The battery, or rather, the autonomy, continues to be today the great Achilles heel of current smartphones, especially in high-end models. In the case of the iPhone, we rarely get it to hold a full day of intensive use without going through the charger, and in the best of cases, when it reaches the end of the day, it is necessary to perform the nightly recharge ritual.
In addition, as in all mobile phones, the iPhone battery degrades over time. To this must be added the different reports of slowdown of the Apple phone that have been relating the performance of the CPU with the state of the battery for some time and that forced Apple in its day to launch a campaign offering discounts on the replacement of batteries for some of its models. You want to know how many charge cycles your phone has endured? We explain how to find out.
What is and what does a charge cycle on the iPhone suppose
The age of a battery is measured in charge cycles, where one cycle is the process of completely draining and recharging the battery once. This can be produced by going directly from 100% to 0%, or by reducing the energy to a certain percentage (for example, 75%), recharging and recharging the battery by the remaining percentage until reaching 100% with the sum of both. (in our example it would be 25%).
Once we know how charge cycles are counted, we now need to know how many of those cycles an iPhone battery can handle. before its capacity deteriorates significantly. Well, in this sense, the official Apple support page establishes that, in the case of the iPhone, the Li-Ion battery endures 500 complete cycles (the Apple Watch, the iPad and the Mac, however, support 1,000) .
Once it reaches that limit (it generally takes about two years), the total capacity of the Li-Ion battery will have degraded to about 80%. Now it becomes more important to know how many cycles our iPhone takes, right? To do this, since Apple has removed all the apps for this purpose from the App Store, we are going to use the Lightning cable, a desktop computer and the iBackupBot program (available for Mac and PC), which offers a free trial period of 7 days.
How many cycles does my iPhone take?
To know the number of charge cycles our iPhone has, we have several methods, but the one we propose here allows us to check it directly from the phone itself and without having to install anything. The first thing to do is access the diagnostics that the iPhone performs daily.
To do this, follow these steps:
Open the ‘Settings’ of the iPhone and enter ‘Privacy’.
Click on the section ‘Analysis and improvements’, and once inside, enter ‘Analysis data’.
Go down until you find the ‘log-aggregated’ and tap on the most recent. Keep in mind that the amount of data is considerable and they are ordered alphabetically, so you will have to scroll a lot.
When opened, the log will show us a lot of information, so that, to facilitate the search for the specific line that interests us, we will use the Notes app. The process is the following:
Touch twice about one of the first words of the log.
Holding down the blue handle on the right, slide your finger towards the lower right corner on the screen to select all the text faster.
When you have everything selected, release the shooter and, in the menu that appears, choose ‘Copy’.
Exit the ‘Settings’ and open the ‘Notes’ app.
Press the pencil button to create a new note.
Tap once on the note and, in the menu that appears, choose ‘Paste’.
We have already transferred the entire log to the Notes app and here we can do a search. To do this, do the following:
Tap the icon circle with three dots inside that you will find in the upper left corner.
Click on the option ‘Search in note’.
Writes batterycyclecount and tap on ‘Search’.
On the screen, the term we have just searched will be shown highlighted in yellow. The figure that appears between the two integer It is the count of the charging cycles that the battery of our iPhone has made. In our example, as we see in the image, it marks 372 cycles.
Let us also remember that, as of iOS 11.3, if we enter Settings> Battery> Battery Health, we can see the percentage that indicates the current capacity of the battery (‘Maximum capacity’).
If the figure is higher than 80% (as in our case, which is 89%), we should not worry, but if it is lower, it means that it is time to think about replacing it for a new one.