3 iPhone battery myths that just won’t die (and could actually damage your phone)

• Clearing all your recent apps
• Fully charging and discharging your battery
• Only using Apple-branded chargers

If there’s one thing holding back modern smartphones from achieving true greatness, it’s their relative lack of stamina. While compute power, display crispness, and software capabilities have accelerated rapidly in recent years, battery life has admittedly evolved at a much slower pace by comparison.

Now, it’s true that the recent emergence of silicon-carbon battery technology is bringing with it major gains in the energy density department. Nevertheless, these newer power packs still appear to suffer from the same degradation problems as their more traditional lithium-ion relatives, which is troubling.

Thankfully, there are a number of measures that can be taken to preserve the long-term health of a handset’s battery, as well as quick fixes to improve the day-to-day stamina across both iPhone and Android. However, there are also a number of misconceptions circulating around having to do with battery preservation, some of which can actually cause more harm than good in the long run.

Here are three battery-saving and endurance myths that really ought to be left behind as we head into 2026, for the sake of our mobile gadgets’ power pack health.

Clearing all your recent apps

Satisfying? Yes. Effective? Not so much

Anecdotally, I find that most people swipe apps away from their multitasking carousels with fervor. I get it — it feels incredibly satisfying to flick away the clutter, and the action of killing an app feels somewhat analogous to closing a window on a desktop PC. The fact of the matter, however, is that modern mobile operating systems like iOS and Android are designed from the ground up with automatic app management in mind, and so manually closing apps isn’t strictly necessary.

If you have an iPhone and are looking to truly optimize your battery life by way of app management, consider restricting background app refreshes by following the steps outlined in this guide.

In fact, closing an app every single time you finish using it can be downright counterproductive. Rather than allowing the operating system to freeze the app on its own and allocate resources as needed, fully swiping away an app means that it has to be reloaded into memory (RAM) each and every time you launch it again. This not only puts a strain on the system, but also unnecessarily drains battery life when compared to having an app unfreeze naturally when launched.

Fully charging and discharging your battery

You’re better off hovering somewhere around 50%

For one reason or another, many people believe that leading a healthy phone battery lifestyle involves the practice of fully charging and fully discharging its capacity on a regular basis. This misconception likely stems from a battery phenomenon known as the memory effect, which results in a slow loss of total capacity by way of “forgetting” its fully-charged state due to electrode crystallization.

If you want your iPhone’s battery to stay long-lasting well into the future, consider enabling the battery limiter option within Settings to cap charging at about seventy or eighty percent capacity. For more information, check out our dedicated guide on how to get this particular feature up and running.

The memory effect, which traditionally occurs after repeatedly keeping a rechargable battery held in a partially charged-up state, primarily affects older nickel-cadmium rechargeable cells, and not the modern lithium-ion or silicon-carbon batteries found on today’s iPhones and Android devices. As a matter of fact, the batteries used in modern consumer electronics are chemically strained when in a fully charged or discharged state, and they’re most performant and suffer from the least amount of wear and tear at around a half-charged capacity.

Only using Apple-branded chargers

Plenty of third-party options are of the utmost quality

For-profit tech giants like Apple would love nothing more than for you to exclusively purchase first-party charging cables and adapters. Pricey charging peripherals are great for padding bottom lines, and, to be fair, they’re generally of high quality. That being said, the vast majority of third-party chargers won’t harm your iPhone’s battery, even if they aren’t officially certified under Apple’s (monetarily lucrative) Made for iPhone (MFi) Program.

Of course, it’s also true that not all charging equipment is made equal, and shotty products that skimp on quality can sometimes pose genuine safety risks. As a hard and fast rule, I recommend avoiding cheap no-name brand chargers and wall plugs, like the ones you’d find at a gas station or a convenience store. Instead, opt for third-party options from reputable manufacturers. Some of my favorite brands include:

• Anker
• Belkin
• Ugreen
• Spigen
• Satechi
• Twelve South
• Nomad Goods
• Baseus

When it comes to modern USB Type-C charging peripherals, I’d recommend ensuring that your equipment is USB Power Delivery (PD) compliant for safe top-ups, and to reduce the chance of untimely battery degradation.