If your iPhone is 18 months old or more and you’ve noticed the battery draining faster than usual, here’s a quick tip: check your battery health!

Your iPhone Battery Health

If you go to Settings → Battery → Battery Health & Charging you can see your battery’s current maximum capacity (relative to when the battery was brand new).

The battery capacity level doesn’t just measure how “full” your battery can get, but it is also a measure of the potential performance that the battery can deliver. A lowered level of battery performance can cause slower app launches, lower max brightness, laggy or choppy games or video apps, slower wireless data speed, as well as needing to charge more often.**

If your battery capacity is below 80%, you can take your phone into an Apple Store and get the battery replaced with a brand new one – which will not only let your phone last longer between charges, but it can also improve everyday performance.

Replacing a Worn-Out Battery

If your phone’s out of warranty, however, the battery replacement won’t be free – it costs about $100 (at least where I live). While you can likely find places to replace your battery for less than that (you can buy an iPhone battery on Amazon for about $20), I think taking it to the Apple Store is the best move, and that this service is one of the benefits of being an iPhone user.

There are two big reasons why I’m fine paying the “Apple Tax” in this situation:

• Consistency – Since the employees are trained by Apple and only deal with a small number of different phone models, they have a greater chance of being competent at taking the phone apart and putting it back together with a minimum of issues. Contrast this to the vast number of Android makers and phone models, and how differently those phones go together and come apart. If you don’t have popular Samsung phone, there’s a good chance that your phone may be the first time a repair shop employee has ever taken apart that phone model.
• Part Quality – You can buy batteries from a ton of online sellers for a wide variety of price points. But if you’ve ever seen a video of an expanding battery bursting, you know that you don’t want to mess around with a poorly-made battery. Especially when it spends so much time going through charging cycles and temperature extremes in close proximity to your body (in a pocket or bag). I trust Apple to have some minimum level of battery quality and safety over a random Amazon retailer.

If you’ve got an older iPhone that doesn’t have the battery life or performance that it had when it was new, take a look at your battery status and maybe take your phone in for a battery replacement and get another couple of years worth of life out of it.

A Couple More Battery-Related Features

And to get the most life out of your battery, make sure to turn on “Optimized Battery Charging”. This will let the OS try and only charge up to 100% in the short time before you take your phone off the charger. Being at 100% for long times is actually stressful to batteries, and so letting the battery “rest” at 80% overnight (or anytime the phone will be on a charger for an extended period) can help preserve battery life long-term.

Another battery-related feature to be aware of is iOS’s “Low Power Mode”. You can enable this under the Battery menu in System Settings and while it will impact the phone’s performance, it can also help your phone last longer between charges by reducing background processes and lowering the phone’s maximum performance. This is useful if you need to stretch your time between charges and you don’t have time to get your phone’s battery replaced.

**Battery issues was one of the biggest reasons why I soured on Android several years ago. You can read more information on this blog post, but the short version is that I had a phone with a battery in such poor condition that even opening apps would sometimes cause the phone to shut off. Both the phone maker (Huawei) and Google tried to blame the other company for the issue, and neither offered any recourse other than “buy a new phone”. While I could have gotten a battery replacement at a 3rd party store, I was so fed up with Google’s lack of support for their own product (Nexus 6P) that I just ditched Android completely.