Apple releases iOS 11.3 with battery health feature

Apple released iOS 11.3 on Thursday evening. Among other things, the update brings the ‘Battery Health’ feature to iPhones, which allows users to understand capacity and undo performance degradation.

After updating to iOS version 11.3, iPhone 6 or later model users can find the ‘Battery Condition’ feature from the Battery menu in the settings. The function consists of two parts. With Maximum Capacity, Apple shows the percentage of capacity that is left over when the battery was first put into use.

Under the Peak Performance section, iOS clarifies if a power management feature has been applied because the battery’s condition has deteriorated. In practice, this means that the software lowers performance to prevent spikes in power demand from overcharging the battery and shutting down the iPhone. Apple was criticized for this because the company had kept silent about lowering the performance.

Other innovations in iOS 11.3 include an update of ARKit to version 1.5. The feature can now display virtual objects on vertical surfaces such as posters in the augmented reality view. The resolution of the display via the camera has also been increased and there is autofocus. There are also four new Animoji for iPhone X users and businesses can chat with customers via Business Chat in Messages.

Finally, iOS 11.3 brings a host of bug fixes and patches for security vulnerabilities to the operating system, including a series of patches for WebKit and one for Safari that impacted when a user visited a malicious site.