Paul Morris·

How To Check iPhone Battery Health To Determine A Replacement For Speed Boost And Greater Battery Life

If you have been reading the news about Apple artificially limiting performance on older iPhones based on battery wear and tear with interest, and are wondering how close your device is to hitting those triggers, then there is an app for that.

Battery Life, free-of-charge from the App Store, will help you keep tabs on your battery’s raw data and the level of wear it has suffered since you first took ownership of the device.

Using the app will then allow you to assess your options and forge a route forward that’s best for you. Apple recently shared the fact that it uses code built into the iOS codebase from iOS 10.2.1 up to determine the performance and state of the iPhone 6, SE, 6s and 7’s (on iOS 11.2 and above) internal battery. This may seem like an underhand and shady trick from the world’s richest company but it does this as a prevention method that allows it to limit the performance of the device based on battery health and capability in order to prevent the device from acting sporadically and randomly shutting down due to battery health issues.

As an iPhone user, it can be extremely confusing as you really have no idea what’s going on under-the-hood. You plug your device in each night, you wake up in the morning and it looks to be 100% charged. The only real sign of an issue comes with performance levels drop and anger levels rise as you subscribe to some conspiracy theory that Apple’s hardware performs worse when a new iPhone is about to be launched.

Thankfully, the free-to-download Battery Life app gives you a decent insight into what’s actually happening by letting you know the charge status of the battery, the battery capacity and a percentage of its original capacity, and, perhaps more importantly, the wear level of the battery which gives advice on when to replace the battery.

Of course, once you get that information, it’s up to you what you do with it. You can persevere in the new-found knowledge that if your battery wear level is high then Apple is likely going to trigger something in iOS to restrict performance levels of that device. You could, of course, take the recommendations of the app and think about having the battery replaced by Apple which costs around the $79 mark. You can also of course get a cheaper battery yourself for $25 and do a DIY replacement. We have cheaper battery options for various different iPhone models linked here should you choose to go with this option:

Or, you could always take the opportunity to grab the latest iPhone model on the market. The important part here is that you will have all of the information that you need to make your decision.

(Download: Battery Life for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple Watch from the App Store)

You may also like to check out:

You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the Web.