How to check if my iPhone battery is original?

Is there any way to check if an iPhone battery is the original one or not? Yes, actually there are 3 possible ways.

There are 3 ways to check if an iPhone battery is the original one;

• Comparing your battery maximum capacity with Apple values
• Checking the battery health data in Settings
• Checking the analytics file to find if the battery has been changed.

I will go through each possible way, from the easiest one to the more complex one. Only the last way will tell you for sure if your iPhone battery has already been replaced once.

Check your iPhone battery capacity to know if it’s original

The first way to check if your iPhone battery has been replaced with a non-official battery, you can check the maximum capacity of your battery, and compare it with what Apple says it should be.

To check your iPhone battery's original capacity, you can follow the tutorial and use the Siri Shortcut I’ve made here. It’s really easy to perform.

Now, you have to know what the battery capacity of your iPhone model announced by Apple. It’s not always easy to find the information, therefore I’ve made a short table

Original battery capacity per iPhone model

It’s still normal to see a small difference between what the Shortcut says and what Apple announced as every battery is different. Two identical batteries still can have a small difference in capacity.

However, if you see a difference of more than 200 mAh, there is a big chance that your iPhone battery has been replaced by a non-official battery.

Checking your iPhone battery health settings

Another way to detect if your iPhone battery is original or not is to check your iPhone battery health settings. Indeed, your iPhone can only check the battery health of Apple's original battery.

To do this, go to Settings -> Battery -> Battery Health & Charging. If your iPhone battery is original, you should see the Maximum capacity value, and no message saying that your iPhone can’t detect battery capability, depending on your iPhone model.

For example, on my iPhone 13, I got this page.

If you have anything different, your battery might have been already replaced.

Detect if your iPhone’s battery has been changed in the Analytics files

The last way to find out if your iPhone battery has been replaced, even by an official Apple battery, is to analyze the analytics file. There are many data about the battery contained in the Analytics files of your iPhone.

You might need to enable the sharing of Analytics files first. Go to Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Analytics & Improvements and check if “Share iPhone & Watch Analytics” is enabled. If it’s not, enable it, and wait a day to get an analytic file.

The following steps are less easy to do and are more for advanced users. You will find the analytics files in “Analytics Data”, click on the latest Analytics-*-.ips.ca file you will find, and share it to be able to retrieve it on your computer. You can either send it by email, or save it to your iPhone first, and transfer it to your computer later.

Once the file is on your computer, open it with a text editor, I personally use Visual Studio Code. You will find a line somewhere with data about the battery, there are two important values that you can search for:

• last_value_OriginalBattery - If this value is set to null, then your iPhone battery is an original one
• last_value_BatterySerialChange - If this value is set to false, then your iPhone battery has never been replaced.

If you want to see more about your iPhone battery, I answered 7 questions you could have here.

Author

Maxime Levesque

Maxime Levesque is a technical engineer with more than 5 years of professional experience. He is an expert in computer and phones, mostly on Apple products. Maxime is also the founder of TechBrowser.

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