Photo: Kicking Studio (Shutterstock)
Apple has come under fire in the past for a myriad of battery issues, and frankly, there are few modern day inconveniences more annoying than feeling like you can’t use your phone for more than a few minutes without plugging it in to charge to have to. Therefore, it is helpful to know where your iPhone battery stands in terms of capacity and performance.
According to Apple, the lithium-ion batteries in your devices are designed to work at up to 80% capacity through around 500 complete charging cycles. As the battery runs low, you will have fewer hours of operation before you have to juicing it again. Batteries naturally degrade over time, and they certainly won’t work at 100% for long (and possibly never after you’ve used your device).
We got covered How to check your iPhone’s battery life, that is easy to see in Settings> Battery> Battery Health. This shows you the current capacity of your battery compared to when it was new and gives you options to maximize battery performance.
However, you might also be interested in how often you’ve charged your phone as this also gives a sense of how long your battery will last. If you’ve far exceeded 500 full charges, slower performance may make more sense. There is an easy way to do this, which you can also find in your device settings (h / t ZDNet).
Here’s how to view your iPhone’s charging history
- Go to Settings> Privacy> Analytics and Improvements.
- Switch Share the iPhone analysis (or Share iPhone and Watch analytics if you have an Apple Watch). This should be on by default, but if it isn’t, you will have to wait a few days for the data to compile before proceeding with the next steps.
- Tap Analytics data and scroll to entries that start with “log-aggregated” and select the latest available date.
- From here you search a code wall for “Battery cycle number”- 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 search through. The number below this entry tells you how many charging cycles your battery has already completed.
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Screenshot: Emily Long
Note that a value above 500 does not mean that your battery is dead and needs to be replaced. In fact, my log shows 517 full charge cycles and my maximum capacity is still 88%.
It’s also useful to know that one charge cycle won’t take your battery from zero to 100 all at once, so you don’t have to let your battery die and then fully charge it. ON The charging cycle is counted when 100% of your capacity is discharged, even if you juice it in between.
