Battery percentage returns to the iPhone’s Home Screen. Is it an improvement?
When the iPhone went to a “notched” screen design starting with the iPhone X in 2017, it was no longer possible to display the iPhone’s current battery percentage directly on the Home Screen. Instead, we’ve all spent the last few years swiping down from the top right corner to invoke Control Center in order to see our specific battery percentage. Otherwise we had to rely on a pictorial representation of our battery’s charge status in the top right corner of the screen.
In the latest beta of iOS 16, you can once again add your current battery percentage to the Home Screen by going to Settings > Battery and toggling Battery Percentage on. This does come with a trade off though. As you can see in the screenshot above, while you can see the specific charge percentage at a glance, you no longer get the visual representation of the battery’s status. The entire battery icon is either fully white or fully black depending on the background of the app you’re in.
In practice I find this a mixed bag. I’ve become so accustomed to gauging my remaining battery life by the pictorial indicator that my brain is sometimes tricked into thinking I have more battery than I actually do even though I can read the specific percentage. I suspect this is something I would adjust to, and I’m definitely very glad to have the option to enable this feature, but I also can’t help but wonder if Apple will tweak this design as we approach the final release of iOS 16.