iOS 13.6 overheating and battery drain issues

@peter_watt - My iPhone SE is just outside warranty (two years two months old) but battery health "maximum capacity" is 90%. So I don't think battery declines 1% per month as you say - mine has declined at less than half that rate. Also, at 90% capacity, my iPhone should be lasting all day with the generally light workload I give it. I can get maybe five or ten minutes checking emails and its dead. And it was working fine until a couple of weeks ago when I suspect it automatically downloaded iOS 13.6. I have another (work) iPhone 6 which runs 13.5.1 and works fine and the battery lasts all day easily, even though I have to use it now to do much of my personal stuff as well as work stuff. So I turned off automatic download yesterday just in time - it was due to "upgrade" to 13.6 overnight last night.

Do you work for Apple? If not, how can we get a response from Apple on this significant software issue, and an acknowledgement that there is a problem?

...by the way these drain threads have been on the forum since iphones came out. Ditto Android and Blackberry forums.

Re 13.6 it contains essential security patches and has "fixed" the battery problems for some, and "caused" them for others who had no problems on 13.5

The reason being it is not and never has been an inherent problem in iOS, but rather in its implementation on individual phones, or faulty phones.

Meanwhile majority of half a billion iphones are fine. Of they weren't then Forbes would be on Apple's back.

Just FYR, the snapshot of battery report on 13.6 over last night. Been experiencing it for a week, so I did a thorough test last night by turning on airplane mode, turning off wifi/bluetooth/airdrop. Some posts are saying Apple Music is the problem, but in my case, there’s no activity recorded. More weirdly, both screen on and off times are zero. BTW, that report is after I tried to reset all settings.

Ok 1 more night with that battery drain issue but I happened to wake up at 2 a.m and the phone is really hot with all connections off. So decided to do a factory reset and install all the apps back manually. Will do the idling test tonight and report tomorrow. Took 2 hours, a real challenge for my patience and memory with all the account info. Definitely don’t want to do it for every other update again.

Hi All, anyone experiencing severe battery drain even after 13.6.1, pls chk your phone for mother board issue. especially older devices and experiencing battery drain issues after 13.5.1,. until 13.5 totally no issues with my phone. my 6splus had severe battery drain issues. i took to service center and they suspect mother board issue causing battery drain. its very expensive to replace. almost same price as phone price. also i was offered to one to one exchange, i have to pay additional 400dollars to get the same model. $489.00 to replace mother board. i chose to take it to mobile shops to repair mother board. anyways my phone is not under warranty now. under my own risk. once i get back my phone, i have to see the performance.

You may want to take it in and ask if that's normal. I'm at 96% after a year, so that seems a bit of a drop unless you watch lots of movies, play games, and thus recharge your battery a lot; normally we are to recharge when it gives notice (not before the low charge notice).

I believe your battery is no problem at all, so was mine when I tried changing my 6s battery by myself when this drain issue hit me upon 13.6 update. After that, I have tried 13.6.1. All have the same idle battery drain issue on my 6s. So the I tried 13.6.1 on my iPad Pro 10.5 which was on 13.5, then started to see the issue on it now, just less severe due to the iPad’s big battery. And I have tried erasing my phone and install apps from scratch, erasing all settings, delete Apple Music app, disable Siri and Search, etc. None of them helped. Now I’m not sure if I can get out of this when ios 14 is officially released or not.

Hi all, for idling battery drain issues:

if draining is above 25-30%?? or more? pls chk your phone's mother board. mainly IC chip. i hv recently repaired my motherboard IC chip. and idling battery drain stopped. iphone 6splus.. somehow motherboard is affected without any reason. pls try to chk. if no idling battery drain, wait for next update

I’m able to resolve the issue by power cycling the device. It lasts for a day or two then comes back out of the blue randomly.

The difference between my hot phone and my cool phone earlier was ONLY the Apple update. Not sure what your point is. It’s clearly a problem with the update.

To give an example analogy, say you have a leaky kitchen sink. Maybe you bought a defective part or something. Who knows. But the restore and rebuild approach is akin to demoing the whole kitchen and rebuilding instead of just fixing the sink. It’s dumb. The problem is, Apple will actually give that to people as a “solution” when it is clearly their job to fix the leaky sink (to continue the analogy).

A lot of people don’t have time to spend hours and hours messing with their phones that they spent upwards of $1200 for after a minor update either. One of the major selling points of a platform that is twice as much as the competition is how well it’s supposed to work without the fuss.

I am not aware of a company line on this. I have not seen any announcements. Even Forbes have nothing to say.

Pure logic says if the phone drops 2% charge every few minutes when totally reset to factory and no cloud set-up, then the phone has a serious battery or hardware problem. Some even showed their battery runs down when turned off and still blame the iOS!!

is your camera app open in the background and on Live Photos?

No, it isn’t fine to have 98% battery health on brand new iphones, after only a month or two. Specially from 13.5.1 battery health decreased abruptly and Apple seems to doing nothing to fix this.

We can't fix it.

Report it to https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html and they will be made aware.

Reset to factory and build up your apps from scratch

Dump icloud

Dump your social history

If it still burns have it fixed.

iOS 14 is considerably better than 13.7 in terms of battery drain and app behavior so far. No recurrence of the stuck background task issue