Making your phone battery last all day can be tough, especially if you don’t know exactly what’s eating away at it. With the recent release of iOS 16, some users have noticed their iPhone battery life decreasing faster than usual. If you’re one of the many dealing with your battery running out quicker, then changing these settings may help you regain some of that battery life. Here’s what you need to know.
How to fix iOS 16 battery life problems
iOS 16 brings a lot of great features to Apple’s iPhone lineup, but it also appears to bring a few problems of its own, too. One of the biggest issues that users have noticed is less battery life. Balancing how long your battery life lasts with the way you use your phone can be tricky, but it isn’t impossible. While a lot of the work comes down to how optimized the operating system is, you can also change up important settings in the phone itself to pull some extra juice out of it.
1. Remove widgets from your 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 sport’s scores or the weather. And because these apps are constantly running in the background due to your widgets, that means they continuously drain battery.
If you want to help preserve some battery on iOS 16, 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.
However, 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.
2. Keep haptic keyboard feedback turned off
Surprisingly, the keyboard on the iPhone has never had the ability to vibrate as you type, an addition that was recently made on iOS 16, known as haptic feedback. Instead of just hearing click-clack sounds, haptic feedback gives each key a vibration, providing a more immersive experience as you type. However, according to Apple, the very same feature may also affect battery life.
According to Apple, haptic feedback "might affect the battery life of your iPhone." No specifics are given as to how much battery life the keyboard feature does drain, but if you want to conserve battery, it’s best to keep this feature disabled.
Fortunately, it is not on by default. If you’ve enabled it in yourself, go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Keyboard Feedback and toggle off Haptic to turn off haptic feedback for your keyboard.
3. Turn off unneeded location services
Another big battery drain on iOS 16 is location services. While you’ll no doubt want to let certain apps track your location, not every app needs to know where you’ve been. You can head to Settings, Privacy & Security, and then Location Services to see a full list of all the apps that have used your location recently. We recommend changing to While Using or Disabled if you don’t want an app tracking you constantly.
You can also select System Services from this menu to pull up a list of all the system-based applications that might be tracking your location. This includes things like Find My iPhone, HomeKit, and Location-Based Alerts. You can determine which services are the most essential by checking the color of the arrow next to them. A solid purple arrow means that the app has recently used your location. A hollow purple arrow indicates that it may use your location under certain conditions—like entering or leaving an area. Finally, a gray arrow means that the item has used your location in the last 24 hours. If the service doesn’t have an arrow, and you don’t use it much, you can disable it to regain some battery life.
4. Change app tracking settings
One of the biggest iOS 16 battery drainer is the ability to determine which apps can track your data use and location. By default this feature is enabled, allowing you to determine whether you want to allow an app to track you or ask it not to track you. If you want to save a little battery life, you can disable this option outright.
Open the Settings app on your phone, head down to Privacy & Security, and then open the Tracking options. Next, look for the settings called “Allow apps to request to track” and toggle it off. This will cause all apps to be automatically denied and disable the notification.
5. Tweak how often background apps refresh
Another battery heavy feature in iOS 16 is its automatic background refresh function. When enabled, it will refresh applications like Gmail, Twitter, and more in the background, even if you aren’t using them. This can be used to ensure you have the most up-to-date notifications from those apps, but often apps that don’t need refreshing will have it turned on.
You can disable background app refresh on apps that aren’t needed by opening Settings, General, and then Background App Refresh. You’ll want to leave it on for some apps, but for others, you can disable it to help save your battery juice.