You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

💡 Did you know?

⏺ If you can't accept iCloud Terms and Conditions... Learn more >

⏺ If you don't see your iCloud notes in the Notes app... Learn more >

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

iOS 14.2/14.3 battery drain bug!

Not sure you know anything about this, but my iPhone 8 battery randomly started to be really bad.


One day my battery was working great and randomly it’s draining battery at a super fast rate...


I didn’t download or change any settings. My settings are the best for battery saving...


I’m hoping it’s a weird software issue!


Know why this could be happening out of the blue?


UPDATE: I have since update to the iOS 14.3 RC/GM and my battery has been much better but the issue is still there not 100% fixed!

iPhone 8

Posted on Dec 9, 2020 1:18 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 20, 2021 2:24 AM

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.





227 replies

Feb 2, 2021 11:43 AM in response to b.desroches

I too have the iPhone SE 2020. I have noticed my battery drains quickly while on WiFi. My phone was charged to 100% when I awoke this morning. I was connected to WiFi and downloaded a podcast (14.6 MB) and listened to it. When I left the house approximately 45 minutes later, the battery was down to 90%.


I’ve checked all my settings and cannot figure out what’s killing my battery 🔋. If I remember, I’m going to turn off WiFi tonight to see if that makes any difference with the battery drain.


I connected my phone to the vehicle’s Bluetooth, and the battery drained soooo quickly! I was only listening to music that was downloaded onto the device!! It seemed like 1% per song...no exaggeration.

Feb 12, 2021 10:58 AM in response to Overlord85

I was hoping apple would fix this bug with 14.4 update but no luck. This morning my phone was charged to 100%. I opened one app and it instantly went to zero and shut down. Plugged it in and nothing after 5 minutes so I unplugged it and plugged back in. Instantly back to 100% battery and has been find the rest of the day. Come on apple. This can’t be that tough a fix and we aren’t all going to buy 12s so fix the problem!!

Feb 12, 2021 11:31 AM in response to Tv4971

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!

iOS 14.2/14.3 battery drain bug!

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.