A YELLOW symbol on your iPhone means your handset isn’t as powerful as it normally would be.
It’s nothing to panic about, but it’s handy for all iPhone owners to know what it means.
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The battery symbol at the top of your iPhone might sometimes appear yellow.
That means that Low Power Mode has been activated, and that’s bad news for iPhone performance.
It’s designed to boost your battery life so that it lasts longer – but at the expense of performance.
“Low Power Mode is an iPhone and iPad feature that extends battery life by reducing the amount of power that your device uses,” Apple explained.
“In Low Power Mode, some features are turned off and some tasks might take longer to complete.”
You’ll know that Low Power Mode is active because your battery icon on the iPhone status bar will turn yellow.
It’s possible to manually turn Low Power Mode on at any time.
And if your battery gets low enough, you’ll be prompted to activate it.
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Once it’s on, it won’t switch off automatically until your iPhone gets back to 80% charge or higher.
Until then, you’ll notice that the performance of your iPhone is degraded.
Apple said that the following features are reduced or affected:
- 5G
- Auto-Lock (defaults to 30 seconds)
- Display brightness
- Display refresh rate
- Some visual effects
- iCloud Photos
- Automatic downloads
- Email fetch
- Background app refresh
It’s possible to turn Low Power Mode off at any time by going into Settings > Battery.
You can also turn it off in the Control Centre, but you’ll need to set it up first.
Just go to Settings > Control Centre > Customise Controls and then add Low Power Mode.
You’ll know that Low Power Mode is often because your battery icon will no longer be yellow.
Of course there are plenty of other reasons why your iPhone performance may be poor.
If it gets too hot or cold, performance can be significantly affected.
You may also experience performance issues if you’ve used too much of your storage.
Apple recommends keeping at least 1GB of storage space free.
And old iPhones tend to perform worse than newer ones, so the age of your device may be to blame.
