FIX FOR: iPhone 4 battery draining fast, phone running hot

Thanks! Worked!

Apple has addressed my concerns.

I was having the same issue.. i just deleted my email like everyone has said to do and it seems to be working its been 10 mins and my battery hasnt dropped which is quite different to before and its a lot cooler.. fingers crossed its actually the fix!

THIS SEEMS TO HAVE WORKED FOR MY MASSIVE BATTERY DRAIN!!! Wow! Thank you so much for posting!!

how can battery drain not disappear for me when i use no email account? this is so F**king annoying...

mhg8 wrote:

how can battery drain not disappear for me when i use no email account?

Because email is not the only app that uses battery power?

There are 500 thousand apps available for the iPhone. All of them use some power, and some of them use a lot of power. Any that connect to the Internet use power, and that's probably over half of them. If your battery is draining faster than you think it should based on the specs for the phone (http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html) start by reviewing your apps.

But, as you haven't said how much drain you are experiencing or even what model you have we have no way of knowing whether it is in the normal range or not.

I want someone to write a "diagnostic app" that tells us exactly what apps are sucking the life out of our batteries. Doesn't make sense to have a phone (even a great one) that you have to charge every four hours.

"carat" - in the app store.

i just had the weirdest thing happen to me today. i've had my iphone 4 for exactly 2 years now. i left it last night with 80% battery, slept for 8 hours, woke up to find it at 35%. wifi was off, no programs were running except for: calendar, messages, settings, skype. there were no notifications at all.

my normal battery drain during night time is between 5% and 7%. i have never had a 50% drop! but i usually don't leave skype running. the phone is running the latest ios (which i think is 6.1)

this happened to me once only on ios 5, but i had left teh phone for 6 hours in a poor reception area. however laast night it was at home, which is notmally a good reception area.

my question is: could this have been skype running, or is it possible that i had lost signal at some point and the phone was searching all night? and if so, should this drain 50%?

is there a solution or a way of finding out what's wrong?

sorry, the ios i am running is 6.0.1, not 6.1

now i jsut had a sudden drop again! i had used the phone for a few short calls and it dropped to 23%. left on standby for 2 hours, it now dropped to 12%!

And you didn't even update it, but you have sudden battery drain.

This problem has been discussed pretty much continuously for the past 5 1/2 years. I did a tabulation a few months ago and found over 20,000 posts about it. Which is still small compared to 300 million iOS devices, but it is the most commonly discussed problem in these forums and other iPhone venues on the Internet. Many of those 20,000 posts have useful information that I don't want to repeat, but the root cause is usually an app on your phone that got stuck in a loop trying to send data and failing.

Rebooting sometimes helps.

As the app is frequently mail deleting a mail account, rebooting, and adding it back will sometimes cure it.

Sometimes it cures itself.

Sometimes running the battery down until the phone shuts off, then charging with the wall charger for 4 hours fixes it (and also recalibrates the battery gauge).

Turning off all data (cellular and wifi) can sometimes CAUSE the problem, because not all apps check to make sure there's a connection before sending. If this is the problem turning data back on will fix it.

best of luck finding the recalcitrant application.

thank you very much Lawrence Finch

for your very useful information. i was pancicing that i have some sort of damage, although i keep my phone very well maintained!

in my case, teh only app that was running was Skype. i had wifi off but 3G on. however, the phone was inside my bag and there was another bag on top of it, so maybe that casue a poor reception and casued the phone to keep searching!

jsut as a side note, i charge my phone every 2 days, but i charge it during the night when i am asleep. i leave it to charge all night. someone mentioned that it shouldn't be left to charge all night, cuz this might damage the battery. is this true?

i also hardly ever drain teh battery to empty. so this time i will try to do that. then charge a full cycle.

mira_ishak wrote:

thank you very much Lawrence Finch

jsut as a side note, i charge my phone every 2 days, but i charge it during the night when i am asleep. i leave it to charge all night. someone mentioned that it shouldn't be left to charge all night, cuz this might damage the battery. is this true?

No, there is a smart charger in the phone. The external "charger" is actually just a dumb power source. The charging circuit fast charges to 80%, then slow charges to 100%, then shuts off. So you can leave it plugged in forever without hurting the battery. One apparently odd symptom results from this process: Once the charger has turned off the phone is using battery power exclusively. So if there are background processes running the battery will start to discharge. If it goes below about 95% the charger will come back on to top it off. But if you look at the phone in the morning after it has been charging all night occasionally it will not be at full charge; perhaps somewhere between 96% and 99%.

i also hardly ever drain teh battery to empty. so this time i will try to do that. then charge a full cycle.

Apple recommends doing this about once a month. The purpose is to recalibrate the battery gauge. Lithium chemistry batteries maintain a constant voltage across their discharge cycle, so you can't tell the state of charge by monitoring voltage. Instead the battery circuit monitors usage, tracking energy in and energy out to determine the state of charge. This proces is imprecise, however, so errors creep in slowly. A full discharge (which isn't really a full discharge, because the phone shuts off with some energy remaining in the battery) followed by a full charge gives the battery monitor markers for empty and full so it can correct the drift in the monitored data.

wow! seriously thanks you very much Lawrence Finch

for taking the time and explaining this thouroughly. i really apreciated it.

it is a great help 🙂