With iOS 18, iPhone users will still be able to see the time even if the handset’s battery is dead. This feature was spotted by a Redditor and it will allow an iPhone user to see the current time on the handset’s status bar. You might have seen how you can get the time of day even if your Apple Watch battery has already bought the farm. Apple had previously added a feature in iOS 15 allowing users to find a lost or missing iPhone using the Find My app even if the iPhone’s battery is out of juice.
This is an interesting little feature that will be useful to iPhone users who don’t wear a watch and depend on the clock on their iPhone to know what time it is. This is different than the always-on screen which debuted on the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max. The always-on screen shows a dimmed version of your Lock Screen allowing you to view the date and time, notifications, and information from your Lock Screen widgets. Note that the always-on screen doesn’t work when you have the phone on Low Power Mode.
While the always-on display is on by default, you can disable it by going to Settings > Display & Brightness, then turn off Always On Display. But as we said, this is different than the new feature and a photo of it in action has been shared by Reddit user ant_t99. The image reveals an iPhone screen with a dead battery and the time can be seen in the upper left status bar. Apparently, this feature is one of the new ones for iOS 18 that is already available on the iOS 18 developer beta.
While the iOS 18 developer beta was released after Monday’s WWDC Keynote, the first public beta of iOS 18 will be available sometime in July. The final stable version of iOS 18 will launch in September around the same time that the new iPhone 16 series is released.