Speaking with ABC News following the company's announcement that it would bring back billions of dollars in profit stored overseas, Apple CEO Tim Cook said a new iOS developer update will arrive next month that will allow iPhone users to see their battery's health.
It also will give them the option to turn off the throttling feature the company instituted last year to prevent older devices from shutting down when batteries became too weak.
"We don't recommend it," said Cook, stressing that the company took the actions it did in order to help users prolong the battery so that their iPhone would be available when they needed it. "Our actions were all in service of the user... maybe we should have been clear at a point in time, but our actions were always the purest."
Cook says the update will also give notifications to users before it starts throttling phone performance due to weak battery health.
Developer updates, or betas, are how Apple tests out new features and software updates before broadly rolling them out to the public. While no timetable was given for when the public update will be released, the fact that Apple is planning to test it so soon suggests that it isn't far off.
First revealed in January, the "batterygate" issue was met with outrage from users. Apple has since apologized and announced it would be dropping the price of replacement iPhone batteries from $79 to $29 throughout 2018.
But that has not done enough to quell the public criticism or stop dozens of lawsuitsfrom being filed against the company. Several U.S. lawmakers have also sent letters to Apple seeking answers on the issue.
Cook seemingly addressed the issue in his ABC News interview, stressing the company's apologetic tone.
"If anybody out there believes we did something nefariously, we apologize for any kind of thing we did or did not do," Cook said.
