Enable a battery percentage meter to appear in the upper-right corner of your Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and know precisely how much battery power you have left.
iPhone or iPad iOS 4 & Higher
- From the Home screen, tap “Settings“.
- Choose “General“.
- Choose “Usage“.
- Switch “Battery Percentage” to “On“.
iPhone, iPad with iOS 3 & Lower or iPod Touch
You’ll have to hack the device using iBackupBot. Please be careful if you intend to follow these steps as doing the wrong thing can damage your device.
- Connect and sync your iOS device with iTunes on your computer.
- Download and install iBackupBot on your computer.
- Disable automatic syncing in iTunes by going to “Edit” > “Preferences” > “Devices” and check “Prevent iPods, iPhones and iPads from syncing automatically“.
- Close iTunes and launch “iBackupBot“.
- Connect your device to the computer using the USB cable. iBackupBot should detect the device.
- Select the latest backup you have on the left side.
- Expand “System Files” > “HomeDomain” > “Library” > “Preferences“.
- Open the “com.apple.springboard.plist” file by double-clicking on it. Click “Cancel” on the dialog that appears afterwards.
- Scroll down to the bottom and place this line right before the </dict> tag:
<key>SBShowBatteryLevel</key>
<true/>
- Close and save the file.
- Check the box next to the line that says “Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist“, then click the “Restore” button at the top bar.
- Your device will now go through a restore process. When it restarts, the battery meter will appear at the top right portion of the screen.
Stenseven says
The iBackupBot fix works great on the iPod 6. Very surprised Apple didn’t include battery percentage on their product since it’s much more useful compared to viewing the icon. Will weirdness never cease?
Mitch Bartlett says
You should be able to replace “true” with “false” to undo your changes.
Josiah says
Hey, could you email me instructions to undo what you walked me through…I edited my iPod touch backup and when I got a iPhone I restored it to the iPod touch backup, and now I can’t turn off the battery percentage on my iPhone.