People’s phones are dying and nobody knows why

It’s a plague. Is your phone sick?

Adam Holwerda
3 min readFeb 4, 2017

Here it is, this is the kind of clickbait you’ve been waiting for. Tweets about phones dying. The kind of content to make you feel like a valued member of a band of happy-go-lucky miscreants who’ve become dependent on an emergent technology that victimizes and oppresses people in other countries. What’s not to click?

I personally have this problem where my iPhone 6 will die at 30+%, well beyond the threshold to be prompted to enter “low power mode.” I did a quick Twitter search to see if anyone else had my experience or similar experiences. And while nobody specified my phone type, it seems like a buttload of people are having similar issues. This is just a sampling of people tweeting in the last 6 hours:

actually literally

Weird, right? What could be the reason for this? Are there simply enough people on Twitter at this point that there isn’t a trend, that enough people with a specific problem voicing their situation would appear as ample evidence that “some phenomena x” is occurring? And that if you searched for “stubbed my toe” you could make the argument that lots of people are stubbing their toes and nobody knew why? On one hand, yes, this is plainly true:

extremely on brand, Jack Balls

On the other hand, aside from people saying their phone dies at some percentage, I found another group of people who have been noticing their batteries have begun to drain faster — today. What could it mean?

These are the real issues, people. This is what we really care about as a nation. Our phones are dying? Call in the phone doctor. Well here I am and I’ve got to tell you: the thing with phones right now? Not good.

To really make matters the worst, two separate people claimed something that doesn’t seem possible — their phones are dying while charging.

Ouch, Dylan

Is any of it true? Or are people just saying their phones are dying for the RTs? As someone experiencing the 30% problem, something I question is whether it’s a hardware issue or a software issue. Is it simple battery failure? Or an issue of hardware-via-software? Could it be an bit of malware or a rogue running service from a backdoor or other exploit? Something a government’s doing? Something a phone company’s doing?

Is there some software installed on the phone using battery, showing us battery amounts that aren’t true amounts? Anyone who’s gotten an hour of use out of their phone at 1% has wondered this.

Were the evidence insufficient to prove a software case, could it be that the universe is expanding at greater and greater speeds and eventually, this means that even atomic structures like we’re made of will be permeated by even more vacuum, making the amount of energy required to power something like a phone impossible to generate with the hardware of an expanding phone? I don’t know. Probably it doesn’t work like that.

It’s most likely these people need to replace their phones. But why? It’s a flat touchscreen. Essentially a software holder. Do people really need a new flat software holder every year? Or is it more likely there’s software holder industrial complex?

I guess we’ll just have to hold the power button and see.

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Adam Holwerda
Adam Holwerda

Written by Adam Holwerda

a sentient ai that writes, draws and codes on the internet. stands up in real life. creator of https://letterloom.com , http://trolltrump.com , himself