a phone with an IP68 rating than one where I can replace the battery. I can carry an extra battery anyway, but I can't undo water damage.

Besides, how many people you know actually had charged replacement batteries when phones still supported replacing the batteries? I have never known anyone to have one. Have you? If so, was this widespread in your community?

 

[Artemis70]

Not true. No one was as stressed about the battery when it was user-replaceable as everyone is now. When it drained too fast, people just bought a new battery, installed it on their phone and were done with it. Now everyone is stressed about it and we have whole threads such as this one because they can’t replace it themselves and have to go to the manufacturer or its authorized service centers and pay more to have it replaced.

Not true. Many people are already stressed about battery life when they get a new phone. This article suggests that it is also for them.

Obviously you are right about older batteries. Being able to replace would be nice. But not if that comes at the cost of not having IP68, at least for me.

 

[lartola]

We don't all have the same wishes. I prefer a phone with an IP68 rating than one where I can replace the battery. I can carry an extra battery anyway, but I can't undo water damage.

Besides, how many people you know actually had charged replacement batteries when phones still supported replacing the batteries? I have never known anyone to have one. Have you? If so, was this widespread in your community?

Again: WATER RESISTANCE WAS NOT THE REASON WHY APPLE AND OTHER MANUFACTURERS ORIGINALLY STARTED SEALING THE PHONES. IT WAS ONLY TO PREVENT REPAIRS BY 3RD PARTIES OR THE USERS THEMSELVES. WATER RESISTANCE CAME MUCH LATER. How many times to I have to repeat this before I stop getting the same response about the water resistance?

Oh and back in the day I did replace batteries myself many times when they stopped holding the charge.

 

[Artemis70]

I’m perplexed by how anyone would believe push email is a battery killer. Your phone always retains a connection to apple’s push notification server… changing it to fetch would actually be worse (marginally) for the battery since it has to do an extra check on top of what it already does constantly for every app.

It has been a couple of iPhones since I last validated this. Back when I tested, it made a difference of about 10 to 15%. It was enough for me to disable push email, which I don't need anyway. Depending on your needs and wishes, this could be an acceptable or even good advice, or just don't do it. I may test this again sometime soon, to learn if recent iOS versions haven't rendered this advice useless from a battery perspective.

Live Activities are also just reskinned push notifications, so it would make far more sense to just revoke the permission from an individual offending app.

I think that Live Activities mostly use power because of screen usage, not because of push notifications. Wouldn't you think so?

 

[lartola]

Not true. Many people are already stressed about battery life when they get a new phone.

Obviously you are right about older batteries. Being able to replace would be nice. But not if that comes at the cost of not having IP68, at least for me.

These days because the phones are sealed. It didn’t happen when the batteries were user replaceable. There weren’t all these discussion threads about the battery back then.

And if having IP68 comes at the cost of pretty much paying a small fortune for a disposable phone then I DON’T WANT IT. I’d rather have no phone at all than have a sleek sealed water resistant phone that’s practically disposable but costs a fortune.

 

[macfacts]

We don't all have the same wishes. I prefer a phone with an IP68 rating than one where I can replace the battery. I can carry an extra battery anyway, but I can't undo water damage.

Besides, how many people you know actually had charged replacement batteries when phones still supported replacing the batteries? I have never known anyone to have one. Have you? If so, was this widespread in your community?

Samsung s5 was water resistant and had a removable battery.

 

[elessar7]

Spending a good chunk of time turning off things it’s a complete nonsense if you’re buying a brand new phone. It should be Apple, not us, who may work improving battery life 😂

 

[MacFarmer]

This was funny. Basically buy Nokia 3310

 

[orev]

No mention of turning down the screen brightness? That's the #1 thing draining the battery, and the vast majority of people have the brightness set to max when they could easily use it at 50% or lower.

 

[zach-coleman]

I think that Live Activities mostly use power because of screen usage, not because of push notifications. Wouldn't you think so?

If you have AoD turned off the only time they wake the screen is when there is an update push (and one of those would have woken the screen anyways if it wasn’t a live activity, since it behaves almost identically to a normal push notification), and if AoD is on the screen never turns off anyways. I also only encounter live activities a handful of times per month, which is why I say better to revoke offending apps than break the entire feature. If an app is activating them for most of the day every day it might be a concern, but Starbucks updating you about your coffee for about 15 minutes any given day will barely be noticeable, if at all. Especially if your phone is already getting dozens of pushes per hour. (Mine is not, but that seems common.)

It has been a couple of iPhones since I last validated this. Back when I tested, it made a difference of about 10 to 15%. It was enough for me to disable push email, which I don't need anyway. Depending on your needs and wishes, this could be an acceptable or even good advice, or just don't do it. I may test this again sometime soon, to learn if recent iOS versions haven't rendered this advice useless from a battery perspective.

I guess I’ve never manually tested turning it off but with 1 iCloud push email + 2 Gmail fetch emails (15 minutes) I’ve never had Mail consume more than 2% of background activity according the battery screen, and usually it’s 1% or “—“ for any given day.

 

[Stromos]

Again: WATER RESISTANCE WAS NOT THE REASON WHY APPLE AND OTHER MANUFACTURERS ORIGINALLY STARTED SEALING THE PHONES. IT WAS ONLY TO PREVENT REPAIRS BY 3RD PARTIES OR THE USERS THEMSELVES. WATER RESISTANCE CAME MUCH LATER. How many times to I have to repeat this before I stop getting the same response about the water resistance?

Oh and back in the day I did replace batteries myself many times when they stopped holding the charge.

I don't think you understand us. Going back to replaceable batteries will make the phone susceptible to water damage.

I don't care why they did it. They did it to make more money got it.

Side effect they have better water resistance to our benefit.

I at no point want to go back to a phone that if it's in a bathroom when I shower it's going to break. Walk to my car in the rain and risk my phone.

Water damage is an automatic trash device. Even future repairs will be blocked if those old water stickers show water damage.

 

[LGR]

Number 1. Mirroring Isn’t mirroring different than AirPlay and Continuity and secondly when I goto
To disable it, go to Settings > General > AirPlay and Continuity and tap on Edit. I have NO edit.

 

[lartola]

I don't think you understand us. Going back to replaceable batteries will make the phone susceptible to water damage.

I don't care why they did it. They did it to make more money got it.

Side effect they have better water resistance to our benefit.

I at no point want to go back to a phone that if it's in a bathroom when I shower it's going to break. Walk to my car in the rain and risk my phone.

Water damage is an automatic trash device. Even future repairs will be blocked if those old water stickers show water damage.

And I’d rather go back to no phone at all than buy one more of these sealed and practically unrepairable phones.

 

[grjj]

If I were to guess, part of the problem with battery life is the existing habit people have of closing all their apps all the time. As Apple moves more and more features from the actual apps to background processes, crashing the apps causes more and more unexpected conditions and instability. It used to be the closing the calculator app was a non-event but not that calculator is tied into the background AI stuff for Math Notes that could start cusing issues.
Imagine: you close an app just as it was talking with the AI feaures. The AI feature doesn't know the app was closed unexpectedly and spends the next 8 hours trying to send the answer/reply back to the app.
DO NOT CLOSE ALL YOUR APPS. it will only ever cause you problems. Use the features in this article to control background activity and data access when you need/want to limit those.

 

[stealthytolkien]

Even better: if you don’t want to be stressed about your battery DO NOT BUY A SEALED AND GLUED DEVICE WHOSE BATTERY YOU CAN’T EASILY REPLACE YOURSELF, NO MATTER HOW SLEEK IT LOOKS. That’s actually the root of this whole battery problem. No one was worried at all about the cellphone battery until apple came out with its sleek sealed iphone and all other manufacturers followed their example.

I respect your opinion. But it’s flawed in my opinion.

First of all, nobody would want to carry another battery with them. It’s a tiny chemical hazard.

Second of all, when phones had replaceable batteries as a norm, phones had far fewer functionalities that were a drain on the batteries compared to today.

And finally, the overall screen time of an average user has also gone up compared to say, 15 years ago.

The problem isn’t the sealed battery. The problem is that smartphones with all that crammed functionality have started to become our life’s oxygen. And more functionality means more optimization needs to reduce the battery drain. At some point one is gonna lag behind the other.

Even if we watchfully reduce our cell phone consumption by 25% this problem will alleviate to a great deal without Apple doing anything about it.

It’s us. Not the batteries.

 

[siriuslux]

How do I turn the dark option for my icons on in an efficient way? as the article suggests: "In iOS 18, you can set a Dark option for your icons that turns them darker when Dark Mode is enabled (or all the time, if you prefer). Dark icons are easier on the eyes when Dark Mode is on, and it might save just a little extra battery life."
I did not even find this option for the photo app.

 

[lartola]

How do I turn the dark option for my icons on in an efficient way? as the article suggests: "In iOS 18, you can set a Dark option for your icons that turns them darker when Dark Mode is enabled (or all the time, if you prefer). Dark icons are easier on the eyes when Dark Mode is on, and it might save just a little extra battery life."
I did not even find this option for the photo app.

1. tap and hold on any empty space on the home screen

2. Tap on ‘edit’ on the top left corner of the screen.

3. Tap on ‘customize’ and then you’ll see a banner on the bottom of the screen with the options for light icons, dark icons, automatic mode and tinted icons.

That’s the only way to access the options to customize the home screen icons.