Same battery as iPhone XR?

Hi Kelvyn,

Nope, not compatible. The SE 2020 is based off the iPhone 8 model rather than the iPhone X, and does have a substantial amount of cross-compatibility with the 8. However, that doesn't include the battery, so even that isn't any help. Here's what iFixit's article about the SE 2020 has to say about batteries for it.

Also incompatible? The battery. Turns out, although the battery looks identical, the battery’s logic board connector differs from the one in the 8, so they don’t fit together. The SE will connect to an iPhone 11 battery, which uses the same connector—but it won’t turn on. And, sadly, this seemingly throwback phone has some very modern Apple roadblocks inside. You can’t even swap one genuine iPhone SE 2020 battery for another without triggering a “not a genuine Apple battery” service warning.

As we've mentioned on other threads, that battery warning also comes with the neat feature that you'll no longer be able to view the battery health information. Apple's self service repair is supposed to address things like this, but the models that are supported are limited to the iPhone 12 and later models, including the 3rd gen iPhone SE 2022. So that option won't help you.

There are workarounds that have been figured out by aftermarket companies though, but they require a device programmer such as the JC V1S or the Qian Li iCopy. Basically, you buy a new battery cell without the BMS, or Battery Management System circuit attached, then you cut the BMS off your old battery and solder/spot weld it onto the new cell. That gets rid of your non-genuine battery warning, but has the unfortunate side effect of still showing the old battery's health and cycle count information.

You're lucky in that on the SE 2020 that data can be written with the aforementioned device programmer. You plug the battery into the programmer and hook the programmer up to a Windows computer and you can then reset the health information to 100% and the cycle count back to zero.

Assuming you don't want to shell out the $60 USD or so that the programmer will cost, your next best bet would be to take it to a repair shop that does have one and will do the BMS swap. The alternative is to live with the warning. For a week or so you'll get a pop-up warning then that will eventually go away, but afterwards you'll have a permanent notification in your Settings about the battery. You could always hang onto the original battery (or just its BMS) and do the swap and reprogramming down the road.

To sum up, the only battery that will work on your SE 2020 is an SE 2020 battery and without the BMS swap and reprogramming you'll get a warning and/or incorrect battery health information. The iPhone X was the last phone where you could just do a straight battery replacement, so 50 demerit points to Apple for their anti-repair strategies.