If you were one of those people disappointed by Apple's reimplementation of its battery percentage feature in iOS 16, there's some hope for you.
The iOS 16.1 beta 2 released to developers today updated the feature to be more dynamic, so the battery icon changes as your battery power goes down.
If you look at the picture above, you can see that in the new beta, the battery icon moves rather than being shown as "full" the entire time (see picture below).
Since the feature was re-introduced to users in iOS 16 about a month ago, it's been the subject of criticism for being hard to read and downright unuseful at a glance. Our iMore contributor Karen Freeman hated the battery percentage feature when it was revealed, and I tend to agree that the first implementation had a bunch of issues.
When you put your best iPhone in Low Power Mode, the battery icon still turns yellow as it did before, but the new version keeps changing, unlike the static old version. We will have to see exactly how this feature works as you dip lower in battery power.
The old becomes new again
The battery percentage feature was initially taken out of Apple's UI with the introduction of the notch on the iPhone X in 2017. The reasoning was that the notch took too much room.
The iPhone 13 shrunk the notch, while the latest iPhone 14 Pro removes the old notch for the new Dynamic Island, which takes up even less room and isn't attached to the top edge of the iPhone at all.
In August, the battery percentage feature came back in the iOS 16 beta to only some phones, and Apple just recently rolled out the feature to other older iPhone models as well.
Glad to see Apple listening to feedback from users and developers alike, and I'll be interested to see if Apple decides to make any other changes to the battery percentage feature in the future.
