iPhone Battery Tanking Fast? These 3 Settings Are Probably to Blame

CNET

01-06-2025

If your iPhone feels like it's always on the verge of dying, you're not imagining things. Over time, every phone's battery loses its ability to hold a charge-but that doesn't mean you have to live tethered to a charger. Even if your iPhone is a few years old, there are simple setting tweaks you can make right now that can noticeably extend your battery life. You might be surprised how much longer your phone lasts with just a few smart changes.
Whether you're using your phone to get directions, stream music, or send that one last text, the last thing you want is for it to shut down at the worst possible moment. Instead of scrambling for a charger or switching on Low Power Mode every few hours, take a minute to check your iPhone settings. Turning off a few power-draining features could be the fix your battery desperately needs-and it only takes seconds to do.
You can also keep an eye on your Battery Health menu -- it'll tell you your battery health percentage (80% or higher is considered good), as well as show you how many times you've cycled your battery and whether or not your battery is "normal."
We'll explain three iOS features that put a strain on your iPhone's battery to varying degrees, and show how you can turn them off to help preserve battery life. Here's what you need to know.
Turn off widgets on your iPhone lock screen
All the widgets on your lock screen force your apps to automatically run in the background, constantly fetching data to update the information the widgets display, like sports scores or the weather. Because these apps are constantly running in the background due to your widgets, that means they continuously drain power.
If you want to help preserve some battery on iOS 18, the best thing to do is simply avoid widgets on your lock screen (and home screen). The easiest way to do this is to switch to another lock screen profile: Press your finger down on your existing lock screen and then swipe around to choose one that doesn't have any widgets.
If you want to just remove the widgets from your existing lock screen, press down on your lock screen, hit Customize, choose the Lock Screen option, tap on the widget box and then hit the "—" button on each widget to remove them.
If you're already low on battery, it's best to just switch to a wallpaper that doesn't have lock screen widgets.
Screenshots by Nelson Aguilar/CNET
Reduce the motion of your iPhone UI
Your iPhone user interface has some fun, sleek animations. There's the fluid motion of opening and closing apps, and the burst of color that appears when you activate Siri with Apple Intelligence, just to name a couple. These visual tricks help bring the slab of metal and glass in your hand to life. Unfortunately, they can also reduce your phone's battery life.
If you want subtler animations across iOS, you can enable the Reduce Motion setting. To do this, go to Settings > Accessibility > Motion and toggle on Reduce Motion.
Visual tricks like the parallax effect are fun, but they can affect your battery life.
Screenshots by Jason Chun/CNET
Switch off your iPhone's keyboard vibration
Surprisingly, the keyboard on the iPhone has never had the ability to vibrate as you type, an addition called "haptic feedback" that was added to iPhones with iOS 16. Instead of just hearing click-clack sounds, haptic feedback gives each key a vibration, providing a more immersive experience as you type. According to Apple, the very same feature may also affect battery life.
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According to this Apple support page about the keyboard, haptic feedback "might affect the battery life of your iPhone." No specifics are given as to how much battery life the keyboard feature drains, but if you want to conserve battery, it's best to keep this feature disabled.
Fortunately, it is not enabled by default. If you've enabled it yourself, go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Keyboard Feedback and toggle off Haptic to turn off haptic feedback for your keyboard.
Every single time you type, you'll feel a slight vibration for each key you hit.
Screenshots by Nelson Aguilar/CNET
For more tips on iOS, learn how to download iOS 18 and how to automatically delete multifactor authentication messages from texts and emails.