Q: 5S iOS 10 Messages Background Activity causes battery to drain

Hi

Go to messages in settings set push to less often .

In settings turn off apps refresh .

Turn brightness down a bit .

Cheers

Brian

Try restarting your father's iPhone and wait for battery stats to refresh, yesterday I rebooted my iPhone, plugged it into a charger, charged it, disconnected and then used it until now, battery stats refreshed sometime today and Messages is now completely gone from the stats (I dont even use Messages except very rarely) so it seems the problem is fixed for now, but Apple needs to investigate this issue with Messages using too much battery.

Thanks. Yeah, I've tried the hard restart, closing the app, but if didn't help very much... I'll wait to see if it starts to dilute.

But definitely apple needs to address this issue.

A hard restart worked for me. It took a while to disappear from the battery stats though.

I have a new 7+ running iOS 10.0.1 and am having the same issue. Messages accounts for 30-40% of my battery use with hours of background activity. Please fix this Apple!

Hi.    3 days ago I disabled the "Reduce Motion" option (was previously enabled for 1-2 years as it was known to help with battery life).   I disabled it to see the fancy new messages.   Wow - what battery drain.   The usage in the "last 7 days" read 53 minutes screen and 9.1 hours background.

I re-enabled the "reduce motion" which makes the fancy message text and effects not visible and not available to send.  I did this 24 hours ago and ti appears to be helping.  My messages activity in the last 24 hours is 8 minutes screen only - no background usage.

Thank you! I did just disable the reduce motion feature so I could also see the cool iMessage feature. That must be the issue. I re-enabled it and am hoping that solves the problem. Thanks!!

Watching it today, I have found it does indeed help but my battery life is still poorer than before the 10.0.1 update.   I ran the beta for almost a month on this same phone and didn't' experience this.

I monitored messages behaviour for couple of days and found out that messages app drain battery when/if I used all new digital messages features like digital touch, hand writing and all that new stuff Apple put in messages. It behaves fine when only using for normal text purposes. Apple need to fix it asap. Is there anyway to make Apple aware of that bug?

I wasn't having this problem with excessive background activity in messages till today. You can't turn off background app refresh for messages separately. You have to turn off background app refresh for all apps to stop background activity in messages so this is not an acceptable solution. I did update Microsoft OneNote and Amazon Music this morning but that shouldn't effect messages background activity. Sounds like a bug to me.

AAfter updating my iPhone SE to 10.0.2 it seems to have stopped draining the battery disproportionately.