Batteries wear out gradually, so it's easy to adjust your habits around a failing one without realising how bad it's actually gotten. Here are the signs worth paying attention to.
1. It drains fast, or shuts down out of nowhere
If your phone drops from 30% to 0% in a few minutes, or switches off suddenly even though it showed charge remaining, the battery is likely no longer holding a stable charge. This is one of the clearest and most common signs.
2. It runs hot during normal use
Some warmth during heavy use (gaming, navigation, charging) is normal. A phone that gets noticeably hot just browsing or sitting idle, though, often points to a battery working harder than it should to hold its charge.
3. Battery health has dropped well below 100%
On iPhone, you can check this directly: go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging. Once that number drops into the 70–80% range or lower, you'll usually start noticing real differences in how long the phone lasts. Android phones vary by brand in how they report this — some show a similar figure under Settings > Battery, others don't expose it at all, in which case the signs below matter more than a single number.
4. The phone or battery looks swollen
5. Charging takes much longer than it used to
If a full charge now takes noticeably longer than it did when the phone was new, or the phone loses a meaningful amount of charge overnight while switched off, that's a sign the battery's capacity has genuinely degraded — not just a software quirk.
What to do next
One or two of these on their own might not mean much. Several together, especially rapid drain plus heat, are a strong sign it's time for a replacement. It's a quick, same-day fix in most cases.
Related: repair or replace a broken phone?
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