Lightning port heads up

I've been having a lot of trouble charging my iPhone over the past couple months. Then the cable that came with my phone broke near the lightning end.



I've had iPods and iPhones for the past 10 years and this is the first time I've ever had one break like this. I know it's a common problem, but apple really skimped on the sheath of the new lightning cables. I've always been careful to not pull the cable out by the cord, as this is the reason for many of them breaking. But this one broke any way seemingly because it hung off my night stand at a curved 90 degree angle.

So I bought the 6ft amazon basics lightning cable seen on the floor. Then I could never get a good connection when I plugged my phone. It would remount every time I touched the phone (vibrate and make the charging noise) and I was thinking that it was because a 3rd party cable. Finally today I woke up and even though my phone indicated the battery was charging, the percentage was below 10% after charging all night.

I worked on the problem off and on throughout the day to no avail. Finally I stuck a toothpick in the port and scraped it out. I couldn't believe how much lint I pulled out. Now I'm having no problems with charging and the phone mounts great with the amazon basics cable.

tl;dr if you have problems charging via lightning port, scrape out that belly button lint.