Apple released iOS 16 beta 5 today and with it comes the long-awaited return of battery percentage in the status bar. Unfortunately, it’s ugly as hell and unreadable to boot.
Previously, the battery percentage appeared 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 have to swipe down to the Control Center. In iOS 16, Apple “fixed” this problem by making the figure appear on the battery icon.
(If you’ve updated to the latest beta and don’t see it, it’s because it’s not turned on by default. To turn it on, go to the Battery menu in Settings and turn on the Battery Percentage toggle. . The option also doesn’t appear to be available on the iPhone 11, iPhone 12 mini, and iPhone 13 mini. This could change with future betas, but those are the breaks for now.)
It looks like a shame, something you’d see on a phone circa 2011. From a distance, it looks like the number on a sports jersey, 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 on the battery icon, it must appear fully charged at all times to be readable. So even if you have 10% battery left on your phone, the icon still looks full. In the few hours I’ve had this feature enabled, it’s admittedly short-circuited my brain. A full battery icon that says 55? This just overrides the visual cues we’ve all become accustomed to.
The whole purpose of the battery icon is to quickly understand, at a glance, how much juice you have left. Unfortunately, the “full” battery and tiny 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’re using a light background. Of course, not everyone will have this problem. If you have 20/20 vision, it probably won’t bother you much. I have severe astigmatism and myopia, and some Focus mode lock screens with light backgrounds. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve misread the 50 percent battery figure as 5G.
This is not right. I can’t read this at all. Screenshot: Victoria Song / The Verge
Compare all of this with the low battery icon. Although the unnumbered icon doesn’t tell you exactly how much battery you have left, it’s very easy to figure out a difficult stage. It’s an intuitive design that needs almost no explanation. It’s a small consolation, but at least the battery icon still changes color when you turn on low power mode or plug in the phone. The former turns the icon yellow, while the latter turns it green with a lightning bolt symbol next to it. (Charging also makes the battery icon and numbers bigger and therefore much more readable! Why not do that for normal mode too?!)
It almost feels like Apple has put us through this on purpose. The company is known for its close control over product design, regardless of whether the changes it makes are what people want. (RIP headphone jack.) Apple decided with the iPhone X that we didn’t need the battery percentage in the status bar. It gave us what we considered a satisfactory solution with Control Center. But we all asked for Apple to restore the battery percentage in the top right corner of our phones, and here’s what we got.
I’ll probably turn battery percentage back off. After all, the low battery icon works in the vast majority of situations. And the next time my battery gets dangerously close to zero, I’ll sigh as I slide down to the Control Center, crying over what could have been.