iOS 14.2/14.3 battery drain bug!

Hi!

Airplane mode does initially disable all connections (Wi-Fi, Cellular, Bluetooth) however all except Cellular can be separately re-enabled even if airplane mode stays active. Hence why I asked if your carrier supports Wi-Fi Calling.

Did you update to 14.4 already? Even though the drain bug on my device isn't gone, the overall battery performance though got better. And because I am connected to Wi-Fi 99.9% of the day, airplane mode with Wi-Fi calling works like a charm.

Being on airplane mode and completely offline (in case you do not have the Wi-Fi calling option) is not really a fix either, is it?

I only use and recommend airplane mode because Wi-Fi calling exists and is a possibility for many.

In any other instance, I advise you to plug in your phone however often you can until Apple hopefully fixes this, so you are not prematurely ruining you battery (if it drains entirely multiple times a day and you have to recharge it, it most definitely will put on many many cycles and makes it degrade even faster). But as you said, it is sitting on your desk most of the day waiting for a fix, it's alright ;) The battery draining like this (not only your device, but devices across the entire line-up) has to be a software bug which they should be able to patch up. Nobody knows what is taking them so long, and why they do not address this. It has made quite a bit of fuss already and they don't do anything. Maybe they are clueless as well, who knows

One thing I noticed when I updated to iOS 14.3 for my iPhone - It switched on Wifi Calling after the upgrade. This definitely was not switched on before!.

As I understand Wifi calling creates an IPsec VPN tunnel to your carriers network which can use more phone battery to keep this tunnel open for calls. I notced that after switching this off in my phone settings, my battery life improved dramatically. Or course, if you're in a poor reception area with your carrier you may want to have Wifi calling enabled as it would no doubt be better than if you had poor reception.

Same problem after update from iOs 13.x to 14.3 in my iPhone 6S. The iphone drain battery from 80% to 15% in one night (airplane mode) or lost 50% of battery in 30 minutes, but I think I've resolved it.

I tried unsuccesfully:

· Battery recalibration

· Disable background updates

· Disable location on all Apps

· Delete some unused Apps

· Switch off / switch on iphone.

· Hard reset.

The solution (the battery drains normal as pre-update to iOs 14.3 along last 24 hours...):

· Delete all widgets (enabled by default when updated to iOs 14.3) from left side screen.

Pretty sure this battery drain kills battery health as well.

Updated my 6months old iphone 11 to 14.3 with 100% health and 40 charging cycles and now its 98% battery health and 44 charging cycles in 2 weeks. As you can understand i am a very light user so until ios 14.3 i used to charge my iphone once every week, but now i need to charge it every 2 days. Obviously this is not the reason for the battery health drop (2% in 4 charging cycles) and Apples silence over the issue is quite frightening. Further more whenever i use mail or safari the battery drops 1% per 2 minutes, thus a fully charged battery hold the iphone for 4 hours, way below its advertised specs. Do note that background app refresh is turned off and location services are only for maps app, share my location and find my iphone services. If this goes on i will ask for a full replacement under warranty, as waiting for the 80% battery health limit, will get me just out of warranty with a broken battery iphone and less than 200 charging cycles.

By the way, the only think that helped my idle power drain was to put my iphone faced down. Read somewhere That this helps with the notifications and screen activation and it really drops my idle power drain by 50%.

I have a 12 Pro Max and battery drain in standby. No apps running in background, my drain is inconsistent because some nights it only drain 4-5% and other nights up to 30%. Lately I have discovered that airplane mode with WiFi on and Bluetooth on stop my drain. If I have my phone in these settings at night there is no drain so it seem to be iPhone mobile network modem that’s causing my issue with drain. As soon I use it in airplane mode off it’s starts to drain in standby again. Been doing these test for multiple days now and there is a pattern with airplane mode on/off.

What iPhone do you have? When I hear stuff like that, I instantly think that a battery calibration is needed to fix a problem like you are describing. It won't fix the drain but it should fix the wrong read-out (which is obviously false).

I had an iPhone 6s sitting on 1% for hours (before the percentage was jumping around and dropping in large amounts instantly) and was able to power on multiple times after it has shut itself off due to the 'empty' battery which it shouldn't be able to if the battery reading would be accurate. After doing the following procedure, it worked a whole lot better. It still had the original battery with 84% health. Granted it is the 6s and really rather old already, and while it didn't improve overall battery life by much, doing the calibration fixed the erratic percentage drops and made the device a little bit more reliable because 'what you see is what you get' and not a plummeting battery meter that is lingering on 1% for hours or in your case, a phone shutting down when it obviously has a full charge.

To calibrate: (it is best do to this on the weekend when you are less likely do not have any place to be early in the day etc.)

1) Drain your device until it shuts off. Reboot or at least try to until it doesn't do so anymore (also do it by the hard reboot method, as sometimes the device boots whereas it wouldn't boot if only the power button is held, but would power up by doing the hard reboot).

2) Leave unplugged for a couple hours (overnight is best)

3) Charge the device until full, then leave plugged in for at least one more hour after it already is displaying 100%.

4 Restart your iPhone either by normally turning it off and rebooting or by hard rebooting

5) Unplug, then if you can, do the whole procedure one more time

Hard reboot:

Devices with actual physical Home Button, 6s (Plus) SE Gen1: press the Home Button and Side (Top on SE) Button for ten seconds, then keep holding only the Side (Top on SE) Button until the Apple Logo appears

With iPhone 7 (Plus), 8 (Plus), SE Gen2: it is the same procedure as devices without Home Button (I believe)

All devices without a Home Button: press Volume up quickly once, then Volume down quickly once and then hold the Side button until the Apple logo appears.

Be vigilant about the calibration steps as only performing them the right way, will actually give you any real and good result. The phone needs to know (re-learn from time to time) what is an actually empty battery so it can calculate the time and display the correct percentage for everything in between actually full and actually REALLY empty. Good Luck!

A little follow up on my previous post.

In my company we have more than 100 users with iPhone 11 purchased on July 2020 and many (me included) have raised an issue that the phone is inadequate for our work due to fast battery drain.

We mainly use the phone for e-mail and messages between us (5 to 10 per hour) and access to a site over the browser to enter some data 5-6 times a day for about 10 minutes per time (plus phone calls off course).

With these many barely get through the day (80% to 20% charge) and some don't even reach the afternoon.

So our technicians performed some operational tests and came up with the bellow:

Main Settings:

Newly reset 6 months old iPhone 11's with Background app refers off, Location services only maps, WIFI calling, find my iPhone and share my location on, raise to talk off, Siri search off, App and IOS update off, Bluetooth off, 1 mail account and iCloud on.

stand by drain 14-20% per 12 hour.

Enabling airplane mode (working with wifi calling) stand by drain 6-12% per 12 hours

Disabling notifications stand by drain 2-4% per 12 hours. (actually my phone went from 93% to 55% in 5 days stand by).

So notifications seems to be a major culprit here but we do need them so turning them off is out of the question and obviously airplane mode is out of the question for people on the road most of the time.

Based on the notifications finding techs began to suspect the screen-on, battery usage.

So they put 5 iPhones on home screen without any widget, dark mode on and 20% brightness, no open apps and all above settings as described and let them on for 1 hour. The battery drain was 22-36% . Even continued the test until the phones went off and it took them 3.5-5 hours in total (sitting there, doing nothin with the screen on). That's a screen battery drain of above 1% per minute.

Now further to the above we performed the same test with safari open on a news page that auto-refresh and the results were double as bad. No phone lasted more than 3 hours.

To conclude they checked the battery status with iMazing and they found that the battery health displayed on the iPhones was 2 present above the the health reported by the program ranging from 90% (124 charging cycles) to 96% (47 charging cycles).

Out of curiosity Techs performed the same test on a same lot brand new spare iPhone and a coworkers iPhone still on iOS 13.

The new iPhone performed much better but still way less than the IOS 13 one which by the way had 99% (98 according to iMazing) battery health after 93 charging cycles.

Their opinion is that IOS 14.3 is too heavy on the battery and actually it kills it as the battery health seem to degrade much faster than the !OS 13 one. That's why it performs so much better on new iPhones were the battery is on its peeks.

With the above results the management decided to return all affected iPhones (42) to our ISP supplier and get them back only when they are functioning within described specs and all necessary settings on (the claim is that we buy phones based o functionality and operational performance to meet out needs and not technical data), so we wait a response from them.

For the mid time i got from the Techs a mid range android phone on Monday morning, fully loaded with my apps and i am charging it now for the first time from 27% battery. If i get used to the android UI and logic i think i will ask to stick with this one.

I've read everything you posted.

What is the current health of your battery?

When you go to Settings > Battery which apps are using the most battery? Anything stand out?

Keep in mind within the first 72 hours of an update the spotlight will reindex and the phone may be transferring data to iCloud. If you are on a weak connection iMessage and the phone can use up a lot of battery.

Severe battery drain after an update is to be expected as the files are remapped. Depending on how much data you have stored on your phone, it could take 2-3 days. In several cases reported here, you've only given it overnight.

Wait a couple day, restart your device, and see if your battery drain returns to normal.

I'm curious as to whether anyone has tried to reset to factory configuration and run the stock phone for 48 hours to see how the battery holds up with no 3rd party apps installed. My guess is this is an app(s) that doesn't play well with 14.2/3 since there are literally millions of iPhones out there in use and only a tiny fraction exhibit this problem.

I had a long chat with the Apple support and he tested my phone with the Apple inspector and a battery check but he can't find something wrong. Then I had a chat with his boss and after that I got a call from Apple from a guy from the Apple care team (I don't have Apple care). We are talking long about that issue and in the end he gave me to tips:

Create an Apple bug request

Write an feedback <- very important

https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

He told me that Apple takes care about the feedback issues and when a lot of people writing a feedback for the same issue, the developers taking care to have a look and try to fix it. But it's only necessary over this ways (Bug request, feedback formular, get in contact with the support). He told me that they ignore the Apple Support Communities for that. a

Hi everyone,

I did turn on the Airplane mode as recommended by user0197. I can confirm that while being on Airplane mode, the battery doesn't drain as fast as when it is off when I don't use my phone.

Prior to that my iPhone was optimized to preserve battery life. Therefore, in my case at least, the problem seems either related to wifi or bluetooth, or maybe even both of them. I'll try to see if one of them is the culprit.

That being said I have the exact same settings on my iPhone today that I had with iOS 14.1 when my battery was not draining super fast.

I hope this might help some people!

I found that a local app was using 59% battery so reluctantly deleted it so now battery much better. I also checked how much other apps were using but they are ok

Hi, i had the same problem of battery drain on 14.3, it seems to be fixed after remove the weather widget

Low power mode seems to work for me BUT you have to be vigilant. When you charge the phone, iOS automatically turns off Lower Power mode when it charges past 80. So, if you begin in LP mode, put the phone on a wireless charger overnight, what happens is that the device will charge but when it hits 80%, iOS goes into normal mode and the battery drains far faster than it can charge. Thus, when you wake up, the power may be at 15%, 7%, whatever. There doesn't seem to be any way to lock it into LP mode. So when you charge it, turn on LP mode when it gets past 80%. Also, the wired charger seems to add more juice than the new MagSafe charger I'm using so, if plugged in, it will charge slightly faster than it drains, even in normal mode. BTW -- I'm running diagnostics on the device as per an Apple Support chat but I strongly doubt that it's a hardware issue as the same thing happened to my iPhone X just after installing 14.2. In fact, the sudden drop in battery life but 2 other relatively minor issues are why I got the 12 to replace the X in the first place. Sigh...