How To Get Battery Percentage On Iphone 5

How to see your battery percentage on an iPhone

iPhone 12 Pro Max displaying battery percentage

(Image credit: Laptop Mag)

Finding the exact battery percentage on an iPhone unfortunately isn't as easy as it used to be as Apple removed the ability to have it permanently in your status bar alongside the battery icon.

You can get a general idea of where things stand from the icon alone, but sometimes 10-15% can make a real difference and that isn't so easy to parse on that tiny icon. There's no magic trick to get it back in the status bar, but here are the fastest and easiest ways to see your battery percentage on an iPhone.

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The easiest way to see your battery percentage on iPhone

Swipe down from the top-right corner of your screen
Look in the upper-right corner of Control Center and you'll see your battery percentage

This quick and easy method doesn't require much effort, but it does remove the glanceability of the old method. If you want that back, you'll need to turn to the widgets that were introduced with iOS 14 this year.

Long press on an open spot on the home screen.
Tap on the "+" button in the upper-left corner of the screen.
Scroll down and select "batteries."
Choose the battery widget that you would like and tap "Add widget" at the bottom of the screen.
Place the widget wherever you prefer.

iOS 14 steps to add a battery widget — (Image credit: Laptop Mag)

That's all there is to it, now you have your battery percentage easily glanceable on your home screen or multiple home screens if you like. Of the three available options, two of them will also display the battery life of any other devices that you have connected to your iPhone like an Apple Watch or AirPods.

While I still find it frustrating that Apple doesn't simply allow you to view the precise battery percentage in the status bar anymore, these two techniques render it a lot less irritating and with the widgets actually give you some helpful added info with the look at your battery life across all of your connected devices. Rumors persist that Apple will be adding an always-on display mode to the iPhone 13 and if that holds true battery percentage would be a prime use case and may finally make this information effortlessly glanceable again.

Sean Riley has been covering tech professionally for over a decade now. Most of that time was as a freelancer covering varied topics including phones, wearables, tablets, smart home devices, laptops, AR, VR, mobile payments, fintech, and more. Sean is the resident mobile expert at Laptop Mag, specializing in phones and wearables, you'll find plenty of news, reviews, how-to, and opinion pieces on these subjects from him here. But Laptop Mag has also proven a perfect fit for that broad range of interests with reviews and news on the latest laptops, VR games, and computer accessories along with coverage on everything from NFTs to cybersecurity and more.