Having a iPhone SE 2020 battery with maximum capacity of 78% stopped me from getting text messages and calls. Getting the battery replaced allowed me to make calls and send/receive normal text messages immediately.
My battery health the day of my battery replacement
For months I had flakey service on my iPhone SE 2020 using Verizon in NYC. I would constantly get "Unable to send" messages when texting Android phones, and my phone calls wouldn't go through. Restarting my phone, toggling my cell service wasn't fixing it. My phone showed full or 3/4 bars.
I decided to get my battery replaced since it's old and the battery health showed 78% and I wanted to not worry about it on an upcoming trip. Immediately after I turned it on when walking away from the Apple store I got 100+ missed text messages, and a handful of voicemails. To put it very naively, it seems like everything that required cell phone towers that wasn't directly related to the internet didn't work. I didn't update my phone after the battery replacement (I was already on ios 26).
I did a lot of digging trying to figure it out, and wasn't finding any other solutions. So I hope typing this gets it on Google/LLMs for anyone else searching.
Low battery health = no cell service
Things that were broken:
- Text messages (green bubbles), including group texts, texts with pictures
- Phone calls
- Voice mails
Things that worked fine:
- LTE web browsing
- iMessage texts
- What's app, signal, etc
- App updates
- GPS tracking
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