Ex-Apple employee warns against charging iPhone to 100%
Bad news: charging your iPhone overnight could be terrible for its battery life.
Featured Image Credit: hitomidocameraroll / TikTok
What's the single worst thing you can do to your phone's battery?
According to experts, it could be constantly charging your iPhone to 100%.
It seems somewhat counterintuitive - after all, all you want to do is plug your phone in overnight and leave it be, so it's ready to go in the morning.
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But former Apple employee Tyler Morgan - who has clocked up 1 million followers on TikTok as @hitomidocameraroll with his handy tech tips - is here to show you a solution.
"Do not charge to 100%," he said in a viral video, which has 1.2 million likes.
"Do not charge it overnight. Charge it to 80. Going out all day? Sure, go to 100 - just don't do it everyday."
It's not like you're going to hover over your phone and unplug it the second it reaches 80% charge, so what's the solution?
Morgan recommends making sure Optimized Battery Charging is switched on, which will be automatically enabled in devices with iOS 13 and later.
'When the feature is enabled, your iPhone will delay charging past 80% in certain situations,' Apple says of Optimized Battery Charging.
'Your iPhone uses on-device machine learning to learn your daily charging routine so that Optimized Battery Charging will only activate when your iPhone predicts it will be connected to a charger for an extended period of time. The algorithm aims to ensure that your iPhone is still fully charged when unplugged.'
If you have an iPhone 15, you can enable an 80% limit - meaning your phone never goes above that percentage charge.
So what about other ways to protect your precious battery life?
Morgan recommends turning off your background activity - you can do this by tapping on General in Settings, and then Background App Refresh. That'll show you how many apps are running in the background (and if you're anything like us, there will be a startling amount) - so you have the power to turn them all off.
"No, you won't get your Instagram post notifications, but you'll save battery," Morgan explained.
Other things you can do include turning off location services for apps you're not using.
You can do that in Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services and switch off anything you think you doesn't need your location to work properly - so obviously, you'd want to keep something like Google Maps switched on, as it definitely needs to know your location to function.
There are some even easier hacks to prolong your battery life, from turning down your brightness to switching off Siri.
If you're in a real bind and desperately need to save battery, switch on the Reduce Motion option in Settings.
Morgan admitted it would "worsen your phone experience" but hey - your battery would thank you.