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Permanent low power mode on iPhone

I bought my iPhone 8 about 2 years and 3 months ago (I bought the oldest model available on Apple Store at the time). By now it reports that battery is at 88% of its original capacity. It feels even lower than that. That's quite terrible.

When the battery gets below 20%, phone suggests enabling "low power mode". I was curious how much it would improve the battery capacity if I keep my phone in low power mode permanently?

I used the phone normally for a week and then kept it in low power mode for another week.

Here is the comparison of battery usage along with hours of activity, per day.

Doesn't look that drastic, but subjectively it felt that I have ~20% more battery by the end of day. Let's look at the numbers:

Normal mode drain: 19.33% per hour of usage
Low power mode drain: 16.83% per hour of usage
Low power mode savings: 2.5% per hour of usage

Normal day savings: 8.3%
Heavy day savings: 12.5%

"Normal" are days when I used the phone for 4 hours or less, usually weekdays. "Heavy" are more than 4 hours, usually weekends. Not quite the 20% I felt! It must have been because I happened to use the phone less overall on the "low power" week.

What exactly low power mode does?

According to the little explanation in the Settings:

Low Power Mode temporarily reduces background activity like downloads and mail fetch until you can fully charge your iPhone.

That's actually all it seems to do: disable all the background activity in all apps. You can see it if you go to any app's settings:

Background refresh is hard-off

Practically it means that Mail app, for example, will fetch the mail quite rarely, unless you open the app and then it fetches right away. I actually quite like that behavior!

On the other hand all the push notifications behave exactly as usual. So then GMail app will pop email notifications instantaneously, because I believe they actually use push notifications for that immediacy. So low power mode does not affect GMail or instant messengers.

Is it worth it?

Hard to say. The savings are not as significant as I'd have liked to see. But the difference between having your phone shut down before the day ends and having extra 12.5% is quite big.

I personally don't mind that it slows down emails and possibly some other apps pushing their updates on me. The only downside is that iPhone turns low power mode off after full charge, so I need to re-enable it every morning.

Update: lunchboxhero showed me that you can go to Apple's Shortcuts app, Automation tab, and automatically turn on low power mode when charger is connected and disconnected. Thanks lunchboxhero!

Automated permanent low power mode

I think I'm going to stick to low power mode for a while and see what happens.

2022-01-21 | #iphone #lowpowermode

Agent Parsley

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