It’s 2026, and if you’re constantly turning to ‘Low Power Mode’ to survive the commute, you might as well be carrying a rock around with you. While it’s true that lithium-ion batteries naturally degrade over time, most people suck their “juice” prematurely by leaving behind high-end features they don’t even need.
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 watching your battery percentage plummet at the worst possible time, a few simple adjustments will give you hours of extra life.
Before you even think about buying a new phone, check the Battery Status menu (anything above 80% is fair) and then disable these three settings. It’s the easiest way to make your iPhone’s battery last longer, and it’s starting right now.
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Disable widgets on your iPhone’s lock screen
All the widgets on your lock screen allow your apps to automatically run in the background, continuously retrieving data to update the information the widgets display, such as sports scores or the weather. Since these apps are constantly running in the background because of your widgets, it means they are constantly consuming power.
If you want to help save iOS 18 battery life, the best thing you can 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: press your finger on your existing lock screen, then swipe around to choose one that doesn’t have widgets.
If you just want to remove the widgets from your existing lock screen, press on your lock screen and press Adjustchoose the Lock screen option, tap the widget box and then click the “—“ knob on each widget to delete them.
If the battery is already low, it is best to switch to a wallpaper without lock screen widgets.
Reduce the motion of your iPhone user interface
Your iPhone’s user interface has some nice, 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, to name a few. These visual tricks help bring the sheet of metal and glass in your hand to life. Unfortunately, they can also shorten 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 Institutions > Accessibility > Movement and switch on Reduce movement.
Visual tricks like the parallax effect are fun, but they can affect battery life.
Turn off your iPhone’s keyboard vibration
Surprisingly, the keyboard on the iPhone has never had the option 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, creating a more immersive experience as you type. According to Apple, the exact same feature can also affect battery life.
According to this Apple support page about the keyboard, haptic feedback “can affect your iPhone’s battery life.” No details are given about the battery life of the keyboard feature, but if you want to save battery life, it’s best to keep this feature turned off.
Fortunately, this is not enabled by default. If you enabled it yourself, go to Institutions > Sounds and haptics > Keyboard feedback and switch off Haptic to disable haptic feedback for your keyboard.
Every time you type, you will feel a slight vibration with each key you press.
For more iOS tips, learn how to access your Control Center more easily and why you might only want to charge your iPhone to 95%.
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