Apple released iOS 16 beta 5 today, and with it comes the long-awaited return of the battery percentage in the status bar. Unfortunately, it’s ugly as hell and unreadable to boot.
Previously, the battery percentage was displayed to the left of the battery icon. However, Apple did away with it starting with the iPhone X because there wasn’t enough room to cram it in thanks to the notch. To find out your battery percentage, you currently need to swipe down to the Control Center. In iOS 16, Apple “solved” this problem by making the figure appear in the battery icon.
(If you’ve updated to the latest beta version and don’t see it, it’s because it’s not enabled by default. To turn it on, you need to go to the Battery menu in Settings and turn on the Battery percentage switch. It looks like the option is also not available on iPhone 11, iPhone 12 mini, and iPhone 13 mini. This may change with future betas, but for now, those are the breaks.)
It looks like an eyesore—something you’d see on a phone circa 2011. From a distance, it looks like a jersey number, and not in a good way. However, I admit that this is my personal aesthetic taste. My biggest issue is that this new battery percentage figure also has functional issues.
Since the number appears in the battery icon, it must appear fully charged at all times to be readable. So even if you have a paltry 10 percent battery left on your phone, the icon itself still looks full. In the few hours I used this feature, it really short-circuited my brain. A full battery icon that says 55? It just interferes with the visual cues we’re all used to.
The whole purpose of the battery icon is to let you know quickly, at a glance, how much juice you have left. Unfortunately, the “full” battery plus the small numbers are not easy on the eyes. This is especially true if you already have poor vision. It doesn’t help that the status bar has always been hard to read if you happen to be using a light background. Of course, not everyone will have this problem. If you have 20/20 vision, this probably won’t bother you much. I happen to have severe astigmatism and nearsightedness and a few locked screens in focus mode with a light background. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve misread the 50 percent battery figure as 5G.
This is not good. I can’t read this at all. Screenshot: Victoria Song / The Verge
Compare all of this with the low battery icon. Although the icon without a number doesn’t tell you exactly how much battery you have left, it’s so easy to get a rough idea. It’s an intuitive design that hardly needs explaining. It’s a small consolation, but at least the battery icon still changes color when you enable low power mode or turn on your phone. The first colors the icon yellow and the second colors it green with a lightning bolt symbol next to it. (Charging also makes the battery icon and numbers bigger and thus much more readable! Why not do this for regular mode as well?!)
It almost seems like Apple put us through this on purpose. The company is known for its precise control over product design — whether or not the changes it makes are what people want. (RIP headphone jack.) Apple decided with the iPhone X that we didn’t need a battery percentage in the status bar. He gave us what we felt was a satisfactory solution with Control Center. But we’ve all been clamoring for Apple to restore the battery percentage in the top right corner of our phones, and here’s what we got.
I’ll probably go back to turning off the battery percentage. After all, the low battery icon works in most situations. And the next time my battery gets dangerously close to zero, I’ll heave a heavy sigh as I swipe down to Control Center, lamenting what could have been.
Add Comment