These 3 iOS Settings Can Drain Your iPhone Battery

If you have an iPhone with an older battery, you might be frustrated to see the Low Power Mode warning — especially if you’re out of the house and you don’t have a charger. You wouldn’t want your phone to run out of battery before you can contact a ride-hailing service or look for directions to get home.

Luckily, you can adjust some settings in iOS to help prevent your device from running out of juice when you need it most. 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.

If you want more battery saving tips and tricks, check out how to stop background apps from refreshing and how to replace your iPhone’s battery (cheaper than Apple).

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.

How to delete Lock Screen widgets on iOS 16 — If you’re already low on battery, it’s best to just switch to a wallpaper that doesn’t have lock screen widgets.

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.

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.

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.