iPhone 3g iOS4 Battery life

The battery issues we are all experiencing may be due in part to multiple-tasking. I went to the Apple store to get my free battery replacement, and found out that I had about a thousand apps running in the background. Apparently ALL applications remain open in iOS4. As a techie and programmer, I assumed only apps that wanted to stay open would. My bad for assuming.

The guy showed me how to close apps by double clicking the home button, and then pressing and holding on one of the open apps to get the little red circle with white bar symbols to appear. Then just press the symbol on each app you want to close.

All those open apps drain the crap out of the battery. I've been doing this a couple days and have noticed a battery life improvement. However, I find that always remembering to close every app I use is difficult. I think apple made a great step forward, now I'd like to see them add a feature where you can specify to close app automatically when closed from screen, or choose which apps can and cannot stay open.

In the mean time, I'm considering downgrading. 😟

I really don't get it all of you complaining about the battery of an almost 2 year old device which it's battery is not as good as the new iPhone and probably almost dead.... An iPhone is like a small laptop with a phone, would you install on a computer that was designed for XP Windods 7 and expect same performance? The iPhone 4 is far superior than the 3G or 3GS, so you can't expect to have the same experience, don't upgrade if you are not willing to have less battery life, it is the price to pay for having an OS that can multitask, things take more juice since stay opened for fast switching, don't need that? Then stay with OS3. And I still not get why people that just don't plug their phones to charge at night every night.... Will that take you out of your energy budget???? Please.....

Hi Victorwol,
The reason everybody is complaining is becuase we had something that worked perfectly, but now it's broken. Apple didn't say this update should not be used on the 3GS, so why would we not have applied the update?

I'm not saying that Apple is innocent, but, it have more features that requires more power, that is jut common sense, and most peole that is complaining are saying that they use to be able to have their phones in stand by for a week and now they can't, what is the point to have a phine to have it in stand by for a week? You got a phone to not use it? The phone goes perfectly fine for a day, go back home, and charge it while you you sleep, it won't break your budget, go o the road for a week, take that cubic inche charger with you.... There are more features, it need more power, simple. For some read on Apple disabled some functions on older phones, would you rather Apple make OS 4 not available at all for your phone? I bet you would all be complaining too...... If you are going to install OSX in your 1998 laptop, you know your battery will not hold for so long right?

Victorwol,

You're not reading previous posts fully (although there are a lot of them, so I can understand - but doesn't that also make you think that there really is a problem here?)

Firstly, I've had my phone replaced by the Apple store, so it's a brand new phone with a brand new battery.

Secondly, even with that brand new battery, and a phone charged to 100% overnight, I can't get through a single day without it completely draining the battery. So on my drive home at 6pm, I'm without a phone. And that's with almost no usage of the phone apart from a couple of email checks during the day.

You still think that doesn't classify iOS4 as broken on 3g(s) iPhones?

Re: downgrading - have you found a definitive set of instructions that allow an non-jailbroken iPhone running iOS4.0.2 to be downgraded to iOS3? I keep reading that it's not possible (as in fact 4.0.2 contained new code to make it even harder for this to be done)

If Apple won't allow me to downgrade, I think they're hoping that I'll upgrade to an iPhone4. Unfortunately, in my case, it's made me look at Android (Google) phones instead, and they look pretty cool.

So my current decision is between a downgrade (staying with Apple) or if Apple insist that this isn't possible, an upgrade to Android...

Victorwol wrote:
I'm not saying that Apple is innocent, but, it have more features that requires more power, that is jut common sense...

Common sense falls under not releasing an update for hardware that can't handle it.

SeanEricWatson wrote:
The guy showed me how to close apps by double clicking the home button, and then pressing and holding on one of the open apps to get the little red circle with white bar symbols to appear. Then just press the symbol on each app you want to close.

The 3G does not do multitasking. You must have a 3GS.

Victorwol wrote:
I'm not saying that Apple is innocent, but, it have more features that requires more power, that is jut common sense

Common sense would be providing a downgrade path so the customer could return to the older, stable, functional operating system if the new one didn't work out.

Victorwol wrote:
If you are going to install OSX in your 1998 laptop, you know your battery will not hold for so long right?

Wrong. I installed OSX in an old Blueberry iBook years ago. The battery life is just fine. But had I wanted to return to OS9, I could have. Apple didn't sneak into my house and confiscate my OS9 installation CD when I upgraded to OSX. That's what they've done to my iPhone.

Knowing how Apple is, they will not provide a downgrade option unless forced, that will be admitting failure, which they never do. Probaly you will be luckier jailbraking. Only way they will fix this is if it gets to a story like the antennagate.....

So if your blueberry iBook worked so well why did you got a new laptop??? Wanted more speed and better battery life and better multitasking? Better screen and more memory?

I hope Apple fix it, but have my doubts it will happen.

I'd like to report after that reboot of 2 days ago. After the reboot and having made sure all multitasking apps were turned off, my battery did lose more life than it would have with the older OS, but at least it wasn't completely drained. I'm now 2 days without charging, but I'm making sure I'm closing every app AGAIN by doubleclicking the homebutton (kinda defeats the purpose of fast usage of the phone). My battery is now at 60%, as compared to the older OS this is still much, much less than I would have had by now (I'd probably have been at 80%), but at least my battery didn't run itself dry in 1 day.

It's really annoying to keep having to switch off the apps in the multitkasing feature. I'm not even bother gonna look if I can downgrade, I read it's not possible without a jailbroken phone anyway, so I'm just going to trust Apple on a very swift fix (hint :D).

Message was edited by: Ccharlotteh

hello i had exactly the same scenario you had. changed the battery and at some point using 3.1.2 OS was perfectly fine until i upgraded to IOS4.

Known Fix: Delete and then redo your MS Exchange Account.

I don't have an MS Exchange account, my email is sync'd with GMail.

But I still have a battery that can't last a day.

installed 4.1 and battery life is even worse now. I'm done with IOS4, it just doesn't work well with the 3G or 3GS.