I was reading this post from Kirk McElhearn, walking through ways of checking AirPods battery life, when I noticed that the iPhone AirPods icon does not include a battery life icon.

For example, here’s what I see with my Bluetooth headphones. Note the headphone icon in the upper right, showing the battery life left in my headphones.

While the AirPods do show up as a Headphone icon on the iPhone, they do not include a battery level indicator in the icon. Any idea why this is?

There’s a Twitter thread on this here. Feel free to weigh in.

One thought is that the AirPods would require three different battery icons (left and right, plus the case itself), perhaps too much clutter for the limited space.

UPDATE: Curiouser and curiouser. Looks like anything with a W1 chip loses the battery sub-icon in the iPhone status bar. Powerbeats 3 have a single charge source (mini USB plug) and do not have the battery sub-icon. Certainly not a big deal, but I am a curious fellow.