Finding True Battery Health of your iPhone & iPad using Shortcuts

A Guide to Navigating the Battery Health Features on iOS

Back in 2018, Apple introduced the Battery Health status option with iOS 11.3. This feature was a boon and allowed users to understand the battery health of their iPhones but (and there is always a BUT) the recalibration time needed for this type of battery checkup induced a lot of unintended anxiety for users. The Battery Health would give a percentage value — 100% for most newly purchased iPhones and according to Apple, this value would gradually drop to about 80% within two years which is perfectly normal for the Li-Ion batteries.

However, some users noticed that their iPhones would have 100% BH even after months of usage or sometimes drop drastically below 80–90% within a year or two. Personally, I have had a weird record of Battery Health percentages from the Settings App on iPhone but then I watched this video of Brandon Butch where he used an iOS Shortcut to find out the battery health directly from the log files on the iPhone.

Now, the Log Files stored on iPhone are probably the most accurate way of finding information about your iPhone as these are generated everyday by your iPhone to be sent to Apple. I customised these shortcuts from Brandon to work for more minute details such as Nominal Charge Capacity (NCC) and Maximum Full Charge Capacity (Max FCC). Here is a bit of context as to why these terms are important — when Li-Ion batteries are manufactured, they are not manufactured perfectly to scale i.e if Apple states that the iPhone XS has a battery capacity of 2658 mAh then its not necessary for every iPhone XS to have that very exact value to the last mAh which means it could have maybe 2600 mAh or even 2700 mAh. That’s the way they are designed. The maximum capacity your iPhone comes charged with is the Max FCC. As you use your phone and it loses battery health (which is very typical of Li-Ion batteries), the NCC goes down giving you a measure of your current charge capacity compared to when the battery was new (with Max FCC).

Now let’s see what we can do to find battery health from the iPhone or iPad’s log files:

Step 1: Save these two iOS Shortcuts on your iPhone/iPad