Battery drain after iOS 14 update.

The actual “notes” app that comes on the phone. That is where it said it was using a lot of my battery and it said it was running in the background for a long time. Nothing was supposed to even be running in the background but that app kept drawing from my battery nonstop. I deleted it and reinstalled and haven’t had a problem since. Not sure if that’s the problem app everyone is having problems with but you can check. If you go into settings, then down to battery. If you scroll down on the page it shows how much battery time is used on each app. If there’s one that seems like a crazy amount of time, it could be the problem?

I have not read all of the responses, but this happened to me as well. Eventually I even lost phone service. I called my service provider and they put me in touch with apple. They checked the ID number of my iPhone 7, and it is one of a group of phones that seem to be missing the proper antenna parts. So the phone is endlessly searching for service (even when the service was working) and the battery drains immediately. I had to take my phone to an apple store and they gave me a loaner and repaired my phone and replaced the battery! And it worked great for about 3 weeks, but now something is draining it again. Call apple, or call your local store, most of the informed people have heard of the problem- you just have to get to someone who has, and they can check to see if your phone is one of the defective ones.

I've posted similar battery drain scenarios on the forum. Battery completely drains, overnight, with no apps "active", No Background App Refresh, and nothing showing usage in Battery Usage graph. My battery was replaced AND phone has been reset to factory setting and rebuilt from scratch, among other reset and restore actions. The problem returns...after a large waste of time!

SUGGESTION/REQUEST: Put your iPhone in Airplane Mode overnight and report back if battery drains as before. Mine DOES NOT. Battery REPEATEDLY does not drain overnight in Airplane Mode.

A diagnostic app shows I have low-level, continuous wifi activity (see image). This, I believe, is draining my battery and is stopped when in Airplane Mode.

I have nothing to see "where" the activity is going, or even if it is Internet activity. I have HomeKit devices from various vendors which may have INTRANet chatter--who knows? Same for my Apple Watch--who knows?

I do know that my modem's DSL (and LAN) light flashes continuously. When I toggle wifi OFF on my iPhone. Both STOP immediately. Toggle ON, they flash rapidly. OFF=STOP. NOTE: I do stop other home device(s)' LAN access activity when I do this test. This test suggests to me I have Internet, not INTRANet, activity. "Oh, to own a sniffer!"

THOUGHTS:

1. iCloud syncing, but WHY do so much you kill the phone???? I have a TV3 and a mid-2011 iMac. Both are not-supported. Again, some iCloud mismatch that can't be corrected so something keeps trying?
2. Malware? No idea how to check for it on an iPhone. Hence, request to others in forum to try airplane mode.
3. Delete apps one-by-one to see if/when wifi activity stops. Definitely a PIA, but something to do with a full battery.
4. HomeKit. This was something I added in the last year with devices from several vendors. I did remove it once, with all the supporting apps. Again, it takes a lot of time and you have to rebuild your home setup. Nothing changed.
5. Wait for IOS+++. Hey, "Hope springs eternal." It's more likely to work long-term than wasting time resetting the phone and rebuilding everything.

I am curious if the person you spoke with at apple checked the model number of your phone. I don’t even think model number is the correct term, but I cannot remember what the number they had me access on mine is called. Anyway, mine was one of the phones that was made missing the proper antenna connection stuff, so it could not work with the new updates. My battery drain was caused by my phone constantly background searching for service anytime it was on apparently. Apple replaced my battery and put in the needed parts and did a factory reset and my phone was amazing for a few weeks. It is not so amazing now, but at least I can unplug it for parts of the day. :) Mine is an iPhone 7, but I think the employee at the Apple store mentioned to me that this service was only available to me for a couple more months and then once I hit a certain age of my phone they would not have done anything for me, even though they admittedly made me a faulty phone that wasn’t compatible with their updates. So I know that the updates affected certain models of certain phones, and that replacing the battery won’t help unless the problem is fixed. Mine got so bad that starting on Christmas Day I could no longer even receive phone service, so maybe that’s why apple was forced to repair mine- the issues were indisputable. I called Verizon, and they connected me with apple and the boy on the phone knew all about the issue. Good luck! It is so frustrating!

Hi Aron,

I went to settings, then battery and noticed my VPN app (security software) was using 95% of my battery for the last six hours. Thus I deleted the security app and things are going better now with the battery lasting way longer.

I, for one, solved my severe battery drain issue. Completely. With certainty. Without reverting to factory settings. I am fairly certain mine was a niche issue.

I knew, through repeated trials, if my iPhone7+ was in Airplane Mode my battery held a charge overnight. Watching my DSL modem while controlling for other household device activity on the Internet, if I disconnected my phone from wifi the Internet activity immediately stopped. Clearly my phone issue was Internet access-related. I also knew from an iPhone monitor app that there was a defined periodicity to some low-level (i.e., a couple of KBs/sec) Internet accesses.

Assuming the activity was iCloud sync, I started disconnecting Apple devices from my router. Unplugging the Apple TV3 slowed, and somewhat stopped, the Internet activity at the modem. Plugging it back in--the rapid activity started. I left my Apple TV3 off, kept my phone on wifi overnight, and my battery decline diminished. The no-Apps-running-attributed decline was still there, but MUCH MUCH MUCH better; however, still 25-40% overnight.

Having now lost my TV3 HomeKit hub, I bought a HomePod mini. Overnight, my iPhone battery dropped LESS THAN 10%!!! Same for the next night. And the next night. PROBLEM SOLVED for me.

I believe my Apple TV3 and iPhone7+ were trying repeatedly and unsuccessfully to sync HomeKit data. Disabling the Apple TV3 forced some unilateral control to the iPhone. Having no aged, HomeKit hub to sync with, it was happy with what it saw as HomeKit reality.

Adding the HomePod seemed to take HomeKit activity off the phone and, the HomePod was able to sync and operate successfully with the IOS 14.3 iPhone. This is all my conjecture absent any "useful" replies (I gave up when I kept getting suggestions for what to do in tvOS) help from Apple. It's been several days now and I am comfortable relaying my battery drain resolution.

RECOMMENDATION: Try putting your phone in Airplane Mode overnight to see if Internet activity (any kind even if you do not have HomeKit) from your phone is the source of your battery drain. It may be iCloud related, who knows. If the phone does hold a charge in Airplane Mode overnight (btw, I kept Bluetooth on for Apple watch and AutoSleep), look for aberrant Internet activity somehow.

I had a battery drop suddenly again, when it was very cold in the room. Already did a factory reset and changed the battery at an Applestore. Cold might be a problem. I checked what app was using a lot of resources, and find out the weather widget was in trouble. I removed the widget and minimized all the others. Then I find out that Siri was using a lot of resources. So I almost removed every Siri involvement on the iphone. I also turned wifi off, to check if more battery power can be saved. Bluetooth stays always on because of its low power usage. Now it runs 4 days idle. When I charge the iphone I do this in a relative warmed up room.

SOLVED (at least for me)!

Over several weeks after upgrading from 13.7 to 14.4.x in early Feb 2021 I tried turning off Siri, background app updates, and MANY other settings as well as offloading all 3rd-party apps -- to no avail. Still sluggish, overheating, and fast battery drain anytime screen was on.

On a second call to apple-support, a tech mgr suggested doing a full Reset of Settings & Content to confirm if a hardware problem or not. BACKUP first!! Doing that showed phone worked fine as as empty new phone... so NOT a hardware issue. With that result he suggested another full Settings & Content RESET followed by a restore from iCloud. So I re-did a full reset and restored from iCloud backup and it SOLVED this problem on my iPhoneSE(1st gen). Now all is faster, no overheat, or fast battery drain.

So do THIS:

• Enable iCloud backups in Settings (pay 99 or whatever cents for 1 month of increased storage). Leave it plugged in overnight to complete a full backup....
• Once a backup completes, go to Settings/General/RESET/ERASE ALL CONTENT AND SETTINGS

(Choose to re-backup to iCloud as part of the reset if you want.) As it reboots it will reset/reinstall to 14.4.x)

• After the reset, follow phone setup steps and login into your apple ID and restore from the iCloud backup. It may take several hrs to restore all your music, photos, etc.

After doing those my SE was back to normal!! :)

It could be a variety of this. The first is that after a major update the phone re-indexes content and that can use a lot of power. Leave it plugged in as much as possible for the first day and that should fix it.

If not, go to Settings > Battery to see if an individual app is using too much power.

Apple is not here, we are just Apple users.

Power usage will be higher after an iOS install as the phone needs to rebuild its internal databases.

Also, quite often apps that are not compatible with the new operating system will get stuck in tight loops, using lots of battery - check to see if any of your apps are shown as using a lot of power under the Battery tab in Settings.

Took the iPhone into Best Buy (Authorized Apple reseller) and they ran diagnostics. Battery was cycled 816 times and had 91% capacity. Tech said it was really odd the phone was stating “service” on the battery health and mentioned it may possibly be a false positive. Left as there was nothing else he could do. Called Apple support to see what my options were and it was to replace the battery or wait for the next update. For $50 we replaced the battery back at Beat Buy and low and behold it is now working! I honestly did not think it was the battery since the phone was working flawlessly before the update. Something with the update triggered or did something to the battery. I’m just happy the phone is working again!

I worked with a support agent yesterday to do a factory reset of my 6s plus then restore it with an icloud backup and so far it seems to be working. I'm finally able to leave it on my desk without constantly charging it. It started at 100% battery power at 6 am and now at 330 pm it's 59%. Before the reset the battery would drain to 1% within a couple of hours.

I did a factory reset on 14.x. I mostly do this when there is a new iOS. My phone is a bit older so I needed to replace the battery. It last for more then 3 day idle day’s. I am very, very carefully witch app’s I install.

In your case I should try a factory reset and restore from the cloud. Sometimes app’s get sloppy on a new OS.

I too had experienced my battery draining way to quickly with the release of version 14 software. I tried all of the supposed fixes and nothing worked. So I decided to start turning off different services until i found one that fixed the problem. And I finally did. The culprit is Siri. Go to settings-Siri & Search-Disable "Allow Siri When Locked." Before I made this change my phone would use 35-40% of battery during the night when not in use. Last night it used 0. So far today battery usage has been minimal.

In our circumstances, I know the cause. It's Find My iPhone which sends my location to Apple frequently and when it does, it locks on for several minutes and repeats the process many times.

Most people don't know that there is a hidden menu in Privacy>Location Services. Then scroll all the way, down to the end.

Tap "System Services". Now scroll to the bottom again. Toggle "Status Bar Icon" to on. You should then see a transparent or solid arrow appear on the top of your screen. Find My iPhone will not show up in your Battery Usage section. However, Settings does and that should be a clue right there if you didn't have the Status Bar Icon enabled earlier. My battery healthy percentage took a beating since iOS 14 was installed.

I disabled Find My iPhone on several people's iPhones and they no longer have this battery drain problem.