Excessive idle battery drain after 13.4.1 update

I updated my iPhone 7 Plus to 13.4.1 earlier this week. Ever since, I am noticing that my battery drains excessively overnight. Here is a screenshot from yesterday night:

As can be seen, the battery was fully charged at 2:22 a.m and the phone was unused until 11:20 a.m. In these 9 hours, battery drained from 100% to 78% with absolutely no use. Even the battery stats don't show any misbehaving apps.

Also, I was checking the settings to understand why it happened, and my battery dropped from 78% to 69% in less than 10 minutes.

All these problems have started after the 13.4.1 update.

Phone: iPhone 7 Plus

Battery capacity: 85%

Anyone else facing this issue?

iPhone 7 Plus, iOS 13

Posted on Apr 8, 2020 11:45 PM

Top-ranking reply

Sridhar Ananthanarayanan Author

Level 1

83 points

Posted on May 5, 2020 12:22 AM

It is definitely a software bug. Until 13.4, everything was fine on my phone (iPhone 7 Plus), and there was no problem with battery (Battery health is at 85% for over 6 months now). I always leave everything ON (Bluetooth, mobile data, WiFi, location, etc.) and the battery graph would be flat overnight.

This problem started with 13.4.1, which bought fixes for Bluetooth and FaceTime (ironically I didn't have any problems with either before the update). You can do the following:

1. Turn OFF both Bluetooth and FaceTime from Settings before going to sleep.

2. If the above doesn't help, turn on airplane mode before going to sleep.

In my case, I haven't turned off or tweaked any other setting to save battery. I mean background refresh is allowed for essential apps, location is ON and allowed for essential apps ('always' for Google Photos and 'when using the app' for maps, etc.).

The only thing I do before going to sleep is turn OFF Bluetooth from settings (WiFi stays ON). And my battery holds on well (flat battery graph) until I wake up the phone in the morning.

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62 replies

DibM

Level 1

4 points

May 14, 2020 10:18 PM in response to DibM

Sorry to say but 2.4 did drain the battery just as bad during my sleep.

Must have been an optical illusion that made me think it was better during the day.

DibM

Level 1

4 points

May 17, 2020 4:22 AM in response to dommy179

With IOS 13.5 expected any day soon or at least within this month i hope that the battery drain soon is gone like for you with the beta.

Just charging over night until then.

;-)

Mihashmi

Level 1

31 points

May 18, 2020 10:17 PM in response to Sridhar Ananthanarayanan

I have xs max and i face the same problem with 13.4.1. Auto drain at night even taken all type of precautions to save the battery life but its excessive drain.

May 21, 2020 5:36 AM in response to DibM

Although the battery graph is somewhat flat, what are those bars using battery during sleep?

May 22, 2020 12:21 PM in response to Sridhar Ananthanarayanan

i am facing same issue. i followed the bluetooth hack. but no luck. can u please help me how to stop it from draining during my sleep

May 22, 2020 1:36 PM in response to Mihashmi

bro. i upgraded to 13.5. still facing the same issue. did u upgrade using i tunes or over the air ???

May 22, 2020 1:36 PM in response to GREAT DIVIDE

which phone ? did u upgrade using itunes or over the air

Mihashmi

Level 1

31 points

May 22, 2020 3:26 PM in response to AwaisTalha

Xs max. Over the air

May 25, 2020 1:02 AM in response to Wildrams

It is related to the update, but we don't know what that was. My battery drain after 13.4.1 also subsided, but it took close to a month after the update. Now I am on 13.5 and things look fine so far.

hed1117

Level 1

31 points

May 27, 2020 3:46 PM in response to Sridhar Ananthanarayanan

That sucks for those like myself who use a bluetooth headset all day long. I never had a battery drain or bluetooth connectivity issue with my 7 Plus prior to upgrading to 13.4.1

Kémaël

Level 1

18 points

Apr 24, 2020 1:08 AM in response to Sridhar Ananthanarayanan

I’m sorry SravanKrA but your answer is completely unhelpful and does not pertain or try to tackle the problem at hand, you blatantly copy-pasted some unrelated help rubric from Apple.

Sridhar, thank you for testing this extensively, I have an iPhone 11 Pro and I’m at 98% battery capacity after 3 months. Before iOS 13.4.1 the device had absolutely amazing battery life as I could get 7 - 8 hours out of it and it would lose very little, if at all, battery when idle.

Since the update I have noticed that not only do I get shorter battery life when using it, but I would lose a whopping 30% battery overnight when idle. That usually means a little over 5 hours.

I will definitely try what you did with bluetooth and will revert accordingly by editing this post.

Edit: I forgot to add that it’s very confusing because the battery usage reporting in settings is completely unhelpful, there are no apps reported draining battery life during the idle period.

Apr 25, 2020 12:08 AM in response to Kémaël

With all due to respect to Mr. @SravanKrA for trying to help, his response was indeed unhelpful for this post, yet Apple ‘recommended’ his answer for including links to some of their own knowledge articles. That’s very foolish.

This is my battery stats over the last 52 hours since last 100% charge:

As can be seen, the battery dropped from 100% to 73% over 52 hours of sleep (I didn’t use my phone for 2 days, and Bluetooth was turned OFF from Settings). This is about 0.5% battery drain per hour. Much better than the ~3% per hour battery drain observed with Bluetooth on (but no device connected).

I have not paid attention on how the battery is holding up during use. I will check that too over the next few days.

Unfortunately, Apple does not provide the battery stats ‘since last charge’ to enable us to accurately see what has been draining battery since the last charge. Even with the ‘last 24 hours’ and ‘last 10 days’ stats, it doesn’t show ‘Bluetooth’ as draining battery.

I figured it out just because Bluetooth and FaceTime were the only 2 items on the update release notes. I did not have any issues with either to begin with, but the update definitely introduced a bug that didn’t exist before.

Unklemac

Level 1

4 points

May 4, 2020 1:35 AM in response to Sridhar Ananthanarayanan

Thanks for your findings. I just got my brand new iphone SE (2nd gen.), swapped twice because of faulty battery drainage. I have been turning off every little “smartphone” settings to help keep battery. First night was horrible 100% before bedtime and 55% when I woke up. I truely hope apple solved this asap, since it does not record in battery usage, what’s going on.

the other iphone SE:

and another brand new iphone SE:

May 21, 2020 5:35 AM in response to Mihashmi

In about a month since I updated to 13.4.1, the battery drain on my iPhone has slowly disappeared and is almost back to how it has always been. I am now getting a flat (or almost flat) battery graph overnight, losing about 0.5% or less per hour overnight, keeping everything ON. I have tested it on both WiFi bands (2.4 GHz & 5GHz) and the result is the same. So I am not upgrading to 13.5 just yet until I see the feedback from others in the forum on how their experience is with the latest update.

A popular YouTuber reported that 13.5 damaged his Face ID hardware and Apple refused to cover it under warranty.

https://youtu.be/IjWUfHX73DI

Unklemac

Level 1

4 points

May 20, 2020 1:23 AM in response to DibM

Golden Master 13.5 (Public Beta).

No changes to my iPhone SE (2nd Gen.)

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Excessive idle battery drain after 13.4.1 update