Signs of reverse wireless charging found in iPhone 11

Sep 21, 2019 18:23 GMT  ·  By

Earlier this year, people familiar with Apple’s iPhone plans revealed that the new-generation model would come with support for bilateral wireless charging, something which at that point made total sense given Android devices already boasted such capabilities.

Bilateral wireless charging, or reverse wireless charging, allows a smartphone to act as a power bank and charge other devices wirelessly.

In the case of iPhone 11, such a feature would have made it possible to recharge the Apple Watch or AirPods on the go without the need for a traditional charger.

However, bilateral wireless charging is missing from the iPhone 11 despite the earlier speculation, with Apple not saying a single word about it during the September 10 launch event.

This was a bit surprising, but what was even more surprising was the evidence that bilateral wireless charging was actually implemented on the iPhone 11, only that it wasn’t enabled. This gave hopes that Apple could activate the feature at one point in the future with an iOS update.

Contradictory reports

During a quick teardown, iFixit also came across evidence that some work in this area has indeed been done on the iPhne 11.

“With the phone powered on, we disconnected the lower battery connector and the phone stayed on and charged via the Lightning port, but not over wireless charging. Seems this extra connector is a direct line to the wireless charging coil, which could be an important feature for bilateral charging!” iFixit says.

“What's more, when we reconnected the cable, our phone displayed a momentary temperature warning before returning to normal. We suspect it lost contact with an important battery temperature sensor and shut itself down; this sounds a lot like a reverse wireless charging heat management feature to us.”

And yet, Rene Ritchie of iMore says reverse wireless charging has never been a feature that Apple wanted to bring to the iPhone 11. So no, there’s no hardware to make this happen and it won’t be activated by an iOS update.

“It’s my understanding bilateral inductive charging wasn’t pulled from the iPhones 11. It was never slated for production and there isn’t anything in there that could be enabled later. (It would also be dumb to ship it without Watch support…)” he posted.

Meanwhile, Apple has remained completely tight-lipped on such capabilities for the iPhone.