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Nothing lives forever, and that includes your phone’s battery. Not only does it die a little on an almost daily basis, but it also dies longer and slower which will eventually render your phone unusable if it’s not permanently connected to a power source.
Unless of course you replace your old battery with a new one.
You may have a feeling that your battery is deteriorating over time, but you don’t know when to replace it. A new app from an online community, advocacy group, and parts dealer iFixit is here to help. The app includes a battery status indicator that shows where your battery is in its life cycle and estimates when it’s time to use the toolkit and give your device a new lease on life.
Repairing our technology rather than simply replacing it when it breaks can save us money in the long run and reduce our contribution to the ever-growing mountains of electronic waste accumulating around the world. Thanks to the Right to Repair movement, it’s easier than ever to get the parts and instructions we need to fix technology at home. However, this can be a scary prospect for anyone who is not familiar with the inner workings of their devices.
“It’s never been easier to fix things ourselves, but learning how can be a little confusing,” says Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit. “We now have so many different types of tools in our lives, so how do you learn how to fix them all?” The answer is the iFixit app, which comes with an AI assistant “Fixbot” to guide you through any repairs you want to make, with access to iFixit’s full catalog of repair guides.
This isn’t the first time iFixit has had its own app, but in 2015, Apple stripped it from the App Store after iFixit conducted a… Unfavorable disassembly of Apple TV. It’s back now, available on both the App Store and Google Play Store for iPhone and Android owners. I took him for a ride.
Predicting the death of my iPhone
My current phone is the iPhone 15 Pro Max. I’ve been using it for a little over a year. At the time, I definitely noticed it running out of power more often, and I was eager to know when I might need to replace it.
The battery health feature in the iFixit app is still in beta, and the process of getting a reading varies slightly depending on your phone’s manufacturer. (Spoiler: Nothing is quite clear.)
Apple doesn’t currently allow access to battery stats via any of its APIs (iFixit told me that APIs exist, but Apple won’t approve your app if you use them), so instead you have to make sure your phone’s analytics are turned on and then import an analytics file into the app.
If it sounds complicated, it’s not. In the app there is a guide that tells you exactly what to do and I found it easy to follow. I turned on my analytics in settings and allowed it to collect data for a day before sharing the file with iFixit.
What I found surprised me. I consider myself a power user (my screen time is really embarrassing), but in the year or so that I’ve had this iPhone, I’ve only completed 266 full charge cycles. As a result, iFixit rated my battery health as “acceptable” and said it could now only charge to 86% of its original capacity.
She added, “Your capacity is declining. Plan to replace it soon to maintain performance.” It turns out that “soon” is a relative term, as it recommended that the replacement doesn’t actually need to happen until February 2027.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much life this iPhone still has. It’s entirely possible that I’ll replace the battery before then, simply because I like to get a full day of life out of a single charge, and that’s not happening now. But then Andrew Lankson, CNET’s editor-at-large He replaced his iPhone battery last monthI feel confident that I can perform open heart surgery on my phone at home. Plus, I always have iFixit’s Fixbot on hand to help me if I run into trouble.