iPhone 12 battery draining fast

sudharshanj25 wrote:

1. In My new 12 pro, I observe the below issues

charging is quite slow especially after 80%

2. Battery discharges quite fast even for a normal web browsing(no videos, just for a news website)

3. Battery takes a while to go down to 99% from 100%. But once it reaches 99%, it discharges very fast as said above.

4. No overnight draining issue for me though.

keeping fingers crossed for IOS 14.4. Contacted apple supprt for 4 to 5 times. But no luck. They are not ready to accept the issue. Pathetic!!!

Point #1. Please see the following Apple Support docs;

https://support.apple.com/HT208710

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201569 and note the paragraph about 80% charge level.

Point #2. Rate of discharge will vary depending on how you use the phone, and radio signal conditions which change from minute to minute.

Point #3. See Point #2 above, and remember the battery indication in screen is exactly that - an indication rather than a calibrated measurement.

Point #4. As expected when you are not messing with the phone and keeping the screen alive.

“Pathetic” - yes, it is indeed pathetic that you have failed to search readily available documents which would have guided you to answer at least some of your points.

bernadett181 wrote:

Hi all,

i would ask those who use iphone 12/12 pro with dual sim.

You also included in the battery usage statistics that “No mobile coverage”?

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/e3c5936e-94c7-4cc1-81a9-39b4cec069c9

11 hours screen activity including a big battery load from Facebook is not too shameful. It reminds me that FB always used to be a serious battery hog, doing a lot of invisible background traffic while checking over cellular. If you think that might be contributing to battery drain you could try denying network access overnight and see what happens, or even for test remove Facebook (and/or other suspects) altogether.

When we see consistent reports from vanilla out-of-box devices I will be more convinced this could be a hardware problem. Until that stage my prime suspect is still around third party software and unexpected network activity.

Last night (~8 hours).

• iPhone 12 mini, 14.2.1, 100% battery health, airplane mode ON: 3-4% drain.
• iPhone 6s, 14.3, 75% battery health, airplane mode OFF: 0% drain.

In past days draining on iPhone 12 mini with airplane mode was “only” 2%.

On my side, I have bee, back on my iPhone 11 Pro Max for the all last week in order to compare its battery life to the one I experience on the 12 Pro Max, and I have to say that in my remembers he was performing well...

In my souvenir, he was able to stay at 100% all night if unplugged just before sleep and that was not the cas last week. From 100% it usually lost approx. 2% and approx. 5% if not at 100%.

It has been restored from a finder back up of my 12 Pro Max in iOS 14 and use as below :

• dual sim from the same french carrier,
• background refresh for a third of the installed app,
• wifi and Bluetooth activated all time but not always connected of course,
• even by night, but do not disturb and sleep mode are activated.

I usually saw a drain of approx. 5% per night in those conditions. I have also tried to set data on the eSIM or on the other but I didn't see any measurable difference.

So I went back to the iPhone 12 Pro Max on Saturday via the same protocol and let it plugged in all night to Sunday and as most as possible during Sunday in order to allow him to complete the indexation process. Once it was done for the picture, I unplugged it at 6:30pm yesterday, used it a little and went to sleep at 11:30pm with 94%. I wake-up this morning with 89%.

Now at 10:55am I am at 82% with a very moderate use.

here are some battery use graph from the last week with the 11 Pro Max

And this one is from the 12 Pro Max a few minutes ago

I know it is not helping here, but I have unfortunately to admit that this seems very similar.

I expected both to have a better endurance with such a light use but it is not the case, or I can even say it is no longer the case for the 11 Pro Max.

Maybe some of the changes introduced by iOS 14.3 and the associated carrier updates have impacted the older iPhones.

Once again, I remembered as many other people here that the 11 Pro Max performed much better, but this was before the iPhone 12 :(

After a couple days of experimenting.

Let me give you scenarios/examples with no regard to any other settings other than those mentioned being turned on or off.

iPhone 12 Pro running iOS 14.3

SIM card installed, WiFi on, Cellular On, Bluetooth in Standby (Turned off in CC to disable new connections, but still enabled)

Battery drops between 15 and 30% over an eight hour time frame while not being in use. (This was the case for a couple days, until I realized something was clearly wrong)

SIM card installed, WiFi off, Cellular off, Bluetooth standby same as before

Battery drops around 10% over the same time frame (Better, but still not satisfying)

Now get this!

SIM card taken out, Wifi on, Cellular off, Bluetooth same as before, I also turned Airplane Mode on for the sake of it

Draining between 1 and 3% , over the span of 8 hours.

I know, it seems absolutely silly to use an iPhone without a SIM card, but as long as this bug is not fixed taking out the Sim card might be your best option to prevent your battery from draining over night. Or you just simply keep it on a charger. Keeping the SIM and at least turning off WiFi and cellular or putting the device into airplane mode should make the battery drain a little less too.

Some other things you might want to switch off, if only to test for a couple days to see if battery life improves and slows the drain. Keep in mind, you can disable everything temporarily and don't have to worry about anything breaking. If something needs a certain thing enabled, iOS will most likely give you a prompt anyways. You can go back and enable everything again, but until a version of iOS 14.3.x or 14.4 is released that addresses the those kind of issues, it's the best and to be frank, the only thing you can do.

• Location Services > System Services. Be bold and turn off EVERYTHING. Toggle the status bar icon (the switch on the very bottom) so when you slowly enable them one by one again, you can keep an eye on what triggers the location to update. With the status bar icon on, you can check and investigate closely how and when a certain service is updating. I found the Find my iPhone location feature updates like crazy.

System customization also updates in the background constantly ( if you turn it off, Dark Mode/ Appearance will still be able to work in sunset/sunrise mode, night mode however will work only when you put it on a custom schedule, and optimized battery charging will not work (even the option itself in the battery menu is enabled) if you have Significant Location and/or System Customization disabled).

• Put Bluetooth into standby so it stops searching for new devices (Toggle it via Control Center so the icon becomes white.)

• Turn off 'Ask to Join Networks' and set 'Auto-join Hotspot' to Never in Wi-Fi settings to stop the device from constantly checking for sources, notifying you and trying to connect to other routers.

I don't mention any of those things like turning off Background App refresh, dimming your display etc as those can be found in literary every 'iPhone battery savings' video or article.

It is clear that the issue can be pinpointed to the cellular modem, which can only be put into completely pause if there is no SIM card in the device. Airplane mode alone does not seem to fix the issue fully nor does turning off Cellular data help much if anything.

That update doesn’t work for everyone and didn’t work for me at all https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251956914?answerId=254267033022#254267033022

So for everyone who’s eager to install it I would suggest to wait. The issue might be elsewhere.

Give it a read, try it and please report!

The only thing that came close to solving the issue for me.

Hope it helps some of ya. I made a standalone post, because this here has gotten quite floated.

And Yes, I do get the inconvenience and stupidity of removing the phone function from your iPhone!

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252271797

ColinFromSussex wrote:

Does anyone from Apple look at this forum?

As has been stated multiple times before, no, at least not anyone you are trying to reach.

Apple employees do read the forum, but only to monitor thread content to make sure it does not violate the Terms of Use.

I agree but in the case of DianaElenaT, there isn't anything clearly wrong. And the drain curve does seem quite normal and very different than all the others we see here. All the others are a straight downhill line, which indicate a parasitic draw which is in fact a problem.

But consider this. What I mean by 'tweaking' is the same principle as buying an expensive car with which you don't get the promised fuel-economy for some reason. You can't for the **** of it figure out why and you just complain about it. Whereas you are constantly driving with the AC on even when it is not needed, while having your window rolled down half-way because the AC by itself is too **** cold, charging three USB devices, carry useless stuff in your trunk everywhere etc etc. You can get good performance but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use your own common sense every once in a while.

And I know. Plenty of people drive cars, and don't think twice about anything, and they wouldn't even think about what gas milage they are getting, but then again, those people would not come to a forum either. And I know, manufactures can be responsible for things as well and they should stand by their mistakes and fix them but still.

If you can spare another few minutes, I have a story for you.

I bought an old car a while ago. Nice car but well, old. 40 years old. Got me around 450 kilometers (pardon me, I am European and only know the metric system xD) when the fuel light came on. Which is terrible. admittedly. I did a lot of work on it since then. Replaced brakes, suspension, bearings, filters etc. and long story. By the time I had most items that needed replacing replaced, it drove roughly 800 kilometers between refills. So don't tell me, that Apple (or any manufacturer) is the only one that can change or improve upon or fix things.

So, and if/when Apple acknowledges the problem. What then?

Why not do a few things you can do right now on your device if it helps.

[Edited by Moderator]

Low data mode do not stop receiving texts/iMessages from messengers or social networks. Don't be confused with Notifications.

Please check: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210596

In a nutshell, with Low data mode reduces apps' background activity: refresh, backups, software updates, autoplay video & music, so it's not hurt your user experience.

For me it got much worse. I downgraded to 14.4.1, which fixed the idle battery drain issue on the iPhone 12.

You can see my battery charts in this thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252603947

Yes, on my iMac. It all started when I noticed that while on a trip out of town, my iPhone’s battery was hardly draining at all, even on all-day hikes with GPS, and that my iPad Pro sat at 100% when I returned to my hotel. So it was either something on my home Wi-Fi, or my AirTags (half of them having remained home). Separately, maikm23 had noticed some runaway background communications between his Macs and iPhone, which stopped (along with the battery drain) when he moved his iPhone to his guest Wi-Fi.

What complicates things even more is that prior to the current situation, I had experienced issues with CoViD Exposure Notifications after traveling to a state that had those, and with Apple Music running 30+ minutes in the background every hour. Since then, the Apple Music drain seems to have stopped; but the Exposure Notifications debacle led me to believe that the Bluetooth radio was causing THIS drain (the behavior is somewhat similar to the Find My network). At the time, disabling Exposure Notifications immediately stopped the drain.

So I would suggest starting with disabling the Find My network on your iPhone/iPad, and Join Hotspot and Show in Finder on your Macs. If your battery drain stops, try reenabling one of those every day to see how your battery behaves over 24 hours. Right now, with all three of those settings disabled, the battery on my iPhone and iPad is mostly fine (just under 1% per hour for both the iPad and iPhone). But I want to narrow it down further.

Hello everyone.

I want to suggest everyone in this thread to turn off FaceID to see if their battery life changes for the better.

The last week I have spent so much time and effort trying to locate what was causing my massive battery drain, I turned off FaceID and the problem was gone. Went to Apple here in Stockholm and they replaced my whole phone.

I own a iPhone 12 Mini and did all kinds of weird setting changes that were suggested in this thread.

What I have tried that DID NOT work

• Full reinstall without reading in a backup
• Low power mode
• Dark mode
• Turn off app refresh, wifi, bluetooth, gps etc
• Turn off Find My iPhone
• Turn off the Find My iPhone Network
• Lower Screen brightness
• Many many many other suggestions

What solved my problem: Turn off FaceID!

Screenshot showing you how my battery was performing before they changed my phone

Why don’t you just follow the best practice of charging overnight, every night? There are processes that happen all the time, 24/7. When the phone is locked Wi-Fi turns off unless the phone is connected to power, so all processes that require data use cellular data. Which is the heaviest battery user after interactive gaming. Leaving it connected to power overnight has multiple advantages:

• If you turn on iCloud backups the phone will back up every night
• You can enable Optimized charging
• Wi-Fi remains on, so no data updates will use cellular data
• The running processes will use mains power instead of battery power, thus reducing the need to use charge cycles; as battery life is measured in full charge cycles this will greatly improve the useful life of the battery.

There are always things going on, and they aren’t the same things every night, so you shouldn’t expect the battery drain to be the same every night. Here are just a few:

• Incoming text messages
• Incoming iMessages and messages from any messaging apps you use
• Push and Fetch email
• Notifications from apps
• iCloud sync for any items that you have set to sync
• The phone pinging the cellular network to report its position every few minutes
• Data updates from apps such as weather, stocks, news, podcasts, shopping apps, calendar, etc
• Any apps that do housekeeping using the background app refresh feature
• Incoming visual voicemail messages if you have Do not Disturb enabled (if you don’t, any phone calls you get)
• Multiplayer game updates (e.g., Words for Friends)