Give Your iPhone a Boost: Turn Off These 2 iOS Settings for Longer Battery Life [CNET]

Keep your phone running longer by tweaking these two iOS settings.

Keep your phone running longer by tweaking these two iOS settings.

You have to make it through a whole day or longer without a smartphone charger — what’s the first thing you should do? Sure, you can bring a portable charger on your camping expedition or business trip. But first, make sure you’ve done all you can to maximize your phone’s battery life. 

If you’re an iPhone user, there are some settings in iOS 17.5 you can adjust so that your device won’t run out of juice when you need it most. You can also keep an eye on your Battery Health menu: it’ll not only tell you your battery health percentage (80% or higher is considered good), but also show you how many times you’ve cycled your battery and whether or not your battery is “normal.”

Keep those iPhone battery best practices in mind as you get ready for iOS 18, and read on to learn about some less obvious battery-saving tips for iOS 17.

We’ll show you two features in iOS 16 and iOS 17 that both put a strain on your iPhone’s battery to varying degrees and how you can turn them off to help preserve battery life. Here’s what you need to know.

If you want more battery saving tips and tricks, check out how to stop background apps from refreshing and how to replace your iPhone’s battery (cheaper than Apple).

Stop using widgets on your iPhone 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 sports scores or the weather. Because these apps are constantly running in the background due to your widgets, that means they continuously drain power.

If you want to help preserve some battery on iOS 17, 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.

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.

Turn off your iPhone’s keyboard vibration

Surprisingly, the keyboard on the iPhone has 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, the very same feature may also affect battery life.

According to this Apple support page about the keyboard, haptic feedback “might affect the battery life of your iPhone.” No specifics are given as to how much battery life the keyboard feature drains, but if you want to conserve battery, it’s best to keep this feature disabled.

Fortunately, it is not enabled by default. If you’ve enabled it yourself, go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Keyboard Feedback and toggle off Haptic to turn off haptic feedback for your keyboard.

For more tips on iOS, learn how to download the new iOS 17 and how to automatically delete multifactor authentication messages from texts and emails.