Learn how to set up automation on your iPhone that turns off Low Power Mode when Adaptive Power Mode activates it automatically.
First, a few basics to get everyone up to speed.
Adaptive Power Mode in iOS 26 and later makes a number of background adjustments, such as lowering screen brightness by 3% and limiting certain background activity to give you more usage time on a single charge.
Another notable thing that Adaptive Power does is automatically turn on Low Power Mode when your iPhone’s battery drops to 20%. Without Adaptive Power, you just see a banner at 20% battery, and you get to decide whether to enable Low Power Mode or not.
Adaptive Power Mode is enabled out of the box on the iPhone Air and all iPhone 17 series phones. You can also choose to enable it manually on the iPhone 15 Pro and later by going to Settings > Battery > Power mode.
I chose to keep Adaptive Power Mode on on my iPhone, without its notifications. I don’t really see a performance drop.
However, I don’t like using Low Power Mode especially because it disables the high 120Hz ProMotion screen refresh rate and the device lags a lot. I don’t like it so much that even when my iPhone battery drops to 20%, I don’t want low power mode to activate. And as mentioned earlier, Adaptive Power Mode turns on Low Power Mode automatically without my permission when the battery reaches 20%.
So to stop that from happening, I set up a simple automation that tells my iPhone to never go into low power mode.
Automatically turn off Low Power Mode on iPhone if it’s ever been enabled
The steps here are updated for iOS 27 (currently in beta).
1) Open Apple Shortcuts app on your iPhone.
2) Tap that back button in the upper left corner and select Default.
3) Tap that the merge button to create a new automation.
4) Now, you can have Apple Intelligence set up automation for you by asking it to “create a default that automatically turns off Low Power Mode if it’s ever enabled.”
Wait a few seconds for the AI to work on your automation.
5) Once the default is created, ask Siri and ask it to turn on Low Power Mode. Siri will do that, but you’ll see that the battery icon isn’t dead yet because these new devices just turned off.
6) In case Apple Intelligence fails to build automation, or you don’t use Apple Intelligence, or you want to dig deeper into automation, or if you want to simulate this in iOS 26, press Organize button in the upper right corner. It will take you to the standard shortcut creation screen, where you can see the actions used to create this setup. Tap the small arrow on the first action to confirm the ‘Default‘the switch is on.
Going forward, Low Power Mode will not activate on this iPhone, either automatically or manually.
The downside and its solution
I almost never put my iPhone in Low Power Mode, so the above setup is fine for me. But if you want to use Low Power Mode sometimes, like when you travel, and you try to enable it from Control Center or Battery Settings, you will notice that it turns off again, because of the above default.
This happens because iOS (iOS 27 beta 4 to be exact) doesn’t have Shortcuts app actions for Adaptive Power Mode. As a result, we cannot have iPhone turn off Low Power Mode only if it is automatically turned on with Adaptive Power Mode.
So, if you’ve set the defaults above and still want to use Low Power Mode, follow these steps to disable the defaults. You can turn it back on later.
1) Open the Shortcuts app then go to the default screen.
2) Turn off the switch next to Low Power Mode to disable it.
3) You can now turn on Low Power Mode by asking Siri, in Battery Settings, or Control Center.
4) Flip the same switch back in the future to re-enable the automatic power.
On the other hand: How to force your iPhone to stay in Low Power Mode