The iPhones launched in the past two or three years have incredible battery life and can easily last a full day on a single charge. If you turn on power mode you can even expect more than a day’s battery life from your iPhone.

But, on the other hand, the iPhones are the slowest when it comes to charging speeds. These slow charging speeds can be annoying for a lot of users, especially when a lot of Android smartphones can charge within 20 minutes.

iPhones do compensate for slow charging with their long endurance of battery life which can even be further extended with low power mode. Speaking of low power mode, in this post we will be finding out if the iPhones can charge any faster if we try to charge them in low power mode.

Low Power mode on iPhone

Let’s first get to know what exactly is the low power mode in the iPhone. Basically, it helps you to preserve the battery by shutting down the background processes. You can turn on the low power mode on your iPhone from the battery settings or the control centre.

Once you have turned it on, your iPhone will try to preserve as much battery as it can. For instance, it stops all the background sync, the CPU doesn’t run on its max frequency and the refresh rate of the iPhone is also locked at 60 Hz. 

The low power mode is complete software integration and it doesn’t have anything to do with the hardware.

Charging the iPhone with low Power mode turned on

You can definitely charge your iPhone while it is in low power mode. However, charging the iPhone in low power mode does not affect the charging speeds of the phone in any case. This means the answer to our main question does iPhone charges faster while in low power mode is a big NO.

In our testing, the iPhone 13 Pro charged from 30 per cent to 47 per cent in about 30 minutes with a 20W official apple adapter. The next day we tried the same test but with low power, mode turned on. Unsurprisingly the iPhone was charged to 47 per cent in 30 minutes from 30 per cent.

After doing the charging test on our iPhone, we can safely say that charging an iPhone in low power mode won’t charge it any faster.

In both cases the iPhone didn’t draw power to anything more than 20W, and neither did we feel that it wants more power while charging in low power mode.

The point to be noted is that the iPhone doesn’t charge at a linear rate. Initially, the iPhone will be charged at 20W but at a later stage, once the iPhone reaches around 70-80 per cent, the charging speed drops drastically to protect the battery’s health and to prevent overheating.

iPhone launched after 2018 does support fast charging and can be charged from 0 to 50 per cent in about 30 minutes when charged with the official 20W adapter and the official cable.

Once the phone reaches above 50 per cent, it starts to slow down the charging speed and when it hits 80 per cent the iPhone starts to trickle charge. On trickle charge, the iPhone is only charged at a speed of around 4-5 watts to maintain the battery’s health.

Also, if you have enabled the optimized battery charging feature, then it can take even longer to charge from 80- 100 per cent.

There are a lot of different factors that are involved in the fast charging of the iPhone. Your iPhone should be as cool as possible to charge fast, and it should also have the official fast charging brick and the cable to charge it efficiently.

The iPhone 12 series and above also supports fast wireless charging. But the fast 15W wireless charging is only supported with MagSafe wireless chargers. Otherwise, it will only be charged with 10W. The MagSafe wireless chargers need to be bought separately from the Apple store.

Wireless charging is never the efficient way to charge your iPhone and there is a lot of energy wastage, so always try to do wired charging when you are in a hurry.