Adaptive capabilities in iOS 26 are about to make your iPhone smarter for charging
Usually, I am the one who adapts to behavior based on the remaining power in the iPhone, but starting this fall, I can ask the iPhone to do more adaptability. The new adaptive power settings in iOS 26 can expand battery power by intelligently trimming energy usage in a smaller way, which adds up to the time before recharge.
See: Adaptive capabilities in iOS 26 can save the iPhone 17 air from this big trap
Currently, iPhones use as many features as possible to perform their tasks. You can extend battery life by doing many things like reducing the screen brightness and turning off the always-on display. Or, if your battery level starts to become scary, you can activate low-power mode, reducing background activity, such as getting emails and downloading data, in addition to these screen tweaks. Low power mode will also start automatically when the battery level reaches 20%.
If the low power mode is a knockdown hammer, the adaptive power is a scalpel, which can intelligently save energy here and there as needed. Based on Apple’s description, the description of the control will be mainly a savings in the case of a desire amount (such as recording videos, editing photos, or even playing games :).
“When your battery usage is higher than usual, the iPhone can make smaller performance tunings to extend battery life, including slightly reducing the display brightness or allowing certain activities to take longer. Low-power mode may turn on at 20% of the speed.”
By default, adaptability is not available and you need to opt-in to use it. In iOS 26, you will find the adaptive power switch in Settings > Battery > Power Mode.
In iOS 26, turn on the Adaptive Power option to help extend battery life. (The developer build shown here for iOS 26.)
Since adaptive capabilities seem to be using AI to determine which settings and processes to adjust, I suspect the feature will be available on an iPhone model that supports Apple Intelligence, which includes the iPhone 15 Pro and later. Regarding the adaptive Reddit threads show this is the case, and the commentator notes that it is not displayed and beta is installed in the iPhone 13 Pro or Iphone 14 Pro models.
Adaptive power sounds like the product of the game mode introduced in iOS 18, which routes all available processing and graphics power to the front-end app and pauses other processes to provide the best experience – at the expense of obvious battery life.
While we all want as much battery life as possible, it sounds as if the optimization of adaptive capabilities isn’t always active, even if you keep the features. “When your battery usage is higher than usual” may include a limited number of cases. Still, given the CNET survey, 61% of people upgraded their phones due to battery life, features like adaptive power only extend the phone’s life by updating to iOS 26.
I also wonder if slight adjustment of the display brightness will break. However, since this function is also a processing task that selectively cancels priority processing, it indicates that the external effect will be minimal.
As the iOS 26 Beta program approaches its expected release date for September or October, we’ll learn more about how adaptive power works – often, battery optimization is the last tweak to an operating system developed before shipping. If you want to start giving iOS 26 spins, you can download the first developer beta right now; public beta is expected in July. Remember that beta software poses risks, especially the first iteration of the recent lab setup from Apple.
Watch the following: I was deeply impressed by iOS 26. Apple just made iPhone better
