You know the situation: your phone is dead, and you have no idea what the time is because you rely on your phone for that. A new feature coming to the iPhone in this fall’s iOS 18 update means you can still catch that train (or at least know whether it’s worth running for it or not).
With iOS 18, you'll be able to tell the time when your battery has died, too.
Updated June 16 with details of another battery improvement coming to iOS 18 and further details of how it will work.
That’s because even when the phone’s battery has been depleted, the display will show the time. Not just that, it also shows an empty battery icon, of course, and the words “iPhone is Findable” to indicate that Find My will still work. That bit isn’t new and is what the display will show you on plenty of other iPhones right now when the battery is too far gone to operate the iPhone.
And it’s not the only battery improvement coming, as it’s emerged that iOS 18 will bring new charging limit levels to the latest phones, iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. As reported by MacRumors, Apple is about to improve the current charging limits that are featured in the iPhone 15 series. Currently, a setting stops the phone from charging beyond 80%.
But iOS 18 will offer more granular control. With new extra limits set at 85%, 90% and even 95% of full charge. As the report says, “With the new limit options, iOS 18 now takes a proactive approach to improving battery longevity by recommending a specific charging limit to users via a notification.”
Charging your smartphone used to entail charging it to full and then, as the charge slowly dropped down again, topping it up to 100%. That’s all very well, but it doesn’t help the health of the battery in the long-term. Leaving it at full for a shorter period is better.
This new feature could come to other iPhones with later releases of iOS 18, but in the initial developer beta, it’s restricted to the iPhone 15 models.
More details have now emerged about this feature, too. In a new report, Mashable explains that “Common battery health lore says that the sweet spot for battery health (at least for the types of batteries that go into an iPhone) is between 20 and 80 percent. But for some users, 80 percent might be too low, so being able to set the limit at 85, 90, and 95 percent might be more helpful in the long run.”
But there’s another detail here that’s important. After all, there are times when you really need the phone to be fully charged, for example when you have a long day ahead of you and you know you’ll be away from power sockets all the time. So, can you recharge to 100%? Absolutely.
“In iOS 18, Apple will also allow you to return the limit from a lower level to the maximum for one time only, after which the limit is reinstated.” There’s another way the battery life could be improved with iOS 18. The new dark look for iOS 18 can make all parts of the display, including the app icons, much darker, which on an OLED display promises some small power savings, too.
All this could be confusing, in the way that smartphones can still manage to be, so pay attention to the settings you choose and make sure they’re just what you’re after, or else, as the report says, “You might be left wondering why your iPhone has less battery life than everyone else's.”
Back to the onscreen battery information: as demonstrated by a user on Reddit and picked up by 9to5Mac, Apple is improving what you see onscreen when the battery has gone so low it can’t turn on the iPhone.
For some time now, Apple has had a very useful feature: Power Reserve. This means that for a period after the iPhone battery has discharged, it keeps a little battery backup so that the iPhone remains findable. It means that if you mark your iPhone as lost, it will be able to contact Find My. This function works for around five hours.
And during this time, the display can show an empty battery icon and the words iPhone is findable.
With iOS 18, there’s a new tiny-but-highly-useful addition: the top left corner of the display now shows the time. Wisely, Apple has added this information in exactly the spot where the time is shown when the iPhone is in regular use, so it’s the first place your eyes naturally look.
Some Android phones from Samsung, Google or others can match the findable feature but not the new clock addition (yet).
If you’re a night owl, say, who regularly finds your battery has died and you want this new feature, don’t rush to upgrade yet: there’s a sting in the tail as it’s not for all iPhones, apparently.
According to MacRumors, it seems to be limited to iPhone 15 models, for now at least. Juli Clover tested it on an iPhone 15 Pro Max and it worked, but there was no time showing up on an iPhone 14 Pro Max.
There’s no news yet on whether it works just on the Pro models, but if I can find out more, I’ll update this post.
As always, there’s another proviso: the new software is only in developer beta just now, and only days old at that. So, you shouldn’t update your main iPhone, the one you use every day, to the iOS 18 developer beta as things won’t work, battery life may suck and it could be altogether annoying. Next month is when we’re expecting the public beta.
