Your iPhone is a crucial part of your routine. Whether it’s staying in touch with friends or family, navigating traffic jams, or taking cute photos of your pets, you’ll likely use it all day. However, this can get tricky if your battery drops to a low level before you even leave the office. While phone batteries will degrade over time, this does not mean that you should use low power mode just to prevent your phone from dying.
Your iPhone has a few key settings that drain your battery in the background. The good news is that you can turn them off. Instead of seeing your battery percentage drop at the worst possible time, a few simple tweaks will give you hours of extra life.
Before you even think about buying a new phone, check the Battery Health menu (anything above 80% is fine), then turn those three settings off. It’s the easiest way to extend your iPhone’s battery life, right now.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased technical content and lab reviews. Add CNET as your preferred Google source.
Disable Widgets on Your iPhone’s Lock Screen
All the widgets on your lock screen force your apps to run automatically in the background, constantly fetching data to update the information displayed by the widgets, like sports scores or the weather. Since these apps are constantly running in the background because of your widgets, that means they are continually consuming power.
If you want to save a little 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 a different lock screen profile: tap your finger on your existing lock screen, then swipe to choose one that doesn’t have any widgets.
If you just want to remove widgets from your existing lock screen, tap on your lock screen, tap Personalizechoose it Lock screen option, tap the widget area, then tap the “button—“ button on each widget to delete them.
If your battery is already low, it’s best to just switch to a wallpaper without lock screen widgets.
Reduce your iPhone UI movement
Your iPhone’s user interface features fun and stylish animations. There’s the smooth motion of opening and closing apps, and the burst of color that appears when you activate Siri with Apple Intelligence, just to name a few. These visual tricks help bring to life the metal and glass plate in your hand. Unfortunately, they can also reduce your phone’s battery life.
If you want more subtle animations on iOS, you can enable the Reduce Motion setting. To do this, go to Settings > Accessibility > Movement and activate Reduce the movement.
Visual tricks like the parallax effect are fun, but they can affect your battery life.
Turn off keyboard vibration on your iPhone
Surprisingly, the iPhone keyboard 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, this same feature can also affect battery life.
Watch this: So many complaints about iPhone battery, but why?
According to this Apple support page for the keyboard, haptic feedback “could affect your iPhone’s battery life.” No specifics are given on how much battery life the keyboard feature consumes, but if you want to save battery power, it’s best to keep this feature disabled.
Fortunately, it is not enabled by default. If you activated it yourself, go to Settings > Sounds and haptics > Keyboard feedback and deactivate Haptics to disable haptic feedback from your keyboard.
Every time you type, you will feel a slight vibration with each key you press.
For more iOS tips, learn how to more easily access your Control Center and why you might only want to charge your iPhone to 95%.
Watch this: Introducing iOS 26 at WWDC25
