This tweak displays a notification when your AirPods case gets low on battery

AirPods

Your AirPods are a piece of peripheral hardware with no useful battery indicator on them apart from a few limited features that are built into iOS. For example, you can open your AirPods case to view the battery percentage in the pairing interface, or you can look at the Today widget to see the remaining battery life for any paired AirPods.

These limitations mean that it’s easy to wear your AirPods’ battery down to near-zero, and this includes the charging case you use to keep them kicking all day long. At some point, they’ll just run out of battery, but with a newly released and free jailbreak tweak called AirPods Case Low Battery by iOS developer Jackson Sykes, you can at least receive a low battery notification banner when the charging case’s charge gets too low for comfort.

In the screenshot example above, you’ll see what one of these notification banners looks like. It behaves similar to the iPhone’s native low battery alert, popping up only when your AirPods’ charging case dips below a certain percentage. But there is a tiny caveat…

It’s worth noting that this can only work if your AirPods are in their case while it is open, as this is a hardware limitation imposed by Apple since the charging case itself doesn’t have Bluetooth capabilities and it can only communicate with your iPhone through connected AirPods. That said, you’ll only receive a notification if your AirPods charging case is low and you begin pulling your AirPods out of their case or putting them back inside.

Albeit a somewhat maddening limitation, the good news is that you’ll be alerted when your charging case is low on juice the next time you go to use your AirPods. This means you can charge the charging case after you begin using your AirPods and it won’t interrupt your flow too much. Then again, if you don’t use your AirPods often, then there’s a change they and the case could die without you ever receiving a single alert.

AirPods Case Low Battery does add a preference pane to the Settings app where you can configure the tweak to your liking:

Here, you can:

  • Toggle low battery notifications on or off on demand
  • Configure the battery level you consider ideal for receiving low battery notifications (default 20%)
  • Adjust the alert cool-down time frame, after which the next low battery alert will come through

The developer includes a button to apply your changes at the bottom of the preference pane, but notes that a respring isn’t required.

If you’re onboard with the caveats and understand how this can be used to prevent you from having a bad day with your AirPods, then you can download AirPods Case Low Battery for free from the Dynastic Repo repository via your preferred package manager. The tweak supports jailbroken iOS 13 devices and should work with both AirPods and AirPods Pro.

Do you plan to give this tweak a try, or is the caveat of using it a deal-breaker for you? Discuss in the comments section below.