Why Your Phone Battery Degrades — and How to Slow It
Your phone battery degrades because the chemistry inside it wears out with use and time. Each charge cycle traps a little lithium in side reactions that no longer help store energy, and heat plus long stretches at full charge speed that process up. You cannot stop the loss, but two habits move the needle more than any other: keep the phone cool, and do not leave it sitting at 100% for hours every day . What battery health actually measures When a phone reports battery health as a percentage, it is comparing the battery's current maximum capacity with its capacity when new. A phone at 85% health does not hold 85% of a charge in some vague sense; its full charge now stores about 85% of the energy it stored on day one. That is why an older phone can still show 100% on the screen and still run out sooner: 100% of a smaller tank is a smaller tank. Apple publishes a useful benchmark for this decline. Batteries in iPhone 14 models and earlier are designed to retain 80% of their origina...