The new battery percentage icon in iOS 16.
It’s only a matter of a few weeks before we can all get our hands on iOS 16 on the iPhone. It will for sure be available on the iPhone 14 series but plenty of other phones besides, all the way back to the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X from 2017.
While there’s lots to look forward to, one recent unexpected update has really caught people’s imagination, and it’s just improved. It’s the onscreen percentage update.
Returning to Face ID iPhones for the first time since 2017, it means you no longer have to swipe down from the top corner to see exactly how many percentage points your battery has left.
The change comes in the sixth version of preview software for iOS 16, which has just become available for anyone using the public beta.
In the fifth beta, the toggle to turn on Low Power Mode automatically turned on the battery percentage feature as well. If you wanted Low Power Mode, you had to agree to the percentage being displayed.
Will the onscreen percentage indicator come to more iPhones?
All very well, but not everyone has welcomed the way the new feature is implemented, pointing out that because the percentage digits appeared on a white background that remained constant, (that is, the white area didn’t shrink as it used to on the previous battery icon), that it was easy to misread the battery strength if you only glanced at it.
So, now, if you don’t like the new way of looking at it, you can ensure you don’t get it accidentally if your phone slumps to low power mode levels.
Things are almost certainly not finished being refined at this stage, so there could still be big changes, but there’s still one big sting in the tail.
That’s the fact that not every Face ID phone can display the percentage whether you want it to or not. The excluded models are the iPhone 13 mini, iPhone 12 mini, iPhone XR and iPhone 11.
There’s no reason revealed for why, but it seems likely that space is the reason on the two mini models. As for the other two, well, they both have LCD screens, and are the only Face ID models with this screen technology.
It seems pretty clear that the 326 pixels per inch resolution is not enough to display the new battery icon with percentage figure on it to satisfy Apple’s demanding designers.
There’s still time for all this to change, of course.
