Dave Johnson

Dave Johnson is the editor-in-chief of iPhoneArena. He covers how-to guides, and troubleshooting instructions for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.

How to Calibrate iPhone Battery: Step-by-Step

By Dave Johnson March 27, 2026

Here’s how to calibrate your iPhone battery and why it’s worth doing every so often. The benefits could surprise you!

Poor battery life is a common complaint among smartphone owners. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an iPhone or Android user; if you use your phone a lot during the day, the battery will be lucky to make it to sundown.

However, did you know that something as simple as calibrating your iPhone battery can help? Let’s take a closer look at how to calibrate an iPhone battery and why calibration is important. Once you do this, your iPhone can last longer and be ready when you need it.

Why You Should Calibrate Your iPhone Battery

Calibrating your iPhone’s battery (also referred to as resetting an iPhone’s battery) is a surprisingly important part of iPhone maintenance. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize its benefits, and even fewer take the time to perform the necessary steps.

Without a correctly calibrated battery, you’re likely to experience inaccurate and erratic battery percentage readings, quicker battery drain, and a shorter total lifespan for your battery. If your iPhone shuts down unexpectedly when your battery life percentage hits single digits, poor calibration is almost certainly to blame.

Many factors can cause a battery to become incorrectly calibrated. Software updates, background app refresh, new features, and even plain old day-to-day use can all cause discrepancies. And even if you haven’t noticed an incorrect calibration, performing the steps below will ensure all the ions in the battery are flowing, thus improving the battery’s peak performance.

While you shouldn’t need to calibrate regularly, it’s worth a try if you’ve had battery issues that other steps didn’t resolve.

If you do want to set a schedule, once every two to three months is a reasonable cadence for most people. You can also try it after a major iOS update if you notice your battery percentage behaving strangely — jumping from 40% to 15% in a matter of minutes, for instance, or dying at 20% when it used to last well into single digits.

One thing worth knowing: if you have an iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, or iPhone 11 Pro Max running iOS 14.5 or later, Apple built in an automatic recalibration system for the battery health reporting on those specific models. You can check its status by going to Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging, where you’ll see a message if recalibration is still in progress. That automatic process can take a few weeks and runs during normal charge cycles, so there’s no need to do a manual calibration while it’s active.

Check Your Battery Health First

Go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging (on iPhone 14 or earlier) or Settings > Battery > Battery Health (on iPhone 15 or later) and look at the Maximum Capacity percentage. This number tells you how much charge your battery can hold compared to when it was brand new.

If that number is at or below 80%, calibration won’t do much for you — your battery has physically degraded to the point where it can’t hold the charge it once did, and no amount of drain-and-recharge cycling is going to fix that. Apple considers 80% the threshold where a battery should be serviced, and you’ll often see a “Service” message appear at that point. On iPhone 15 and later, you can also see your battery’s cycle count right on that same screen, which gives you a clearer picture of how hard the battery has been used. If you’re well above 80%, though, a calibration can absolutely help get the software’s reading back in sync with the battery’s actual capacity, and that’s when the steps below are worth your time.

Preparing to Calibrate Your iPhone Battery

Before starting the calibration process, you should take a few steps in preparation. They all revolve around disabling features and services, so as few tasks as possible draw power.

This will help lead to an accurate reading later in the process. After you’ve reset the battery, you can re-enable all of these options. It’s also worth ensuring you haven’t accidentally enabled Low Power Mode by going to Settings > Battery.

Disable Location Services

To disable location services on your iPhone, follow these steps:

Open the Settings app on your iPhone.
Scroll down and tap on Privacy & Security.
Tap Location Services at the top.
Now, toggle off Location Services.

Remember, you can use Location Services to track a lost iPhone, so make sure you don’t forget to re-enable this after you’re done calibrating.

Disable Background Refresh

Follow the instructions below to turn off the background app refresh feature on your iPhone:

Open the Settings app and tap General.
Tap Background App Refresh.
Tap on Background App Refresh a second time.
Choose the Off option.

Lower Your Screen Brightness

Here’s how to lower the screen brightness on an iPhone:

Open the Settings app.
Scroll down and select Display & Brightness.
Drag the Brightness slider all the way to the left.

Turn Off Automatic App Updates

Finally, to turn off automatic updates, follow these steps:

Open the Settings app.
Scroll down and tap on Apps.
Tap on App Store.
Under Automatic Downloads, toggle off App Updates.

Disable Optimized Battery Charging or Charge Limit

Go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging (iPhone 14 or earlier) or Settings > Battery > Charging (iPhone 15 or later) and temporarily disable your charging optimization. If you’re on an iPhone 15 or later, set the charge limit to 100% and turn off Optimized Battery Charging. If you’re on an iPhone 14 or earlier, toggle off Optimized Battery Charging.

This matters because Optimized Battery Charging is designed to pause at 80% and finish later based on your daily routine — which is great for everyday use, but it fights against what you’re trying to accomplish here. You need a full, uninterrupted charge from 0% to a true 100%, and that feature will get in the way. On iPhone 15 and later, if you’ve set a charge limit (say 80% or 85%), that will also prevent the battery from reaching a full charge during calibration. Set it to 100% for now. You can turn it back on when you’re done — and you should, because these features genuinely help your battery last longer over months and years of use.

How to Calibrate Your iPhone Battery

Now, you’re ready to calibrate the battery on your iPhone. Be warned that it takes quite a bit of patience; you’ll need to wait around for a couple of complete charge and drain cycles to finish.

Luckily, you don’t need any third-party tools or apps. Anything you see in the App Store promising to reset your iPhone’s battery is, at best, unnecessary and, at worst, a scam. iPhone battery calibration is easy to perform without extra help.

Step 1: Drain Your iPhone’s Battery

The first step is to completely drain your iPhone battery. You can do so during normal usage. If you want to speed up the process, you can play a long video on YouTube with the volume turned up to the maximum level.

Try to keep your iPhone in a room-temperature environment while you’re draining it. Running the battery down while the phone is sitting in direct sunlight, on a car dashboard, or on a wireless charger that generates heat can stress the battery in ways that go beyond what calibration is meant to do.

Step 2: Wait Three Hours

You may have noticed that your iPhone will automatically shut down even if the battery has a small percentage left. This process is by design; it gives the device a chance to save the current state of your apps so you don’t lose data.

It’s important to let the last embers of the battery life die away. The only way to do this is to wait. The longer you wait, the better, but you should wait at least three hours. If you have time, letting it sit overnight is preferable.

If you’re worried about damaging the battery by letting it sit dead for hours, there’s a built-in safeguard worth knowing about. When your iPhone shuts down at “0%,” it isn’t actually at zero — Apple reserves a small buffer of charge specifically to protect the battery from going completely flat, which is something lithium-ion batteries really don’t tolerate well. That reserve is there so the phone can sit powered off for a while without any real harm. Three to five hours is fine. Leaving it off for days or weeks, on the other hand, is not something you want to do.

Step 3: Charge Your iPhone

Now, it’s time to refill the battery. To ensure optimal performance, make sure you follow these tips:

Use a wall socket rather than a computer to charge.
Ideally, use an official Apple charger. At the very least, make sure you use a high-quality USB-C cable and not a cheap knockoff.
Continue to charge for a couple of hours even after your phone shows the battery as 100 percent full. You need to ensure you squeeze in every drop of power to ensure the calibration works correctly.

Try not to use your iPhone at all while it’s charging during this step. Scrolling through apps or answering messages creates small charge-and-discharge micro-cycles that can throw off the reading you’re trying to establish. Plug it in, walk away, and let it do its thing.

Step 4: Drain Your iPhone

Now, you need to repeat the whole process a second time. It’s the same drill as before: completely drain the power out of your device. Either use it as you normally would or play videos on loop to move it along faster.

Step 5: Wait Another Three Hours

It’s getting repetitive by now but stick with it. Once again, you need to ensure you drain that last bit of battery power from your iPhone. Like before, the longer you can leave it, the better.

Step 6: Charge Your iPhone Again

To finish the process, you need to recharge your device. Follow the same guidelines as earlier, ensuring you let your phone continue charging for a couple of hours even after it’s full.

Finally, you need to re-enable the services and functions you disabled earlier. Turn Location Services, Background Refresh, and Automatic Updates back on and turn the screen brightness back up.

Don’t forget to turn Optimized Battery Charging (or your preferred charge limit) back on in Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging (iPhone 14 or earlier) or Settings > Battery > Charging (iPhone 15 or later). This is easy to overlook, and leaving it off means your battery will charge to 100% every single time, which over weeks and months adds unnecessary wear.

Once everything is re-enabled, do a quick restart of your iPhone to help the system fully register the new calibration data. On all iPhones running the current iOS — including iPhone SE models with a Home button — press and quickly release the Volume Up button, then press and quickly release Volume Down, then press and hold the Side button until you see the Apple logo.

And that’s it. Now, your iPhone battery has been recalibrated.

Other Battery-Saving iPhone Tips

Now that your battery is freshly calibrated, turn on Optimized Battery Charging if you haven’t already. Go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging (iPhone 14 or earlier) or Settings > Battery > Charging (iPhone 15 or later) and make sure it’s enabled. This feature learns your daily routine and delays charging past 80% until right before you typically pick up your phone — it’s one of the best things Apple has done for long-term battery health, and it works without you having to think about it. On iPhone 15 or later, you can also set a specific charge limit anywhere from 80% to 100% in 5% increments if you want even tighter control.

If recalibration hasn’t fixed your iPhone battery problems, it might be time to spend some money on a new battery. You can replace the battery yourself through Apple’s Self Service Repair program, which gives you access to genuine Apple parts, tools, and step-by-step manuals. Using genuine parts won’t void your warranty, though any damage you cause during the repair isn’t covered by Apple.

Therefore, it’s always better to make an Apple Store appointment at a Genius Bar and get it replaced with professional help. A new battery and the required labor aren’t as expensive as you might think.

If you’re still seeing strange battery behavior after calibrating and your Maximum Capacity is above 80%, the issue might be software-related rather than battery-related. A rogue app running in the background, a buggy iOS update, or even a corrupted system file can drain battery life in ways that look like a hardware problem but aren’t. Go to Settings > Battery and scroll down to check which apps have been using the most power over the previous day — you can also tap View All Battery Usage and select individual days going back about a week — sometimes the culprit is obvious once you look. If nothing stands out, contacting Apple Support directly (through the Support app or apple.com/support) is worth doing before you commit to a battery replacement, since they can run remote diagnostics that check things you can’t see on your own.

How to Set an iPhone Camera Timer (Quick Guide)

By Dave Johnson March 19, 2026

You can set a timer on your iPhone camera to take a picture without physically clicking the shutter.

Summary

You can set a timer on your iPhone camera to give yourself time to get in the shot.
You can set the timer to take a photo after three seconds, 5 seconds, or 10 seconds.
The camera will take a series of 10 burst photos – you can choose the ones to keep or delete.

We’ve all been there — there’s nobody around to take a picture of your group of friends at a special location or event. Fortunately, Apple has developed a solution to this with a simple feature on the iPhone.

The built-in self timer on your iPhone camera allows you to take photos without physically clicking the button. You can set a long or short countdown timer and your camera will snap 10 burst photos to give you the perfect shot.

Here’s how to set picture timer on iPhone.

How to Set Timer on iPhone Camera

Open the Camera app on your iPhone.
Position your iPhone where you’d like the photo to be taken.
Tap the Camera Controls button or swipe up from the camera modes at the bottom of the screen.
Tap Timer, then tap 3s, 5s, or 10s.
Tap the Shutter button to start the timer and get in the frame. If you want to stop the timer at any point, tap the Camera Controls button, tap Timer, then tap Off.
Once the photo has been taken, open the Photos app.
Tap the photo taken with the self timer to select it.
Tap Burst (10) at the top right – you will be shown 10 different burst images taken using the self timer.
Scroll through the images, and select the ones you want to keep by tapping on them. If you’d like to keep all of them, you can skip this step.
Tap Done in the upper right-hand corner.
If you’d like to keep only the photos you selected, tap Keep Only # Favorites in the pop-up – the ‌‌# is the number of photos you selected. Otherwise, tap Keep Everything.

Making the Most of Your iPhone Photo Timer

Once you know how to set a timer on your iPhone camera, you can use it as an iPhone selfie timer, for outdoor landscapes, group photos, and more. Here are a few quick iPhone camera tips to get the best photos possible with your iPhone photo timer. Use these iPhone camera tricks to help you capture amazing images and make the most of the delayed photo timer on your iPhone!

The iPhone’s flashlight will flash each second, and you can use that to time your photo.
You can turn off burst for timed photos by tapping the Live Photo button at the top and then take the picture.
If you’re using an iPhone tripod, position it at about eye level. This will usually give you the best results with the selfie timer on an iPhone, or for timed group photos. Of course, you can always mix it up if you’re feeling creative!
For outdoor photos, make sure the sun is off to one side or behind the camera. This will help you avoid glare when you’re setting up your time-delayed photo.
Use a tripod and the iPhone selfie-timer when taking night photos. This can benefit all your photos, but is especially useful for capturing crisp nighttime images. The shutter stays open longer in low-light situations, so using the iPhone camera timer can reduce the shaking and blurriness caused by pressing the shutter button.

Why You NEED an Apple Watch in 2026!

By Dave Johnson March 24, 2026

With the Apple Watch Ultra 3, Apple Watch Series 11, and Apple Watch SE 3, Apple has created its most expansive Apple Watch lineup ever. And with this new lineup, Apple now has a watch for almost anyone.

With a mature platform packed with a ton of features, these devices have never been more capable and more accessible. If you own an iPhone and aren’t wearing an Apple Watch yet, you really should be.

Here are the reasons why you need an Apple Watch in 2026.

Fitness: The main reason I wear an Apple Watch every day

One of the first reasons why you need to be wearing an Apple Watch is for fitness. Actually, that is my number one reason for strapping the Apple Watch onto my wrist every single day and why I won’t leave the house without it.

The Apple Watch activity rings are key to helping me maintain a healthy lifestyle. I’m able to see how many active calories I burn throughout the day. I’m always checking my ring progress, and if I see that my red Move ring is behind, or if I get an alert that I’ve been sitting for too long, I know it’s time to get up for a quick walk or remind myself that I need to put in time at the gym later in the day if I’ve been sedentary for most of the morning.

When I first bought my original Apple Watch back in 2015, I was a lot heavier—like a lot. I weighed in at around 280 pounds. The photo that I took nine months after getting my first Apple Watch, I was touting how much the Apple Watch helped improve my health by losing 60 pounds, down to 220 pounds. I still look at that old photo, pretty amazed that I just kept it going years later, and how much more I’ve progressed since then.

Not only did I lose more weight—my best goal is around losing 100 pounds in total—but I also improved my overall cardiovascular health. First, by taking it easy, just making sure I was hitting everyday step counts of around 10,000 per day and keeping my activity rings full. The most basic exercises can really go a long way, and I lost most of my initial weight just by walking and being a little bit more mindful of my activity.

From there, I learned new ways to stay healthy, from running something as small as one mile to increasing that to a 5K, and eventually even a 10K. The Apple Watch’s activity zones have been really helpful in those longer runs, letting me know how long I kept my heart rate in those higher zones—not only for more endurance but also to focus on fat loss. It also lets me know when it might be a good idea to scale back, take a break, and cool down.

Workout Buddy: my AI coach on my wrist

What’s new now is Apple’s Workout Buddy, which is basically an AI coach that lives on your wrist. It looks at your workout history, current pace, heart rate, and your Activity rings and talks to you during workouts.

At the start of a run, it might say something like, “You’re about 20 minutes away from closing your Exercise ring. This week you’ve already run 6 miles—let’s beat that.” During the workout, it gives you little nudges or encouragement, and afterward, it recaps how you did versus your past workouts. It sounds small, but hearing that kind of feedback mid-workout is surprisingly motivating. It’s like closing your rings, but smarter and more personal.

Keeping the exercise ring full, and even going beyond that 30-minute recommendation, has made me feel healthier, raised my energy levels, and let me master the StairMaster. If you can do one hour on the StairMaster at level 10 or above, my hat is off to you because this, to me, is an exercise that relies as much on willpower as it does on physical endurance.

If you have a pair of AirPods or other Bluetooth headphones, the Apple Watch is the only thing you need to bring with you on your run or to the gym. You can listen to music, podcasts, or audiobooks directly on the watch with plenty of built‑in storage, or even stream music and podcasts directly on your watch if you’re on Wi‑Fi or have a cellular Apple Watch.

If you run outside, just taking the Apple Watch with a pair of AirPods is a magical experience. It’s so much easier to focus on your form without a big iPhone bouncing around in your pocket. Pro Max users know where I’m coming from.

The Apple Watch has grown with me this entire way—from walking to running my first mile to running a 6K. Now, I’ve actually been weight training for the past few months. In each small step on this fitness journey, my Apple Watch has been an invaluable tool, helping me keep weight off and, more importantly, improving my overall health.

Health: the features you hope you never need, but absolutely want

Speaking of health, it’s probably the second reason why I continue to wear an Apple Watch every single day. Even the most basic Apple Watch comes with life‑saving features like heart rate monitoring, which can alert you to abnormally high or low heart rates.

It also supports features like fall detection, which isn’t just for the elderly. It’s helped younger people get help if they needed emergency services after a hard fall. It can automatically dial emergency services even if you aren’t responsive. That really is a potential life‑saving feature, so please don’t dismiss it.

The Apple Watch SE and above also support car crash detection. You’ve probably seen or heard stories about people getting emergency help because their watch detected a crash and called for help when they couldn’t.

An Apple Watch also helps you manage your health in other ways, letting you track your sleep with actual useful data metrics, like how long you were awake in bed, your total deep sleep, your REM sleep, and your core sleep. Newer software now gives you a simple sleep score too, so even if you don’t obsess over every graph, you can glance at a single number to understand how you slept.

ECG, temperature, blood oxygen, and now blood pressure patterns

The Apple Watch SE is a great start, providing the health features that will help the most users overall. But beyond that, there’s the Series 11 and Apple Watch Ultra 3, which are packed with more health features like taking an electrocardiogram right on your wrist. This can alert you to possible atrial fibrillation, which is basically an irregular heartbeat that may require medical attention.

It can also measure blood oxygen levels, and the body temperature sensor on the newer models can help women track their cycles and ovulation, and gives everyone better insights into illness and recovery trends over time.

One of the biggest new health features is hypertension notifications. The newer watches can now look for patterns that suggest high blood pressure over time and notify you if something looks off. It’s not meant to replace a blood pressure cuff, but it’s another layer of “hey, you should maybe get this checked” that’s just running in the background while you live your life. For something as serious as hypertension, that kind of early nudge can really matter.

These are a growing list of health features, and they can be very important depending on the user. I feel like almost anyone can find a feature I mentioned above that they might want monitored. Even something as simple as fall detection, again, could prove to be life‑saving.

Of course, the Apple Watch isn’t just for health and fitness. Let’s be honest: even though these health features are amazing and might help you out, they’re features we hope we never have to use. You probably don’t want to buy an Apple Watch solely with that in mind—for a feature you possibly won’t ever have to use, and hopefully won’t have to use.

Thankfully, there are a ton of other great reasons why you need an Apple Watch.

Everyday life: notifications, calls, and less phone anxiety

One of the most helpful features of an Apple Watch is getting notifications, alerts, messages, and phone calls that are always easily within reach on your wrist.

It’s hard for me to remember a time dealing with constant notifications before the Apple Watch or the anxiety of waiting for an important phone call or message, constantly having my phone glued to my hand. The Apple Watch surfaces those important notifications with a gentle tap on your wrist, letting you see something as trivial as when a new podcast episode is released, or letting you get notifications from certain accounts or apps the second something happens.

It also helps with actual life upgrades, like preorders. For example, if you want to know the secret to scoring any rare pre‑order on a gaming device, you follow the right accounts, enable notifications, have an Apple Watch, and as soon as, say, the PlayStation 5 (or the next hot console) is ready to go up on Amazon when there’s a listing, you get the notification, and you’re able to buy it right away. That’s how I secured multiple preorders back when stock was impossible.

I also like seeing messages on my watch, letting me know if there’s an urgent one I need to reply to. If you do need to reply, you can even answer it on your watch using the scribble keyboard or dictation. If you have a newer Apple Watch like the Series 11 or an Apple Watch Ultra, you even get access to a full QWERTY keyboard. This makes using my Apple Watch as a messaging device much more handy, because even though dictation works really well, if I’m in a public situation, I don’t like talking into my Apple Watch. It’s just a stigma I haven’t gotten over yet.

Newer software also adds things like live translation in Messages, so you can see translated text right on your wrist. It’s one of those “I didn’t know I needed this” features that suddenly makes traveling or texting in another language much easier.

My Apple Watch also provides a lot of handy features I use every day. Unlocking other devices is a big one. If I wear my Apple Watch, I can instantly unlock my Mac or even my iPhone if Face ID fails to authenticate me.

The built‑in calculator is very handy at restaurants, where I need to quickly calculate the tip and split the bill between multiple people. When it comes to paying at stores, there are so many contactless payment terminals that support Apple Pay. All I need to do is double‑tap the side button on my watch, press it against the terminal, and yeah, it pays like that. It’s so quick—there’s no need to fumble in my pocket for my phone or wallet. Best of all, there are times where I leave my phone behind, so especially when I’m going to the gym, if I don’t have my wallet on me, I always have my watch on me, so I always have a payment method ready to use.

Battery life: this used to be a complaint, now it’s a strength

Another big reason to get an Apple Watch in 2026 is because they last even longer on a single charge.

A couple of years ago, getting through a full day with everything turned on felt like the upper limit. Now, with the newer chips, more efficient displays, and updated software, the baseline models comfortably push past a full day, and the Ultra line is in a different league entirely.

On something like the Series 11, all‑day battery actually means all day—with always‑on display, normal notifications, workouts, and even sleep tracking. Pushing into the next morning without charging is much more realistic now, and if you enable Low Power Mode, you can stretch that even further when you know you won’t be near a charger.

The Apple Watch Ultra 3 takes it up another notch. One regular charge can last multiple days depending on how hard you push it. If you’re doing long hikes, runs, or outdoor workouts, the Ultra is built for that. Low‑power optimizations can get you into that “weekend trip without a charger” territory, especially if you’re smart about how many workouts you record and how bright you keep the display.

Fast charging helps too. Being able to slap it on the charger for a short window and get enough juice for the rest of the day makes it feel less like another gadget you have to babysit and more like a normal watch that just happens to be insanely smart.

The 2026 Apple Watch lineup: which one should you get?

With the Ultra and the lower cost of the SE model, there’s now an Apple Watch for almost anyone, and it’s easy to recommend almost any of these models. It’s one of the reasons why in 2026, it may be the best time to get your first Apple Watch.

You can start around that $249 mark for an Apple Watch SE, which gets very similar performance to the pricier models. It skips some of the fancier health sensors and premium materials, but as far as a first Apple Watch goes, this is a great experience for anyone. It’s an excellent watch for parents who want to give their kids messaging or location tracking capabilities, but feel like they aren’t ready for the full responsibility of a smartphone yet.

The Series 11 is a good step up, providing a lot of health features like the electrocardiogram, blood oxygen sensor, advanced temperature sensing, and the new blood pressure‑related notifications. It can be dressed up with nicer finishes. It also includes an always‑on display, something that may have prevented you from buying the original Apple Watches when they lacked one during the first few iterations.

The Apple Watch Ultra 3 is a whole different category, targeting more extreme users. It has the battery life to last hours and hours no matter what you’re doing, even if it’s tracking exercise all day. It can withstand extreme elements, work as a dive companion, survive the blaring hot sun in the desert, and it’s made from a tough titanium design that is focused more on durability rather than being sleek and thin.

If you thought the previous Apple Watches couldn’t withstand your more extreme regimen, or if you’re like me and you’re probably just buying one because it has a bigger display, a different look, and longer battery life, well, then there’s not that many excuses anymore to not pick up an Apple Watch. There are a lot of great models now.

The new software: it looks better and feels smarter

On top of the hardware, the latest watchOS update gives the Apple Watch a fresh coat of paint and some genuinely useful upgrades.

The interface has been refined with a new “glassier” look, smarter widgets in the Smart Stack that actually surface what you need at the right time, and new gestures like flicking your wrist to dismiss alerts or stop a timer when your hands are full.

Notes on the wrist, richer Messages, more customizable watch faces, smarter coaching during workouts, tighter integration with your iPhone—it all adds up to making the watch feel less like an accessory and more like a natural extension of your phone and your daily life.

So, should you get an Apple Watch in 2026?

The Apple Watch lineup is the best it has ever been, with more options than ever. A better Apple Watch at the lowest end, a full‑featured watch in the middle, and a more rugged class of watch that should win over a new audience entirely.

So if you’re reading this and you own an iPhone and you aren’t wearing an Apple Watch yet, you probably should be. And if you are on an older model like a Series 3 or below, some of these newer features—longer battery life, more advanced health tracking, and the new AI‑powered fitness tools—might be the extra push you needed to upgrade your model this year.

All right, everyone, I hope you found this helpful. There are so many Apple Watch features now, but these are some of the main reasons why you really need an Apple Watch in 2026.

Feel free to let me know if you are planning to buy an Apple Watch after reading this article, or if you already own one, let me know how you use yours and if you are planning to upgrade this year.

How to make your iPhone 17 battery last longer

By Dave Johnson January 5, 2026

If you have regular access to an iPhone charger during the day and a healthy battery, you probably don’t need to worry much about extending your ‌iPhone 17 battery. For days when you’re away from home for long periods of time, though, you might need to take some steps to make sure you get the most out of your battery.

We’ve rounded up some tips that will help ensure your iPhone 17 battery lasts all day.

Turn Adaptive Power on

On iPhone 17, Apple offers a new Adaptive Power Mode that works alongside the existing Low Power Mode to intelligently extend your iPhone’s battery life. Unlike Low Power Mode’s heavy restrictions, this AI-powered feature makes subtle adjustments that you’re barely meant to notice.

When your battery usage runs higher than usual, Adaptive Power Mode automatically makes small performance tweaks to help your iPhone last longer. Apple says this includes slightly dimming the display brightness or allowing some tasks to “take a little longer” to complete.

The feature works in the background without the limitations of Low Power Mode, although the latter may still be activated if your device depletes to a 20% charge level.

The iPhone Air, iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ Max have the Adaptive Power option enabled by default. To check if the feature is enabled:

Go to Settings.
Tap Battery.
Tap Power Mode.
Turn Adaptive Power on.

Enable Low Power Mode

Just like other iPhone models, the iPhone 17 has a function called Low Power Mode, which allows you to operate your phone on an extremely low level of power consumption.

To access it, you would head to Settings, then Battery, then toggle Low Power Mode on.

Notice that low power mode is on, signified by your battery indicator turning yellow.

It’s worth pointing out though, that this mode is a tradeoff.

On the one hand, you get a significant increase in the duration of time that your iPhone will be able to operate.

But on the other, you’re going to lose much of the functionality of your iPhone.

Low power mode does things like disable 5G, reduce the screen brightness, limit the refresh rate on your phone, and disable features like background app refresh.

All of these are of course, ‘nice to haves’, but they’re also features that make your iPhone an iPhone. So whilst it’s definitely a feature that you could, and probably should be using when you really need it, I wouldn’t recommend overusing it.

What I hear some people doing, which I think could be a good idea, is enabling this if they know they’re going to be out and away from a charger for a really long time, to try and really squeeze every last bit of power from your device.

Turn on the Dark Mode feature

The iPhone 17 has an OLED display. Quite simply, on an OLED display, individual pixels are able to power on and off, which is why, on a phone with an OLED display, you can see that there’s no difference between the blacks that you see when the screen is disabled, and the blacks that are being used in images or videos.

Where this helps you out with battery life then, is in your ability to use Dark Mode. Head into Settings, then choose Display & Brightness, and choose Dark Mode.

With this enabled, whole sections of your screen are essentially now switched off to all intents, which should result in you being able to keep your iPhone 17 battery going for longer, albeit with a very different look and feel to your phone.

What I tend to do is enable automatic dark mode, where dark mode will come on later in the day, but remain off during the day, that’s just my personal preference, you of course can use this however you like.

Turn off the Always On feature

The iPhone 17 has the option of using it’s always-on display. This works by dimming the brightness of the display so that it’s still just visible when you’re not using it, and also reducing the frame rate to as low as one 1hz.

The point of always-on display is really to make use of live activities. So let’s say for example, that you’ve set a timer for while you’re cooking food, and you then put your phone down on the kitchen counter, the idea is that you can keep an eye on your timer without having to touch the phone. But to be honest nowadays, lots of us have Apple Watches and you could set a timer there, and if you use Siri you can just ask Siri how long you have left on your timer anyway. Timers aren’t the only use case here, but personally after many years of owning an iPhone, I don’t think that the always-on display is that great a feature, and it definitely does drain your battery to have it on, and so I would have to encourage you to at least consider making some changes here.

To do this, open Settings, then Display & Brightness. Scroll down to the Always On Display option, and tap into there.

One option here is to keep the always-on display toggled on, but disable wallpaper. Doing this means that you’ve essentially got a black background, with only the time and any widgets or live activities showing up at the top. Just the fact that you’re not having your OLED screen display wallpaper will save you some battery, and so if you want to try and get the best of both worlds, I’d definitely recommend trying this, but set your expectations for how much battery life you’re going to save here accordingly. Ultimately, the best way to save battery life is going to be to disable this feature altogether, so I would recommend that at the very least, have a think about whether you really get enough value from this feature, and consider turning it off.

Adjust your Auto-Lock settings

If you head into Settings, then Display & Brightness and scroll down, you’ll see an option called Auto Lock.

This is a function of your iPhone which automatically puts your phone into a lock mode after a certain period of inactivity, and you can choose from either Never, or a number of short durations of time.

In general, the shorter you make the time here, the more battery you’re likely to be able to save overall, as your phone will be quicker at going to Lock mode each time you put it down. But, lock mode can be extremely frustrating when it enables at a time when you don’t want it to, so I would absolutely recommend that you play around with this to find a time that suits both your use case, and your need for saving battery life.

Auto Brightness

Head into Settings, then Accessibility, then Display & Text Size, and right at the very bottom of this page you have an option called Auto Brightness.

This is a bit of an odd one. It does exactly what it sounds like, it will look to use the phone’s ambient light sensors to make a judgement call about when to boost your screen’s brightness, and when to reduce it. Apple have a disclaimer on the screen, but notice the wording here – it says that turning this off “may affect battery life”, it just doesn’t mention whether that’s in a positive or a negative way.

And I think that this is because for many people, auto brightness will absolutely help their battery life. If you work in an office or you’ve got your iPhone in a relatively controlled lighting environment much of the time, then allowing your phone to adapt to your surroundings and change the display is probably no bad thing. Where I think people come up against issues here, is if people are using their phones predominantly in very bright environments for much of the time, which is where the brightness would therefore be constantly pushed up high to compensate for this. Also, keep in mind that your iPhone will have to use a certain amount of battery to run the ambient light sensor, so your mileage will definitely vary with this one. My advice would be to try this out, see how you get on with it, if you see value in it, keep it going.

Also, do remember that if you enable this, and then decide that you don’t like it, chances are your brightness will be reduced, so as well as disabling it, you’ll want to head back into Control Centre, and manually change your brightness there.

Reduce White Point

If you head into Settings, then Accessibility, then Display & Text Size, and then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, there’s an option called Reduce White Point.

If you toggle this on, you’ll see a slider, which goes from 25% all the way up to 100%.

Essentially, what you’re doing here is reducing the intensity of bright colours on your screen, and in doing so, you’ll get a boost in your iPhone 17 battery life, albeit at the cost of less bright and vivid colours.

This is in Accessibility as it’s really designed more for people who have light sensitivity, the fact that it will also help reduce some battery consumption is kind of a byproduct, but considering the fact that it will have a positive impact on your battery usage, I figured it was an important one to include in the guide.

Reduced Motion

Go into Settings, then choose Accessibility, and then tap into Motion.

There’s an option here called Reduce Motion, and enabling this will cut down on the number of animations that your iPhone 17 displays. According to Apple themselves, this is things like Screen Transitions, Dissolve Effects, that kind of thing. Much like some of the other accessibility options, this is technically designed to help people who are sensitive to motion effects, but it can absolutely be used by anyone, and it will have a slight positive impact on your iPhone 17 battery life.

As ever, I would recommend trying this out and seeing what you think of it, the tradeoff of a less visually impressive iPhone experience for a little extra battery may or may not be worth it to you.

But, while we’re in this screen, I would recommend disabling Auto Play Message Effects and Video Previews.

Essentially, this means that you can choose when you’d like to view these effects, which again is going to equal a slight boost to your iPhone 17 battery, but also to your data usage, as it will stop your phone from automatically loading video content just because you happened to scroll to it.

Dim Flashing Lights is a relatively newAccessibility feature for people who have light sensitivity, the feature will dim the screen if it notices bright strobe effects being used in the content that you’re viewing. Again, regardless of who this feature is intended for, if ultimate battery life is your goal, this could be of use to you.

Also, you have the option in this screen of reducing your frame rate from a potential 120HZ down to 60HZ, which will again save iPhone 17 battery life, albeit at the expense of arguably one of the best features of these phones, so the option is there if you want it.

Disable the Raise to Wake feature

If you head into Settings, then choose Display & Brightness, then scroll down, you can disable a feature called Raise to Wake. This feature has been around for a while now, and the idea was that you wouldn’t have to tap on your phone’s screen to wake it up, you could simply lift your phone and it would sense you doing so, and wake up. But honestly, unless you really find there’s a great need for having this feature enabled, I’d consider switching it off. iPhone 17 is so fast at waking up, that the tap and verification of your Face ID is, in my opinion, as quick as it is by having this feature enabled, and you can definitely save yourself some battery life by having this one switched off. Try it out, see what you think.

Limit your notifications

Notifications are an enormous drain on your phone’s battery.

First, your phone is having to use battery power to communicate with the various different servers to establish whether there’s a notification, and then pull that information to your device.

Second, during the day especially, your phone is ‘coming to life’ each time you receive a notification, the screen is lighting up, you might even have a sound play. For time sensitive or critical notifications, this is of course really important, but how often do you get a notification that you glance at, and then immediately ignore? Your phone is pretty good at telling the difference between important and unimportant notifications, and you can use this to create notification summaries.

Head into Settings, then tap on Notifications. Choose Scheduled Summary, and enable this.

If you’re doing this for the first time, your phone will explain what this is to you, it’s going to group notifications together, and only deliver them at a schedule that you set, although important and time sensitive notifications will still come through immediately.

Choose Continue to begin setting this up. Your phone will begin by showing you where the majority of your notifications are coming from, based on a weekly average. If you tap the Show More button, you can then begin to work through the apps here, and choose which to include in your summary. I would recommend being fairly ruthless here, and you could even use this as an excuse to make a note of apps that you want to remove notifications for altogether, or even remove the apps altogether if you notice ones here that you’re not really making use of.

When you’re done, tap the Add button to add the chosen apps.

You’re then going to set your summary schedule. The default, for me at least, is 8am, but I’m then going to use the Plus buttons and the time option to add some more. It’s up to you how frequently you feel you need these summaries, I’m going to set this up to give me a number of them throughout the day, remember you can always change this later on, and it’s still going to be better on my battery to have this happen a few times a day rather than hundreds of times per day.

When you’re happy with your choice, tap Turn on Notification Summary, and it’s set. This is also the page you would come back to in order to make changes by the way.

Also, like I just mentioned, I would recommend working down the list of apps and toggling notifications off where you can, you’re not going to need notifications for all of the apps in here. App Store for example, if I tap into that, at the very least I could add this to my Scheduled Summary, but as you scroll down this list you’ll see some where it makes way more sense to simply disable notifications altogether.

Turn off the Background App Refresh feature

Open Settings, then choose General, then Background App Refresh.

This is an iPhone feature where your phone will allow apps to automatically download data in the background, even if they aren’t open on your device, so long as your phone is connected to the internet. The aim here is to make the experience of opening apps totally seamless, you tap to open an app, and the data that would usually take a few seconds to download has already been pre-downloaded, ready for you to enjoy. But the problem here is that this is all using up battery life.

I guess an analogy here would be that with this disabled, it’s a bit like an Uber Eats driver waiting to get a notification from a restaurant, before they head to the restaurant. With this enabled, it’s like that same driver going into the restaurant every few minutes and saying “have you got an order for me?” over and over and over again, until eventually he’s given something to deliver.

So, understandably, you may wish to disable this. Or, at the very least, I think you should disable it for the vast majority of apps, and your device lets you choose which ones you might want to have it enabled or disabled for.

Go through this list and be ruthless. If you really think an app experience is going to be noticeably better by having Background Refresh enabled, then great, otherwise, disable it.

Also, tap into the Background App Refresh button, and consider changing this to WiFi only.

The connection to your home WiFi is much more stable than the connection to a cellular tower when you’re out and about, and will therefore use less power, so if you are going to use this, you may wish to restrict it to the times when you’re on a WiFi connection only.

Adjust your Voice and Data settings

If you head into Settings, and tap on where it says Mobile Data, it might say Cellular Data in your region, then tap on your number under the Sims section, and then tap into Voice and Data, you’ll have the option of choosing any specific data options that are relevant to you, your phone and your data plan.

Here in the UK I do have access to 5G data, although coverage like most places is kind of spotty at best. I can choose between three options here, and my phone explains how each of them work.

If I choose 5G Auto, my phone will choose 5G only when it’s going to benefit my performance, and while optimising battery life.

If I choose 5G On, my phone will always use 5G if it’s available, regardless of whether doing so hammers my battery or not.

And if I choose 4G, my phone will opt for 4G, and not connect to 5G at all. The 4G network is much more widely available here in the UK, so this is probably the option I’d choose if battery conservation was my goal, no matter what.

But personally, I generally go for 5G Auto, because when it is available, it’s excellent, and I’m OK with the fact that it will only be available to me some of the time.

Also, while you’re here, it might be worth jumping back a page, and then tapping on Data Mode. Again, this may look different dependent on your phone and plan, but here on my iPhone 17 in the UK, I can choose between three options.

I would generally recommend choosing either Standard or Low Data Mode, regardless of your data plan, as choosing Allow More Data on 5G will potentially prefer 5G to your own WiFi, and as 5G access is more battery-intensive than WiFi, this is best avoided.

Also, back on the Mobile or Cellular Data screen for just a moment, if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page, there’s an option called Wi-Fi Assist, which you’ve probably got enabled.

With this enabled, your phone will automatically switch to your phone’s data if the WiFi signal that you’re on is especially poor. For most people, this won’t happen very often, but in my experience, this does happen from time to time, and it can use up both battery life and data from your data plan, so you may want to consider disabling this.

Disable Push Email feature

Email is a major draw on your battery life, thanks in part to the way in which most of us have it enabled. If you have Push enabled on your Mail accounts, it essentially means that emails appear in your inbox in much the same way as text messages do, landing the second that they’re sent to you.

And that’s because with Push, your phone is constantly querying your mail server, looking to see if there’s new email. And I think that in general, you probably don’t need that when it comes to email, so it’s definitely worth switching it off.

To do that, head into Settings, scroll down and choose Apps. Tap Mail.

Then tap into Mail Accounts, and then Fetch New Data. I would recommend disabling Push altogether, which you’d do using the button at the top of this screen. You may also have to do this per account, which is what I’ve done here.

Then at the bottom, you can set your Fetch schedule instead. Where Push is your phone constantly checking the mail server, Fetch is you putting your phone on a schedule to do this. I reckon every 30 minutes is probably going to be enough for the average email user, but you go with whatever works for you.

Turn off Analytics & Improvements features

Open Settings, then head into Privacy & Security, then scroll all the way down and tap into Analytics & Improvements.

I’ve got everything disabled in here, and I would absolutely recommend that you do the same to save your iPhone 17 battery life. This page is essentially about you giving permission for Apple to capture data about how you use your device, and then share that data with Apple. Apple do link to their privacy policy on this page, I’d recommend you have a read of that if you’re considering enabling anything here, and whilst I’m all for Apple working to improve their products and services, I’m not so keen on donating my data to it, so yes I tend to turn this off. This will of course also cut down on some data use and battery life in the process.

Adjust the Location & System Services features

If you head into Settings, then choose Privacy & Security, and then choose Location Services, you can see everything relating to the sharing of your location via your phone.

So the first point to consider here is the Share My Location box. Tapping in here will allow you to enable or disable Find my iPhone, I would leave this one on personally, and also choose whether to enable or disable sharing your location. This is going to be down to your preference, being able to quickly check in with someone you know and trust and vice versa can actually be a really helpful way of saving you from having to text your significant other when you’re on your way home from work for example, obviously you choose whether you get value enough from this to have it enabled.

The part of this menu that I would absolutely recommend you spend some time with is back a page, where you can see all of the apps that either have access to your location, or may request it, and you can choose how much access to grant them.

So for example, if I tap into the AutoTrader app, it’s currently set to While Using, but I could change this to Never, or change it to ‘Ask Next Time’, which essentially revokes the access, but gives you the option of choosing again next time you open it.

An exercise that I would recommend that you do, is to head through this list and revoke access to apps where there’s no value in that app being able to track your location.

This is good practice in terms of generally monitoring how much data you’re sharing with apps, but revoking access here will also have a massive impact on your iPhone 17 battery life, as it’s less for your phone to be doing in the background, while you’re not using it.

Also, while you’re here, I’d recommend tapping into System Services. These are all system services that require location access, you can choose to disable any of these if you wish, although you may wish to do your own research here before switching too much off, as each thing you disable is going to impact a feature of your phone.

I would say maybe disable compass calibration, device management, location based alerts and suggestions, motion calibration and distance, setting time zone, share my location and sharing.framework.

But for example, if you disable setting time zone and then travel overseas, this is why your phone won’t automatically update your timezone when you arrive, so every change has a consequence, which is why I say you might want to research this a bit further yourself before changing too much here.

What I would do is disable all of the Product Improvement options at the bottom of this page, and then consider disabling Significant Locations.

This is a feature where your phone learns about locations that you visit frequently, so that it can then use that data to provide you with more relevant app suggestions and ultimately, ads. The data is encrypted, but I’m sure it’s obvious why you may not want this, so consider revoking access here and clearing the history while you’re at it.

Disable the Haptic Keyboard feature

If you head into Settings, then Sounds & Haptics, then scroll down and choose Keyboard Feedback, you can see that you have two options. Both of these can be battery drainers, but Haptic is especially guilty here.

Haptic keyboard is where your phone will emit a very slight vibration each time you tap a key on your keyboard, in an effort to replicate the feeling of typing on a real keyboard. It’s a great feature, I actually do have it enabled on my device, but Apple have literally come out and said that this is a battery drainer, so if you’re someone who prioritises maintaining a battery life over and above everything else, you should really consider disabling both of these, but Haptic in particular.

Minimize the number of Widgets

Widgets are small visual blocks that sit on either your Home Screen or your Lock Screen, and they display up-to-date information without you having to tap into them. So you might have a weather widget on your lock screen that shows you what the weather is going to be doing in the next hour. Or you might have a calendar widget that displays your next couple of appointments on your Home Screen, meaning you don’t need to tap into the calendar to view that information. They’re pretty good, and are now better in iOS 18, but they are battery drainers, as they’re essentially operating as individual apps, constantly updating and refreshing in the background.

You would remove a widget by tapping and holding on it for a moment, and hitting the little minus to remove it. Take a look at what you’re using, and if you don’t get as much value from the widget as you thought you might, especially non-Apple widgets, consider removing it to extend your iPhone 17 battery life.

10 Common Mistakes iPhone Users Make

By Dave Johnson January 4, 2026

I’ve covered loads of iPhone tips here on iPhoneArena, but one thing I’ve not really talked about are the common mistakes that I see iPhone owners making all the time. So, in this guide, I’m going to cover the 10 that I see most often, and let you know what I think you should be doing instead, and why. Read to the end of the article, to see if there’s anything that you’re doing, that might be making your iPhone experience worse rather than better.

Habitually force-quitting apps

So, a question. You’ve been using an app on your phone, and you finish whatever you’re doing. Do you tend to be in the habit of fully closing the app, rather than just letting it continue running in the background? If yes, you’re definitely not the only one, a lot of people do this, thinking it’ll free up memory and make their iPhones run faster, but in reality, killing apps in the background might not be doing your iPhone any favours, in fact, it can actually slow it down and even reduce your phone’s battery life.

There are a few reasons for this.

First up, iPhones are designed with a sophisticated memory management system.

When you exit out of an app, it’s frozen in the background, not using up any CPU resources. By swiping it away, otherwise known as force-quitting it, you’re essentially forcing your iPhone to reload the app from scratch the next time you open it, which consumes more power and resources than simply resuming the app from its frozen state. Because of this, continuously killing and restarting apps can use more battery than letting them run in the background. In fact, according to Apple’s own support page, apps that are not active, are in a suspended state and aren’t actively using up battery.

And look, if you don’t believe me, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, once responded to an email from a user asking if swiping away apps improves battery life, simply replying “No.”

There are exceptions to this rule. If an app is misbehaving or freezing, then force quitting that specific app might be necessary. But doing it routinely for all apps? That’s where this becomes a habit that you need to stop. Trust in your iPhone’s design and efficiency, and let it do its thing.

Common battery mistakes

We all want our iPhone batteries to last as long as possible, but there are some common practices and misconceptions that might be doing more harm than good, so let’s take a look at them.

Avoid using non-MFI Certified Charging Cables and power bricks.

We’ve all been there, you lose your iPhone charger, and you find one at a local store, and it’s so much cheaper than the official Apple one. The problem is, using non-MFI (Made for iPhone) certified charging cables and charging bricks can actually damage your iPhone’s battery. These uncertified products may not meet Apple’s standards for performance and safety, so over time, they can degrade your battery’s health, leading to shorter battery life or even potential safety risks.

I’m not saying you should only buy official Apple products here by the way, they are often overpriced simply because they’re Apple branded, but if you’re going to buy third- party, always look for that MFI logo when purchasing.

Always avoid letting your iPhone get too hot. Extreme temperatures, especially heat, can harm the battery’s capacity. If you’ve ever left your iPhone in a car on a scorching day, or next to you at the beach, you might have noticed a temperature warning. That’s your iPhone telling you it’s in trouble. Continual exposure to high temperatures can reduce

your battery’s chemical lifespan, and whilst extreme cold is also not great for iPhone batteries, extreme heat is definitely the number one problem here.

And on a related note, be careful when fast- charging, especially if you also disregard the first point about only using MFI certified chargers and cables.

Fast-charging generates a lot of heat, and a combination of an MFI certified charging brick and cable will allow you to fast-charge, whilst still doing so in a manner that will minimise the strain on your phone’s battery.

Location Services & Privacy

Your iPhone is incredibly smart, but with that intelligence comes the responsibility of ensuring you’re not sharing more with it than you’d like, and that responsibility falls to you by the way. To do this, we focus on Location Services and Privacy.

So location services first. Location services are essentially referring to your phone’s ability to know where you are, and tailor the way that it functions based on that information. It offers up a tonne of useful features that simply couldn’t exist without it, like being able to direct you home, or remind you to do something when you visit a certain place. But, every time an app asks to know your location, it’s not just about convenience. It’s also about privacy and, believe it or not, battery life. Every time an app pings your location, it uses up a bit of your available battery. You want to get into the habit of managing your location services, and to do that, you’d go to Settings, then scroll down and tap on Privacy & Security, and choose Location Services. Here, you’ll see a list of all apps and their location access.

You can choose which apps can access your location and when. For apps you rarely use or don’t trust, consider setting their access to “Never” or “Ask Next Time or When i Share.” Remember, you can always change it later if you feel you need to.

Next, let’s look at App Tracking Transparency: Beyond just location, some apps want to track your activity across other apps and websites. It’s a big privacy concern, and thankfully, Apple give you the means of controlling this.

Go to Settings, tap on Privacy & Security, then select Tracking. Here, you’ll see a list of apps that have requested to track your activity. You can toggle off tracking for any apps you’re uncomfortable with. For a blanket approach, you can turn off “Allow Apps to Request to Track,” which will prevent any app from even asking in the first place.

There aren’t many parts of the iPhone experience where I’d recommend switching something off entirely, but this might well be one of them, I can’t see many times where I’d want to allow apps to track me across other apps, so definitely consider disabling this.

Never closing your Safari Tabs

Every open tab in Safari uses up a bit of your iPhone’s RAM. While modern iPhones are incredibly powerful, there’s still a limit. If you’ve got dozens (or, dare I say, hundreds?) of tabs open, it can bog down your device’s performance. Not to mention, it’s gonna be a challenge to find that one specific tab you’re actually looking for, because let’s be honest, how many can you actually use at any one time?

You can swipe to close down Safari tabs one at a time if you wish, but there’s a great shortcut to close all Safari tabs in one go:

Head to Safari, and hold down the tabs icon at the bottom right. In the menu that appears, choose ‘Close Tabs’ (however many tabs you currently have open), confirm it on the next message, and all of them are gone in one go.

Camera mistakes

The camera on your iPhone is extremely powerful, but there are a number of mistakes related to the camera that I see people make all the time.

One mistake is either not using, or conversely over-using certain formats. If you head to Settings, then Camera, and then Formats, you can see whether your iPhone model can support either Pro RAW photo capture, and ProRes video capture. Both of these are essentially professional formats, and as such, they take up a tonne of space on your device. For example, i took a photo on my iPhone 15 Pro, one in HEIC format, the other in RAW format. The HEIC format is 1.4MB in size, while the RAW photo is almost 65MB. The RAW photo might not look like it, but it has a tonne more data in there, designed to be edited using professional photo editing software. So the mistake here, is if you want to take better photos, and you’re familiar with shooting with RAW, start making use of it. But if you’re not, don’t use it, and save yourself storage space instead, because you probably won’t notice the difference.

It’s the same story with ProRes. My iPhone literally tells me that a single minute of recorded footage in 4K HDR, captured in ProRes, is going to take up 6GB of space on my iPhone.

Also, there are two insanely useful Camera settings which you should absolutely be making use of, and I often see people not using. The first is the Grid, for composition. Open Settings, then Camera, and ensure that Grid is enabled under Composition. With this on, you will take better photos, just by having the ability to see how you’re composing your photos more accurately.

The other setting is just above the Composition section, it’s Preserve Settings. Tap into that, and toggle on as many settings as you like. With these toggled on, your phone will remember your camera settings each time you open it. So for example, if you disable Live Photos in your camera app, your phone will remember that you disabled it, each time you open the camera app, rather than switching it back on each time.

NOT updating software

A common mistake that I see people making with their iPhones is not updating them to the latest software version. While Apple release a major software update each year, they also release more regular updates which aren’t quite as shiny and exciting, but do contain important bug fixes, performance enhancements, and sometimes entirely new features, so they are worth it, to keep your phone up to date. Head to Settings, then General, then Software Update, and ensure that Automatic Updates are enabled. At the very least, ensure that Security Responses and System Files is enabled, as Apple is now packaging security updates separately, and even if you have a reason for not using the latest operating system, you should be using the most secure version that’s available to you.

One caveat, regarding particularly old iPhones. While the latest iOS versions are optimised for newer devices, older models might struggle a bit. The hardware in these devices might not be equipped to handle the demands of the latest software. This can lead to slower performance, app incompatibilities, and even quicker battery drain, so whilst I’m not outright recommending that you don’t update if you’re using an older model, I would recommend that you do some research first, perhaps checking some user forums to see what other people’s experience has been like.

Giving your phone to a child WITHOUT using Guided Access

If you’ve ever handed your iPhone to a child, whether it’s to keep them entertained or let them chat with a family member, you know there’s a bit of anxiety that comes with it. Kids are curious, and a single tap can lead to deleted apps, accidental calls, altered settings or worse. This is where Guided Access comes in. It’s a feature designed to keep your iPhone locked into a single app, the person you hand your phone to literally can’t close or change the app you hand them, preventing any accidental mishaps.

So, why should you use it? With Guided Access, you can let a child play a game or watch a video without worrying about them venturing into other parts of your phone. It’s peace of mind in a digital format.

To enable it, open Settings, then scroll down and tap on Accessibility. Under the “General” section, you’ll find Guided Access. Tap on it. Toggle on the Guided Access switch. Now, when you want to use it, open the app you want to lock into, quickly triple- click the side or home button (depending on your iPhone model), and tap Start.

Your iPhone is now in Guided Access mode, ensuring a worry-free experience when handing it to a child. And when you want to exit, just triple-click the button again and enter your passcode. It’s that simple!

Not making use of Dictation

A mistake I see people making all the time is not making effective use of dictation on their iPhones. You might be in a situation where typing out a lengthy message or note feels tedious, or perhaps you’re on the move and need to send a quick text without fumbling with the keyboard, there are loads of situations where you might not want to send a voice note, but it’s infinitely quicker and easier to have dictation write your message or note for you. You can use dictation literally everywhere on your iPhone where you can use your keyboard, you just tap the little microphone icon in the lower right of the screen.

Plus, with Apple’s continuous improvements in voice recognition, the accuracy of dictation is impressive, understanding nuances, accents, and even multiple languages, and dictation has gotten noticeably better in iOS 18.

If you don’t believe me, make an effort to give it a go each time you need to type something for the next few days, and see how you get on with it. You might be surprised at just how useful it is.

Disabling Find My iPhone

Find My iPhone is a built-in feature on Apple devices designed to help users locate and secure their iPhone if it’s ever lost or stolen. Integrated into the Apple ecosystem, it uses the device’s built-in GPS to pinpoint its exact location on a map, allowing users to track it in real-time.

Once the feature is enabled in the device’s settings, you can access the location of your device through the “Find My” app on another Apple device or by logging into iCloud.com on any browser. If your iPhone goes missing, you can activate “Lost Mode,” which locks the device and displays a custom message, helping anyone who finds it get in touch with you. Additionally, for added security, you can remotely erase all data on the device to protect personal information. The feature also includes the ability to play a sound on the device, making it easier to locate if it’s nearby, like lost in a sofa cushion or left in another room.

To enable it, head to Settings, then tap on Apple Account, and choose Find My. Tap into Find my iPhone, and ensure that Find my iPhone is toggled on. I would also recommend enabling the other features on this page, as they come in handy if the phone is for example stolen, and immediately powered off.

While ‘Find My iPhone’ does utilise location data, Apple emphasises a commitment to user privacy, ensuring that your location data is used solely for the purpose of this feature and is not sold or shared. And while enabling ‘Find My iPhone’ might have a minor impact on battery life due to its location tracking, the security benefits outweigh this concern in my opinion, especially in the event of a lost or stolen device.

Not knowing how to cancel app subscriptions

We’ve all been there. You sign up for an app trial, thinking you’ll remember to cancel it before getting charged, but then life happens, and before you know it, you’re billed for a subscription you no longer want. The truth is, many iPhone owners aren’t entirely sure where to go to manage and cancel these subscriptions, so let me show you.

When you subscribe to an app on your iPhone, it’s linked to your Apple ID, not just the app itself. This means you won’t typically cancel the subscription within the app but rather through the Settings of your iPhone. Apple actually bring all of the subscription management together to try and make it less complicated, but because a lot of people don’t know where to find them, it can have the opposite effect, so here’s what to do.

Open Settings, and tap on Apple Account at the top of the screen. Tap on Subscriptions. Here, you’ll see a list of all your active and expired subscriptions. Find the subscription you want to cancel and tap on it. Hit Cancel Subscription or Cancel Trial at the bottom.

And that’s it! No more unwanted charges. It’s a simple process, but one that’s often overlooked or misunderstood. And remember, most subscriptions auto-renew by default. So, even if you’re just trying out a service, it’s a good habit to check on its renewal status to avoid unexpected charges.