iOS 12.1.4 battery drain

Had that happen to me, my iPad was in sleep mode for some 2hours before I powered it off and the battery went from 29% down to 5%! It wasn’t doing anything other receiving a couple of emails. All apps were closed. Definitely an issue with the update.

Just so you know that I’m not ‘ranting’ just for ‘rants’ sake, I have been busy determining the TRUE cause of this battery drain.

After some extensive testing (different settings) I have come to the following conclusion, but your NOT going to like what I have discovered! ;-(

Remember my last statement/suggestion of (sarcasm) just turning the Wi-Fi OFF?

Well guess what? By doing that, the battery drain (basically) STOPPED!

There was NO more (measureable) battery consumption WHATSOEVER while the Wi-Fi was SHUTDOWN!

That is to say that the battrey usage was/would be similar to having the iPad TURNED OFF rather than accepting their excuse as to “Well it’s going to be indexing things for a day or two so the battery will be used more somewhat

and you should just expect/accept this to be the case” the REAL cause of the excessive drain.

What I have determined is that it is due to “Background App Refresh” in that Apps are connecting to the Internet

and acquiring new content no matter if I wanted them to do so or not!

Now you’d expect them to do so IF the App was another task that I had started and left running ‘in the background’

but the TRUTH is much WORSE than that.

I went and turned OFF “Background App Refresh” for ALL my installed apps as well as set my mail Apps

to ONLY acquire new content MANUALLY but what I’ve discovered is that this iOS (12.1.4) version

does NOT appear to be paying ANY attention to the “Background App Refresh” setting and instead is accepting ’pushes’

(from Apple’s Servers) of ANY app’s data whenever it occurs!

Yea, you say “but what does that really mean?” It means that for EVERY installed App, when NEW data is available, it is “Pushed” to your device so even if yoy aren’t ‘running’ ANY apps in the background, ALL of your installed “Background App Refresh” capable apps are STILL acquiring NEW data whenever it is present!

Ok, just how BAD can this get to be? Well try this on as an example:

For every NEW mail (be it an Office Exchange or a GMAIL account) item, it gets ‘pushed’ to my device even if

the setting is for MANUAL acquiring of items! <— some more battery usage right there

Now add to THAT consumption the following ‘busy’ apps:

Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest (just to name a few) <— more battery consumption

follow that up with installed ‘virtual’ books/magazines (like Apple’s Books, Kindle, Nook, etc) <—- even more consumption

what you end up with is that for ALL INSTALLED APPS if they are “Background App Refresh” capable,

they will be doing this no matter IF they were/are running in the BACKGROUND (as active tasks) or not!

Naturally, the “Battery Usage” section ONLY shows the Apps that are running as active Background tasks,

and not reporting on the TRUE usage of the battery, since it is not monitoring those other apps

yet the reality is that for EVERY BACKGROUND REFRESH CAPABLE app

(that you have installed) they ARE connecing to the Internet and Actively getting NEW content.

This is akin to having you device (actively) running EVERY installed app at the SAME TIME in multiple processes!

Just imagine how much battrey resources will/would be needed to provide that kind of support!?

I don’t wonder WHY the bsttery is dropping so fast, but rather am relieved

to think that my iPad Pro can (for a while anyway) keep up with the (excessive) demand till it is (finally) drained dry!

So there you have it!

I sure hope that they fix this (major) problem soon, but this is my experienced, extensive diagnostic results report!

oddly , we updated several devices (3) two ipads and an iphone 6s to 12.1.4...they were all using various forms of ios 10 and 11. we did this three days ago to initiate family sharing as another device (Xs) is using 12.1...apple would not allow sharing through icloud until we updated....all three devices at 12.1.4 are today now experiencing battery drain...one ipad is brand new and the 6s has 87% battery capacity...no battery drain with the Xs still running 12.1. To me, logic says it's the update. we turned on the usb accessories blocker that comes with the update thinking that was preventing a full charge and possibly giving a false reading but that wasn't the case.

Hi Vipul

wow and I thought mine was bad, that’s crazy. My new iPad Pro is a mirror copy of my old iPad, only difference is, I didn’t update my old iPad, I’m not having any battery problems with old iPad, funny that.

Hi vipul friend and lan man. I think your analysis is maybe getting to the root of the problem . Some heavy background activity not shown in the stats. Even then turning off wifi or background refresh is having different effects.

Youre going to shoot me down for asking but is either of you brave enough to reset those back to factory settings to see it its a third party app doing the damage?

I made 3 clean restore every restore take around 3 hours and it is Disappoint Nasty 12.1.4 update consumes the battery and shows some errors like the appearance of the undo write window without shaking the phone

Now now dont fight amongst yourselves!

I’ve not gone quiet. I am watching and waiting for ONE user to reset completely to factory settings i.e. as a new phone and report they still have a problem. Then start adding back apps. Its a pain but the problem must be app related - not saying that is not Apples fault, though it is up to app developers to do the testing.

All I know is I updated my wife’s ipad to 12.1.4 yesyerday. Closed it up last nigjt at 95% battery and 12 hours later this morning it was 94% .

Now what is the difference between her iPad and those mentioned in this thread? It was on wifi all night.

From a previous problem about a year ago with Google Maps, I did a complete reset of my phone and it fixed the problem. I also now try to keep about .75GB of free space on my phone.

To solve my battery issue after the 12.1.4 upgrade, I did another complete reset of the phone on Sunday feb 17. As of the writing, so far so good.

Note: before resetting the phone, make sure you do a backup of the device. I did one to my computer as well as one right after to iCloud.

By complete reset do you mean reset as new? And the battery drain problem went away?

Its certainly a tactic I used several times on my droid phone which actually got warm whilst running down in my pocket. Its amazing how few apps you really need and a good clearout is cathartic.

Yup, factory style reset. As of this writing, it's less than 24 hours since the reset but so far so good. And it took about 30 minutes or less after I had to manually reset a few things. BTW an encrypted backup will preserve most security information such as passwords, but you'll have to reset the finger print reader. I have an iPhone 6S.

There's some other information I'd like to add.

That morning I was listening to some podcasts through the little internal speaker for about an hour or less, and the battery dropped from the high 80s% to about 10%. I plugged then phone back in to charge and in about 20 minutes the battery level was back up around 87%. In 20 Minutes? It then took another couple of hours to get back to 100%.

You know, the 12.1.4 says it was supposed to improve battery life, if by only a very small amount. I'm wondering if the battery is fine and the upgrade is causing the battery health report to be incorrect? Just thinking.

There have been several solutions mentioned in this thread that worked. But if you go into troubleshooting with the assumption that 12.1.4 Is defective you will never solve the problem with whatever app is the cause.

Still no one single solution posted...

Thats because there isn’t a single solution. It is a symptom, and many different issues can cause that symptom. You have to find the solution to your specific issue. Restoring the phone to factory settings will fix it. So will restoring from a backup fix it for most users. Just restarting the phone will fix it for some. Deleting Facebook fixes it for a lot of users. And just waiting a few days will fix it to give the phone time to finish its housekeeping.

Throwing up up your hands and saying “APPLE FIX IT NOW” is the least effective solution.

Testing with a iPhone 6S. No battery drain issues with iOS 12.1.3 and battery lasts normally with base apps for a full day.

With iOS 12.1.4 firmware battery drain is intensified and instead of lasting a full day it fully drains within 2 hours. Temporary remedy is putting the device in low power mode manually.

With iOS 12.2 Public Beta 2 firmware It is back to a full day for battery drain and does not exhibit the battery drain issue noted in 12.1.4.

Short version Apple screwed the pooch on the 12.1.4 update. If you have access to download the 12.1.3 update from various sites to roll back you can do that or sign up for the public betas with your Apple ID and update to the latest public betas.

Imagine I sold you an expensive car, then a few months down the line I pop over and say, oh I am just going to modify the car slightly for you. The next morning you notice your fuel consumption has doubled. I am 100% sure you will be calling me that day saying, FIX IT NOW, no? After all, I would have been the one that caused the problem, therefore I should be the one to fix it, no? You didn't spend good money on the car to be encountering issues just months into the purchase, no?

Choosing an inappropriate analogy proves nothing and will not fix whatever is in your phone.

You have been given advice how you could fix the problem and some brave souls have taken the advice and now have no more battery drain.

Sitting on your hands just gives you numb fingers, if you want an analogy.