iOS 13.5.1 battery drain

in that case it is apps that have not been modified to run on the new OS and have runaway background usage, Viber fir example.

or a busted phone.

Nothing in 13.5.1 itself is causing this.

So to test this ( yes effort required)

• backup
• restore to factory settings as though you were selling it - see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201351
• Set it up with your apple account
• Check battery usage in that vanilla environment.
• Restore from backup.

It seems to have something to do with iCloud sync. I thought I ruled this out by putting iPads on airplane mode, but on iPads the airplane mode does not disable Wifi (whereas on Iphones it does). I should have noticed the Wifi icon still being there after enabling airplane mode, but somehow 'Airplane mode' was still synonymous to 'disable all communication' in my mind.

When disabling Wifi, the CPU load goes back to 3-5%. When disabling iCloud mobile sync on iPhone + disabling Wifi, the problem also goes away.

This leads me to believe the latest upgrade is doing 'something' regarding iCloud sync (of photos). We have library of 13.000+ photos/ 400+ videos, so if anything is being done it will most likely take 'a little while'.

My iPhone XS has returned back to 3-5% CPU usage again (with Wifi enabled) after 2 full days or so, so I guess this one is done processing/resyncing. My wife's (slower) iPhone SE is still at 60-80%CPU for most of the time for the last couple of days.

I've disabled the mobile sync on there, so at least when she goes out of the house, the battery won't drain from 100% to 35% in a matter of 3 hours like it did this morning.

Can someone who has same issue also has a large(r) Photo library ?

I expect the problem to go away after some time now on all devices. What it is doing, no idea, this is first time I've seen this.

So, I was having this problem with my ipad and iphone. If you review my posts I kind of tried everything and also endured (well meaning I suppose) snarky comments from people basically gaslighting me and telling me this problem I was having didn't exist because they didn't have it. Or that everybody has it and get over it and stop ranting and complaining. Anyway. I did something kind of obvious and easy per the recommendation of an apple tech. She had me "reset all settings." on my ipad and its pretty much fixed. I did the same with my iphone and I'm pretty sure it eliminated most of the the battery drain. Yesterday I would unplug my ipad and leave it screen off case closed and I would return 3 hours later to find the battery more than half depleted ...from Siri which was disables. Today after resetting all setting. Came back after 3 hours. Battery 100%. After 7 hours 98%. So theres that. iPhone is much better but I'm not totally convinced so I'm letting Apple Care + send me a new phone just in case since the only option is set up from new (again) at this point anyway. So give the "reset all settings" a try, I hope this helps.

So I have had this problem since the update. Same issue as reported. But what’s even stranger was the Mail App and Siri who were consuming chunks of the battery, were still active in the background even when I switched Siri off and disabled the Mail App from Screen Time (Content Restrictions). Even THAT wasn’t working! So I deleted my mail app since it was still affecting my battery. I bought my phone in November and I had a 100% battery health till the first week of June. Right after the update, my battery health went from 100 to 94 because those apps kept running in the background. I disabled background app refresh, reset settings, did a factory reset both through Mac and my iPhone, TO NO AVAIL.

I was with Apple support most days, trying to find a solution.

In the end, I did find the solution to this problem but it isn’t going to be a popular solution here.

What I did was restore my iPhone through iTunes and when everything got erased from my phone, I did NOT choose “restore backup from iCloud” and just logged into my Apple ID and started using my phone without Apps being installed.

I, then, downloaded every single App through the App store yet again and this is how I was able to fix this problem. There is no other solution out there. I have tried everything else

As described, right after updating to iOS 13.5.1 on my iPhone 6s Plus, my battery life dropped off a cliff. I’ve made all of the changes to my settings that have been offered up in this thread with no success.

However, there was one change I tried that seems to have made a significant difference, and that was to switch off the screen time sharing across devices in the screen time settings. My battery drain has slowed significantly and the back of my iPhone has finally cooled off. Hope this helps others.

I have temporarily, at least, stopped this issue on both my iPhone and iPad by offloading the apps that keep running in the background even with Background Refresh turned off. I have at least three of them. When I want to use one of these apps, I reload it and then offload it again after I'm done. I suggest offloading rather than deleting the app so that you don't lose the settings when you use it again. I hope Apple corrects this issue soon.

Resolved for me! :-)

Solution for me below, try at your own risk I am only sharing how I troubleshot the issue and what resolved it for me for informational purposes. I accept no responsibility if you break your phone.

Symptoms:

Following the recent IOS 13.5.1 update my wifes Iphone 6s seemed to be draining its battery excessively, you could watch the percentage going down as you used the phone. The phone also got seemed laggy and slow to do anything while also getting extremely hot to touch. Downloads and browsing were almost impossible. Looking at the battery I could see the health was 79% which is not good but not terrible, I could see gaps in the reporting graphs which to me signifies an excessive CPU load (30 years IT and server experience).

Investigation:

I tried disabling Background updates, Location services, clearing out space as the storage space was getting low, disabling iCloud, none of this made any difference. I know that heat is usually due to load on the CPU ie running at 100% for too long, spikes are expected but not continuous for minutes at a time or hours. I downloaded an app called Status Lite (free), this indicated to me that the CPU was hitting 100% and staying. I put the phone in aircraft mode and restarted it, when it came back I checked that all connection network and wifi bluetooth etc were all off and switched them off immediately if they enabled. Now back in the Status app I could see the CPU spike at 100% then settle after jumping around due to thing starting up. I enabled the network and mobile data, the CPU increased to 100% but settled again. The phone behaved perfectly well for over one hour, no recurrence of CPU maxing. Now the interesting part, I narrowed it down to be something to do with the WIFI causing the excessive load tried forgetting and re-pairing but the problem returns even resetting the router didnt help. With each setting change I was having to power off and restart the phone, once it hit max CPU it never seemed to drop. With only WIFI enabled it consistently hit max CPU.

Solution for me:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Ensure that you have a good back up your iPhone. Try this at your own risk, I am comfortable doing this as I have experience in working on various Apple devices I have owned over the years but if you are unsure seek the help of an authorised professional. Below is a rough description of what I did.

I backed up the iPhone to my laptop in iTunes, after a successful backup I Erased All Content and Settings to completely wipe the phone back to clean build. At the Hello screen I started setting up the phone connecting to wifi, logging in to Apple, I was asked a question on whether this was a new phone or I wanted to restore a backup. I chose to restore from backup and selected the option that it was a backed up on a computer, a helpful screen pops up telling you to connect to your computer with the iTunes backup on it. Connected the phone selected to restore from backup. When the backup completed you need to stay connected to the computer while the phone restarts as instructed on screen, when the phone restarted it popped up with a prompt to update or upgrade which i clicked (cant remember exact wording)? Once the phone has properly started up and you unlock it again it then syncs the iphone with your iTunes. At the same time all your Apps start to re-download. When this process completed and all the apps were downloaded the iPhone no longer heats up like it did, the CPU is behaving within tolerances. Battery life is back to normal too, so for me or more important my wifes phone it is behaving again.

Why might this have fixed it?:

Cannot be 100% sure but:

When wiping and restoring the phone it also forced a fresh download of all the apps, if there was an app that had somehow gone rogue I guess the fresh install would replace any corrupted files or reset any settings that had went awry.

The update prompt after the restore was a strange one don't recall seeing that before, after selecting it it did pop out to a white screen with the apple logo and status bar. The phone was already on the latest IOS 13.5.1 but perhaps something wasnt right and doing the restore maybe forced a reload? Maybe an apple genius can answer that one?

I hope this is helpful for people, first post here but I thought I would share my experience in-case it helps someone else.

I've been suffering with this too and found a way to help until Apple fix it. It's definitely Music that's causing the problem and it's starting to be reported in the news.

I wiped and restored my phone 5 times. The phone was always fine until I tried downloading a track. I use iTunes Match to sync my CD's across my devices so I tried one of those tracks and one purchased from Apple. Both failed to download and caused the phone to become slow and unresponsive. Switching off "Sync Music" in settings helped but the tracks trying to download were still trying and making the phone slow. Even force quitting the Music app or turning the phone off and on again didn't stop the downloads. They persisted. The Downloading menu doesn't show anything happening anymore but going to the individual albums still showed the spinning icon next to the track name.

My temporary fix until Apple sort this was to go into the Music app on my MacBook and delete the tracks I was downloading on the phone (I made a copy of the files first) This removed the tracks from my synched library and cancelled the downloads on my phone meaning I could use it again. My biggest gripe is that since I did a wipe & restore on my phone I no longer have any music to listen to. I often work in places without connectivity so streaming services are no use to me.

On my iPad I had the same problem. The battery was going flat very quickly and other apps like News and my reading app didn't work. I was able to sort of rescue it by just disabling the "Automatic Downloads" in the music settings before deleting the tracks in Music on the MacBook. This cleared the download queue and stopped the block on other apps working. I can now read News again, read and play the music that is already on the iPad. Also the battery is back to lasting for ages.

Hello there! I had also suffered from battery drain issues upon updating from ios 13.5 to 13.5.1on my iPhone 11. This is something i did on my phone and in the last 3 days i didn’t see any battery draining issues. Here’s what I did, I fixed my screen time for apps like whatsapp and apple music which seemed to have taken a toll on the screen-off time when i clicked on the battery settings. You can fix any time for the apps which have been consuming a lot of battery. Set your location service preferences. You need not necessarily toggle your location services on for every app. I had even closed iCloud services back up for all apps. I backup my imp data on my laptop once in every month. Set Background app refresh off for most of the apps. You might want to keep it on for your mailing app only. One thing i noticed that even if you keep background app refresh off for whatsapp, your messages will still get delivered. So it doesn’t matter if you keep the background app refresh on or off for whatsapp but i suggest you to keep it off as it won’t affect anything. You might wanna set automatic dowloads off as well and download manually. And almost forgot, set a downtime using the screentime feature from say 3am-7am. After having done all these, i switched off my mobile ( while it was at 29%), then i fully charged it. And then i switched on my mobile and since last 3 days, my battery drain issues dropped significantly, my screen off time also reduced by almost 70%. While I am writing you this I have already used my phone today for 5h55min with 57% juice still left on my phone. FYI, I do not play heavy games, my battery health is 100% and i use the 5W charger that comes with iPhone 11. I do not charge it overnight. I use the 30-100 % charging rule everyday. For the last three days, I didn’t face any problem with battery draining issues. You might wanna watched a few videos first on youtube as to which services you should keep on and off for longer battery life. There are myriad videos on this topic. You can then follow the few aforementioned suggestions that is solely based on my personal experience. FOLLOW THE STEPS AND HOPE IT HELPS YOU!! AND now my battery level is at 56%. Good luck!!!!

There is no inbuilt problem with this 13.5.1 update, mine is just great, but it is possible to have a bad update over the air with a small patch like this.

Always use a mac or pc to do all iphone updates if you possibly can.

So to fix this use a mac or pc to

Backup

Restore as NEW device

Restore from backup.

Do not miss out step 2

Update all apps. If they still burn background battery contact the developer

PS anyone who goes to bed with the phone off charge has a strange idea of charging cycles. Latest iOS even tries to predict when you will wake up and charge the last 20% in the hour before.

i.e. it assumes overnight charging.

"went to bed and woke up to a flat battery" Der!

I will say three things

1. It may settle once the reindexing has finished.
2. Why leave it overnight without a charger? These phones are designed to use in the day and charge overnight. The battery app even tries to determine your sleep pattern.
3. If all else fails you may need to get a new copy of the OS. Which means...

• Backup.
• Then set to factory settings with Settings, General, Reset, Erase all content and settings.
• Then set up with your appleID like a new phone without a restore. Try for a day. How did it do?
• If OK then restore from backup and see how it went

If anyone says they tried that and no difference then they don't speak for you because your phone is not theirs

"...battery usage just shows a step drop in the graph, no apps had usage. I’m happy to help test anything right now to aid in resolving this issue. .."

I had battery step drops when I set up my old 6S for my wife after a full reset to factory (which surprised me)

To fix it I recalibrated the battery:-

1. Run a long video with screen timeout set to Never and top brightness on, so as to run the battery down flat and leave flat a further 2 hours
2. put on charge to 100% and leave on charge a further 2 hours
3. Disconnect charger and force restart the phone

Worked for me

OK So it's been all day and my battery has been perfect and better than ever. As I stated earlier I had the same problems and was so frustrated. I "reset all settings" and charged it up an dit worked on my ipad. With my phone, Apple sent me a new XS since I had apple care plus and I sent them my old one. But before I sent it back I reset all settings on the phone. And then set up the new phone they sent me as a new phone. Did not do data transfer from old. Manually redownloaded all apps etc. Running 13.5.1 the old one was way better and lasted all day. The new one as I said is perfect. I did notice the new one was doing the Siri battery drain thing at first and I thought here we go again. So this morning I shut down siri in all apps and shut down listen for Siri and just activated toggled the "push side button for siri" since I needed to have siri on in some capacity to use carplay. And the phone is perfect. YMMV. Hope this helps. Hope Apple addresses this too because I shouldnt have had to do all that nor should I have to disable their software (siri) to get it to work.

Tho only answer to battery drain IOS 13.5.1 is to factory reset from Itunes on PC or laptop. I did this yesterday and it took six hours as well as having to but a USB-A to USB-C cable. 13.5.1 is a bad update and unfortunately this is the only way to fix this as that update has corrupted the software some how for a small percentage of users. ERASING THE IPAD WITHOUT CONNECTING TO ITUNES VIA A COMPUTER WILL NOT WORK. Hope this solves your problem. The only other thing you can do is wait 3 months for IOS 14 if you do not have the time to do this.

There is certainly a problem with this update but you can fix most of that problem by disabling Siri and restoring your iPhone/iPad through iTunes. I have no idea why Siri keeps running in the background but I have noticed that after this clean install, it has not used more than 2% of my battery. Which I got rid of by disabling it through Allowed Apps in Screen Time.

Please do not restore from your backup, instead use the Purchased Apps History to download Apps as you won’t lose your Calendar, Reminders, iMessages etc anyway since you’d be logging in from your the same Apple ID.

Photos will run in the background for a while since the library is in the restoration process.

Yes, this requires time and patience but at least your battery health won’t get affected. Mine was 100% from November till the 13.5.1 update. It dropped down to 94%. But at least now I can keep it at 94% after this clean installation. Yes, it is a lot of work. But if you don’t want to be getting your battery replaced, please try this.