Stop using your iPhone’s charging limit, it’s probably hurting your battery

Okay, I say. I've seen too many articles about people trying to keep their iPhone batteries charged at 80 percent to extend battery life. I wish it worked this way, but this feature is only meant to help your iPhone reduce the number of charge cycles if it's plugged in all day.

For example, if you work as a delivery driver and need to keep your phone connected to your car all day to use CarPlay, this feature is for you. This is also useful for iPads that will only be used as cash registers or remain plugged in at the table. If you are a regular user who charges the battery at night or when the battery is low, this feature does nothing but wear out the battery faster.

Draining your battery and charging it again is actually worse for your phone than simply trying to keep it charged as long as possible. The real key to longer battery life is fewer charge cycles. The less you do, the longer your phone battery will last. Other factors such as heat and cold may have some impact, but nothing is more important than keeping the battery fully charged.

Below I've included the most interesting battery research video I've seen, which takes a comprehensive look at the effects of charging, wireless charging, heat, and more on smartphone batteries.

They're using iPhone 13 models in this test. I will say that I found that the iPhone 14 and 15, especially the Pro models, sometimes got very hot while charging wirelessly, and I feel like this could lead to worse than average battery life. I will also say that in my use, the iPhone 16 and 17 models solved this problem because they didn't get as hot while charging wirelessly. This is especially impressive since these devices also feature faster wireless charging speeds than the 14 or 15.

If you read any of these history O people living two years with my phones are set to 80 percentage limit, you'll see that it didn't work for them. So unless you need to keep your phone plugged in all the time, don't use the charging limit. If your phone is plugged in too often, the operating system will even notify you that you can take advantage of the charging limit.

Part of this confusion is due to Apple support page. The charging limit section is subtitled: “Extend battery life with Charge Limit.” This is true, but not for everyone, so it's a little misleading. However, you need to disable “Battery Optimization” to apply charging limiting, and the same support page says, “Disabling Charging Optimization may increase battery wear and shorten its lifespan.” However, it is not written in giant letters like the other proposal I linked to.

Ideally, Apple could clarify the support page so that people stop enforcing battery charging restrictions for no reason. I've spent years trying to fix the damage that Android multitasking did to the iPhone. users who think they need to keep closing their appsand I really don't want to spend another five years explaining this new technology myth to people.