I’m not sure what happened, but now the battery icon on my brand new iPhone 8 is yellow. Is there something wrong with the darn battery already??
Most people don’t realize it, but your iPhone battery icon can be any one of five different colors, to indicate different states of your battery. Yes, five. Normally it’s black if running off battery and green if plugged in, but in some situations you can have a white battery icon and in others, yellow or red. From a user interface perspective, it’s quite reasonable to assume that the yellow battery icon is telling you something’s wrong with the battery, particularly if you see it and you have, say, a 50% battery charge.
So what the heck does it mean to have a yellow battery icon on your brand new iPhone 8? Nothing much, actually. It’s all tied to Low Power Mode on the phone, and it really is nothing to worry about and will fix itself next time you charge the phone.
Here’s how it all works: If your phone gets down to almost no battery the battery icon itself turns red. You’ve undoubtedly seen it, we all have with smartphones. Get low enough and you’ll be prompted to enable Low Power Mode on iOS 9, iOS 10 and iOS 11 in a desperate attempt for your phone to last as long as possible:
As you can see, it disables a lot of background activities, so can be a good way to have your iPhone battery last longer overall, but the impact on your daily routine with your phone might be impacted.
But let’s step back and go through how to enable / disable Lower Power Mode at any point in your day. First off, here’s that anxiety-provoking battery icon:
75% battery and a yellow icon? What the deuce??
Turns out that once Lower Power Mode is enabled due to a low battery, it’s going to remain on until you charge your phone to 80% or more. At that point it just turns off again and you’re back to normal. So one way to fix the yellow battery icon problem is to simply charge your phone. Easy enough.
But if you’d rather have control over when you’re in LPM or not, that’s done in Settings. Look for “Battery” in your main Settings screen:
It’s a bit of a swipe down to find it (or you can search for it in the Settings app, of course) but once you tap on that you’ll find yourself looking at this:
As you can see this is where you can enable or disable Low Power Mode, if you’re so inclined. For example, leave your phone in LPM if you’re running out of juice, but once you go to plug it in for a recharge then go here to change mode so that you aren’t plagued by the yellow battery icon and, of course, so that all of these background features are re-enabled too.
Or, as I said earlier, you can just wait until you’ve more than an 80% charge and let iOS do the work for you:
And now you know all about the exciting world of iOS 11 battery icon colors. 🙂