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.
I’ve noticed this with the Beat Solo 3 too. I have 2 other bluetooth head phones, and my Jabra Move headphones DO show that battery icon, my older Bose SoundLink AE ones don’t show the battery, and the Beats Solo 3 Wireless don’t show the battery info. I thought when they swtiched all bluetooth headphoens to the new icon that the Jabra’s would lose it’s battery status, but it didn’t. I’m thinking the headphones that don’t show it, don’t include the timer/counter that watches how many minutes have passed since charge so the phone doesn’t get that info.
Three icons – left, right, and the charging case.
Must be this. Given you can go to the Today screen and see the status, it’s not a big deal.
Incidentally, I think that headphone icon is new as of 10.2. It used to just show the battery next to the Bluetooth icon.
Out of curiosity, does iOS flash a warning if one of the three is low?
It seems like my Jabra Move headpones did NOT do anything in iOS to warn about low battery. Headphones themselves would play a tone increasing in frequency and you could see on the phone what the approximate remaining charge was. I use my beats most of the time now, and haven’t used the Jabras much since 10.2 due to having the W1 beats.
Do they show up on the swipe-right widgets page on the iPhone? If not, I would guess there will be an update for this.
They do show up in the battery widgets (my Beats Solo3, and poeple have screenshot airpods showing up with each airpod, and charging case status.
If this were the thinking, they could possibly forget about the case in the status bar and do an average of the two in use?
But then you wouldn’t know which AirPod has more charge if you want to switch to single-ear mode.
There aren’t any Beats headphones that have separate batteries like the Airpods. I have Beats Solo 3, but none of the Beats have that complexity.
I heard you have to ask Siri for the charge level then it will show!