Water resistance after replacing battery

Hi Evan,

Be aware that unless you replace the battery under Apple's self repair program, you will run into a couple of issues with a replacement, whether you use a genuine Apple battery or not.

First, you will lose the ability to view the battery health information, an excellent tool that lets you know when it's time to replace the battery. Secondly, you will get a pop-up warning every time you restart your phone for about a week to the effect that the phone is not able to determine whether the battery is genuine. After that the pop-up will go away, but will still show up as a permanent badge on your Settings icon.

There are ways around this issue, but of course Apple had to turn a simple battery replacement into surgery. The aftermarket industry has figured out that you can avoid the non genuine parts warning by transferring the BMS, or battery management system, from the old battery to a new battery cell. This involves cutting off the original one and spot welding it onto a new battery cell; manufacturers now sell them without the BMS for just that purpose.

However, that still leaves you with the original battery health information, so if your battery health had deteriorated to, say, 70%, it will still read that after putting in a new cell. It used to be that you could take a device programmer such as a JC V1S or QianLi iCopy and write the health percentage back to 100 and the cycle count to zero, but of course Apple has deliberately disabled the ability to do that any longer.

Naturally, some very smart people figured out how to defeat that by using something called a tag-on flex cable. It's a tiny circuit board that gets mounted in between the battery and the motherboard, and allows you to write the battery data just like you used to be able to. When the phone is reassembled, the tag-on flex stays inside permanently. The downside is that you still need a device programmer to clear the health information, but I recall seeing one advertised as coming pre-programmed such that you wouldn't need to program it. That'll save you like $80 if you don't need a programmer.

So anyway, that's what Apple has been actively working on to keep people from being able to repair their own phones. The longer we go without right to repair laws, the worse they get; it started in earnest after the iPhone X, and has reached the zenith of unreparability with the iPhone 15. Screens and batteries were the first things to be targeted, and it's progressed with each new model.

So there you go, you basically have three choices; pay Apple for the repair or use their self repair option (which doesn't actually seem to save you much money), plan on a repair that requires several extra tools and surgery, or live with the loss of function and bogus warning messages. You can thank Apple for that.