Battery Health & Usage

In this lesson for What’s New in iOS 12 on the iPhone, we look at how we can see how our battery is doing and what apps are using the battery on an iPhone.

Accessing Battery Health and Usage
To view your battery usage on your iPhone, you need to open the Settings app. Scroll down until you see Battery. When you tap on Battery, you can check the health of your battery as well as see which apps are using most of your battery.

Low Power Mode
This is nothing new in iOS 12, but it is worth mentioning. When you are running low on power or you anticipate that you may run low, I recommend turning on Low Power Mode as opposed to force-quitting apps. Low Power Mode, reduces various operations on the iPhone, but in my guess is you won’t even notice, but by doing this, it will dramatically prolong your battery life.

Battery Health
With Battery Health, you can see what the health of your battery is. If you have a battery in poor health, you can decide if you want to replace it.

Peak Performance Capability
With this setting, you can see if your iPhone supports peak performance. What is Peak Performance? When you are using your iPhone and it is performing a number of tasks or heavy calculations, it may go into Peak Performance. You may notice it is in this mode by the battery getting warm. Well if your iPhone does not have a healthy battery, when your iPhone goes into peak performance, it may shut down. To Prevent this, Apple will slow down your iPhone. If you’d rather have a faster iPhone, with a shorter battery life because the battery isn’t healthy, you can turn Peak Performance on and override the slower performance. When you do turn this on, your iPhone may shut down prematurely.

Battery Performance
You can see how your battery has performed in the last 24 hours, or in the last few days. You can see what the last charge level was when it was last charged, and then the battery level by time in a chart. You can also see the activity of the battery by time. Tap on the chart to narrow down a specific time. This can come in helpful if you are trying to diagnose what is taking your battery on your iPhone at a specific time, tap on the time to see what apps were using your battery.

Screen On and Screen Off
You can also see how long your screen has been on as a total for the time selected above (last 24 hours or longer). You’ll also see the screen time off.

Battery Usage by App
Towards the bottom of the Battery settings is a list of apps that have been using your battery. You can see the percentage of battery each app has taken as well as how much background activity they’ve used.

Battery Usage by Activity
You can also see the battery usage by activity by tapping on Show Activity. With this view, you can see how much time each app has been used including background activity.

See this lesson in Action
If you want to see this lesson in action, I show you how this all works in the video above.