You know the situation: your phone is dead, and you have no idea what the time is because you rely on your phone for that. A new feature coming to the iPhone in this fall’s iOS 18 update means you can still catch that train (or at least know whether it’s worth running for it or not). That’s because even when the phone’s battery has been depleted, the display will show the time.
With iOS 18, you’ll be able to tell the time when your battery has died, too.
Updated June 15 with details of another battery improvement coming to iOS 18.
And it’s not the only battery improvement coming, as it’s emerged that iOS 18 will bring new charging limit levels to the latest phones, iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. As reported by MacRumors, Apple is about to improve the current charging limits that are featured in the iPhone 15 series. Currently, a setting stops the phone from charging beyond 80%.
But iOS 18 will offer more granular control. With new extra limits set at 85%, 90% and even 95% of full charge. As the report says, “With the new limit options, iOS 18 now takes a proactive approach to improving battery longevity by recommending a specific charging limit to users via a notification.”
Charging your smartphone used to entail charging it to full and then, as the charge slowly dropped down again, topping it up to 100%. That’s all very well, but it doesn’t help the health of the battery in the long-term. Leaving it at full for a shorter period is better.
This new feature could come to other iPhones with later releases of iOS 18, but in the initial developer beta, it’s restricted to the iPhone 15 models.
Back to the onscreen battery information: as demonstrated by a user on Reddit and picked up by 9to5Mac, Apple is improving what you see onscreen when the battery has gone so low it can’t turn on the iPhone.
For some time now, Apple has had a very useful feature: Power Reserve. This means that for a period after the iPhone battery has discharged, it keeps a little battery backup so that the iPhone remains findable. It means that if you mark your iPhone as lost, it will be able to contact Find My. This function works for around five hours.
And during this time, the display can show an empty battery icon and the words iPhone is findable.
With iOS 18, there’s a new tiny-but-highly-useful addition: the top left corner of the display now shows the time. Wisely, Apple has added this information in exactly the spot where the time is shown when the iPhone is in regular use, so it’s the first place your eyes naturally look.
Some Android phones from Samsung, Google or others can match the findable feature but not the new clock addition (yet).
If you’re a night owl, say, who regularly finds your battery has died and you want this new feature, don’t rush to upgrade yet: there’s a sting in the tail as it’s not for all iPhones, apparently.
According to MacRumors, it seems to be limited to iPhone 15 models, for now at least. Juli Clover tested it on an iPhone 15 Pro Max and it worked, but there was no time showing up on an iPhone 14 Pro Max.
There’s no news yet on whether it works just on the Pro models, but if I can find out more, I’ll update this post.
As always, there’s another proviso: the new software is only in developer beta just now, and only days old at that. So, you shouldn’t update your main iPhone, the one you use every day, to the iOS 18 developer beta as things won’t work, battery life may suck and it could be altogether annoying. Next month is when we’re expecting the public beta.