What is Low Power Mode?

This option, which you’ll find at the top of the Settings > Battery page, is an easy way to increase your

iPhone’s battery life. Turn it on and it immediately lowers the brightness of the screen, turns off apps’ ability to refresh data in the background, stops the phone listening for “Hey Siri” all the time if you have that turned on, and limits swish animations. Add all these up and it will result in hours of extra battery life. When it’s turned on, the battery status icon is yellow. It automatically turns off when the battery hits 80% full during charging.

You can make it really easy to turn on Low Power Mode by adding an item to Control Centre. Go to Settings > Control Centre > Customise Controls, find the Low Power Mode option and tap the green plus symbol next to it. It will be added to the bottom of the list; drag from the handles on the right if you want to reorder the list.

Make it permanent

A lot of what Low Power Mode does can be mimicked on a permanent basis, by turning off the right things in Settings. Go to Siri & Search and turn off ‘Listen for “Hey Siri”’. Next, go to Display & Brightness and turn down the brightness (and turn off TrueTone if your device has it). Now, in iTunes & App Store, turn off Updates in Automatic Downloads. Then, go to General > Accessibility and turn on Reduce Motion to stop iOS performing some of its more graphically taxing animations. Finally, tweak Background App Refresh as explained in the box to the right.