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How To Calibrate iPhone Battery [Expert Recommendations]

We all want our batteries to last a little bit longer instead of reaching for chargers every once in a little while. There are ways to help increase our battery lifespan and this article will explain how to calibrate iPhone battery to extend its lifespan in easy steps.

The calibration of batteries is done essentially to correct battery statistics. In other words, making sure the percentage of the battery displayed fits with the actual charge in the battery. What it does is reset your battery statistics to ensure accuracy in the battery charge display.

People who calibrate their batteries have also claimed that it helps maintain batteries in good condition and keeps the flow of ions in the lithium-ion batteries moving.

We will also be reviewing if calibrating actually helps iPhone batteries and other tips that might help us in maintaining a good strong battery.

Calibrating iPhone Battery In 5 Steps

The first step is to completely drain your battery. This can be done by maybe turning the screen brightness to its highest level while streaming the internet or doing something else that’s battery consuming. The aim is to completely drain your battery. Achieve this in any way you want.

iPhone batteries aren’t completely empty even when the batteries show that they are. To ensure the battery is total without charge, you will have to keep your iPhone at rest to relieve the battery of charge completely. This must be done overnight to ensure that it works properly.

The third step is to plug an original charger, one that has the company advised specs into your iPhone and switch it off. Let it charge uninterruptedly for a lot of hours, 5 hours to be exact. Your iPhone will be off though so you will have to time the charging period yourself to ensure that it is exact.

How To Calibrate iPhone Battery

When the time is up and while the charging cable is still connected to the iPhone, turn on your device. Force restart on your iPhone after it has booted up successfully.

This next step differs within iPhone models. iPhone 8 users will have to press and hold the home and sleep/wake button until the Apple logo appears on their screen.

In the iPhone X and above models, the procedure is slightly different.

Users will have to press the volume button. The volume “up” first and then the volume “down“. After that, then press and hold on the sleep/wake button. You will also have to hold until the Apple logo shows.

When your iPhone turns on completely, disconnect the charger cable from your device. The calibration is done and hopefully, it helps your battery.

When To Calibrate Your iPhone Battery 🤔

There are three suggested time periods that calibration should take place in.

The first one is when you notice your battery percentage draining or accumulating at a weirdly higher frequency than usual.

The second situation is calibrating after major iOS updates. Minor iOS updates might not really require calibration.

The explanation behind calibrating after major iOS updates is that sometimes updates come with added battery-draining features that might imbalance your battery. Calibrating your battery is suggested to counter that effect.

The third condition is just doing it once in a while to ensure your battery stays in good condition. There is no exact timeframe, it will be decided at the users’ discretion.

Conditions Needed For A Successful iPhone Battery Calibration

Before actually calibrating your iPhone battery, there are a few settings or requirements you have to take note of.

These settings will be disabled to ensure that the power drawn from your battery is minimal. After the calibration is done, you definitely can restore the settings you tinkered with back to their original state.

The settings include:

Turning Off Automatic Updates – This is important because you don’t want extra updates right in the middle of calibrating your batteries especially if you’re calibrating because of a major iOS update that happened before.

Tap on the Settings, Tap on the “General” tab, and tap on the “Software Update” then tap on the “Customise Automatic Update” option and disable the “Download iOS updates” and “install iOS updates” option.

How To Calibrate iPhone Battery

Lowering Screen Brightness – This must be lowered totally to ensure minimum power draw from the battery you’re trying to calibrate.

How To Calibrate iPhone Battery [Expert Recommendations]

Tap on the Settings and then tap on the “Display & Brightness” option and lower your Brightness.

How To Calibrate iPhone Battery [Expert Recommendations]

Location Services – This also draws a lot of power. Turn it off to help lessen the load on your battery.

Most of the Time applications like Google Maps, Uber, etc services are using the location services which is required for them to function but if you are not using it make it off or put in the location option to “While Using

How To Calibrate iPhone Battery [Expert Recommendations]

Background Refresh – Turning this off ensures no distractions during the calibration. The suggested idea is that these settings are lowered to make sure the calibration of your iPhone battery works well.

Will Calibration Actually Helps iPhone Batteries 🤔

There was a time when calibrating batteries proved really useful but it was a practice that was used on a different type of battery. Basically, it was practiced on nickel-based batteries. iPhone batteries are lithium-ion based batteries, this means they are different from the batteries used a long time ago.

What this suggests is that the calibration method that worked well for nickel-based batteries and touted by many users and companies has become quite irrelevant and can perhaps work against your lithium-ion based batteries.

To actually understand why it might not work, we will explain how iPhone lithium-ion batteries work, what they require to function well, and see if a calibration will help.

iPhone Lithium-ion batteries

These batteries charge faster, last longer, and generally work better than previous generations of batteries.

The official word about how long an iPhone battery should work excellently before experiencing a decrease is 500 charge cycles. More than a year but less than two years if you’re an average user. After 500 charge cycles, your battery will decrease in capacity by 20%.

These are official figures and sometimes might not totally be exact but it is a timeframe to work within establishing a battery lifespan.

What iPhone batteries Want – iPhone lithium-ion batteries want conservative battery percentages. Extremes like 100% or 0% are damaging to your battery.

When your iPhone battery spends too much time at an extreme battery percentage like 100%, it reduces the total capacity of that battery.

It is so important that lithium-ion batteries avoid extremes that Apple put buffers at both extreme ends of the percentages to ensure your battery never reaches that extreme percentage.

This will only help for a while, if you continue to charge up to those extremes your battery will begin to weaken and your battery capacity will diminish. This can always be avoided by staying within conservative ranges.

Apple advises charging whenever users want and this can help in maintaining a healthy battery. Conservative ranges are 40%-60% with 50% being optimal. The advice is that you don’t wait until your battery becomes full before removing the charger and you don’t allow the battery to become really low before charging either.

The battery will eventually die slowly but it is advisable to not move the process along faster. Keep your battery percentages in conservative ranges and you will probably have a healthy battery at least for 500 charge cycles.

iPhone came with Battery Health statics that you can access with Settings > Battery and tap on the Battery health tab, you are able to view battery health statistics for the last 24 hours and last 10 days.

How To Calibrate iPhone Battery

Here you are also able to find which application is consuming more battery.

How To Calibrate iPhone Battery [Expert Recommendations]

Why Calibrating Your Device Might Be Bad

We just explained how lithium-ion based batteries work and some of the “do not” is letting your battery percentage reach and stay at extreme percentages for a long time and that is exactly what calibrating does.

Calibrating advises charging for a really long period and leaving it at the highest extreme percentage for quite a bit of time. This has already been explained as shortening the capacity of lithium-ion batteries so this practice instead of lengthening batteries as promised does the exact opposite by shortening battery lifespan.

Another risk that calibration brings is the risk of overheating your device by leaving it charging even after getting to 100%.

This practice isn’t totally conversant with keeping your iPhone in a good condition so calibration might not be the best bet for helping your iPhone batteries. Instead, focus on keeping conservative ranges and you’ll be better off as suggested.

16 Tricks to Make Your Phone Battery Last Longer

Risk-Free Tips To Help Maintain A Good Battery Condition

Keep Software Updated – Updates usually come with features that enhance battery life so it is advised to be up to date.

Maintain Your Device At Room Temperatures – While weather conditions may be harsh, we still have to make sure our devices aren’t totally exposed to these conditions to maintain a favorable battery condition and overall good device condition.

Storing Device With A 50% Charge – This is why 50% is the optimal charge percentage. Whenever we want to store our iPhone for a bit of time, it is highly necessary to store the device to ensure the battery stays in good condition in storage.

Lower Power Usage – Do this by lowering screen brightness, reducing notifications, and enabling low power mode when not in use. All of these tips will ensure your battery stays in a good condition at least until age catches up with it and it needs a replacement.

At the time of our research on How To Calibrate iPhone Battery, we found a video about “Why Does My iPhone Battery Die So Fast? An Apple Tech’s 14 iPhone Battery Drain Fixes!” which is worth watching.

Why Does My iPhone Battery Die So Fast? An Apple Tech's 14 iPhone Battery Drain Fixes!
Conclusion

Calibration might have been useful a long time ago but the latest tech updates suggest that it isn’t anymore. Some users still swear by it though and if you feel it is worth the risk, use your discretion.

As suggested, there are other tips that can help maintain your battery in a good condition without the risk that calibration might bring. Did calibration work for you? Use the comment section to tell us if it did.