Battery Usage

We’re working hard to finish forScore 10.4, so today we’re taking a quick look at a useful but often misunderstood iOS feature: the Battery Usage screen. These usage statistics are found in iOS’ Settings app (in the Battery section) and they show all of the apps that have been used in the last 24 hours or 7 days.

Where people generally get confused is that the numbers shown here are percentages of the total power used, not percentages of your total battery’s capacity. If you start the day with a full battery and end with 80% remaining, then an app’s 50% reading means that it was responsible for half of the power consumed, or just 10% of your total battery’s capacity.

In other words, these percentages are highly relative. If you use an app a lot you can expect to see a higher percentage of usage. If an app’s usage seems higher than it should be for how much you use it, it may be operating in the background or could simply be managing resources poorly.

If you want to learn more about this panel, Apple’s knowledge base article offers a few additional details to help you understand how this information can be useful.