Avoiding the Temptation to Replace Your Own iPhone Battery

There are a few factors that tend to be most important to the average smartphone owner, and battery life is at or near the top of nearly any such list. We all want a smartphone with an extended battery life that won’t die on us at inopportune times, and when a given battery begins to wear down or decrease in life, many smartphone owners are naturally looking for solutions.

At FixIT Mobile, we’re here to help. Our phone repair services, which extend to a comprehensive range of both iPhone and Android products, cover several areas, including charging and battery concerns you might be dealing with, such as decreasing battery life. One potential option here is to replace your battery with a newer version that has improved battery life – but there are some significant risks to attempting this kind of fix on your own, and some important reasons why you should leave this to our smartphone repair professionals. Here’s a primer on phone battery life, the risks you’re taking by attempting to replace a battery yourself, and a word on why our team is best suited to handle these needs.

Smartphones and Battery Life

As we alluded to above, the simple reality of phone batteries, or basically any battery for that matter, is that battery life will decrease over time. Batteries do not maintain their initial capacity for their entire existence; rather, this capacity diminishes as they are repeatedly charged and depleted (the methods you use here often play some role in how fast this happens, but it will happen eventually regardless).

Some smartphone manufacturers, including Apple for parts of its history, have offered battery replacement options for some of their models; others don’t. However, even if you’re able to obtain a replacement battery you’re confident in, we strongly recommend against attempting to perform this replacement on your own. Our next several sections will go over why we make this recommendation and the risks you’re facing if you ignore it.

Warranty and Insurance Voiding Risks

Let’s use iPhone as our example here, as all new iPhones typically come with a standard one-year warranty when you purchase them. This is great! However, it comes with some important fine print: The warranty only covers accidental damage, such as dropping your phone in water, cracking the screen or some other mistake. If other forms of damage occur, including those you had more control over, they will not be covered.

And as those paying attention to this point have probably already figured out, opening up the phone to replace its battery absolutely does not count as accidental damage. Rather, it’s purposeful damage, the type you take with full intent. The process of opening up a phone is significant, unlike that flip phone you might have owned a decade ago, and any minor evidence of tampering or even opening the phone whatsoever will void your warranty.

In addition, this behavior voids additional forms of phone insurance as well. These are often purchased as a way of protecting your phone, but similar to your basic warranty plan, they usually only cover limited forms of damage – forms that don’t include intentionally opening up the phone without training.

Replacement Battery Concerns

In addition to the above, you may not realize how often these attempts end up not only voiding your warranty or insurance plan, but doing so while providing no actual battery improvement. Even if you’re able to get the phone open and replace the battery without any issues, which is a reach given the expertise this requires, how can you be sure the battery you’ve purchased is robust?

Simply put, you generally can’t. Most phone manufacturers have completely stopped selling viable battery replacements, meaning you’ll be left scouring the secondary market and hoping you aren’t ripped off. There’s no way to truly know whether a battery is robust until it’s in your phone and operating, so the likelihood of scams here goes way up.

Damage Other Phone Components

And of course, any attempt to replace your own phone battery poses significant risks of damage to internal components. Replacing a smartphone battery properly involves several tools you probably don’t have any experience with – in fact, you probably don’t even have them in your home, and you might end up using alternatives that aren’t approved instead.

Even if you somehow manage to acquire the right tools, do you know how to use them properly? If not, you could easily end up moving around exposed wires, interrupting some feature of the phone like the camera or audio components. We also see numerous issues of DIY battery replacement attempts where the user was unable to get the phone back together, or where the phone simply won’t turn on after the attempt is made – and these issues will simply cost you more to remedy. What you had hoped would be a cheap way out of your problem will actually turn into a more expensive issue.

Work With the Pros

For all of the above reasons, it’s vital to work with qualified phone repair professionals for these and similar phone repair needs. We have extensive experience with battery and charger issues for every smartphone model out there, and we’ll both recommend the proper action and carry it out for you depending on your needs. You avoid any risks of voiding warranties or damaging other phone components, plus ensure you actually get a battery upgrade through our team of pros.

For more on the risks of DIY phone battery replacement, or to learn about any of our phone repair, tablet repair and other device repair services, speak to the staff at FixIT Mobile today.