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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

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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

Dec 15, 2020 12:59 PM in response to lindros2

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.

Dec 15, 2020 1:56 PM in response to deggie

99% of new.

not to sound like a broken record...

Going to battery usage, Messages, Photos (with background activity, even though I forbid it...), Phone (I was on a call for 15 minutes, which should use the LOW POWER cores as per apple marketing)...

Home and Lock Screen is now much higher than it used to be. I don’t use widgets, so please don’t ask.

And Mail - but I manually pull, and do not have any dynamic push (ie iCloud/me, exchange, gmail, etc).

Safari is far behind, and chrome is not on the list, since I don’t use it.

Dec 16, 2020 10:53 AM in response to cpergram

I have experienced same issue with iPhone 11 Pro Max.


after lots of troubleshooting I figured my phone was reconnecting to my WiFi every 10 seconds or so. I figured this by monitoring clients list on my access point.


Turned mobile data off and iPhone remains connected to WiFi (as it should) and battery doesn’t drain at all during the night. Not exactly a fix but has helped me.

Dec 16, 2020 11:05 PM in response to Steve M.

Exactly the same experience here: iPhone 8 upgraded from 14.2.x to 14.3 yesterday. Restarted the phone after upgrade. 100% battery when going to bed, 11% this morning 8h later - phone in Sleep mode throughout the night. The battery drain/discharge seems to be linear after upgrading according to the level diagram in the Battery app.

Apple - I'm looking forward to a quick 14.3.1 patch as soon as possible!

Dec 17, 2020 9:17 AM in response to Zorksortronz

@Ricky - to expand on my removed post, I have been on 14.2 and 14.3 for a long time.

The battery drain is predominantly from built-in Apple apps, including Photos (behaving badly - background refresh on battery even though I forbid it), Messages (ditto), and Phone. Also Home & Lock Screen has greater draw than it used to, and I do not use widgets at all.

Not sure what's going on.

I've turned off optimized battery charging numerous times, reset the phone, and went as far as to blow it away, fresh-load/install iOS 14.3, and see how a clean phone worked for a couple days.

Battery draw - on an iPhone 11 Pro Max w/ 99% of new - is about 15-20% more severe than iOS 14.1.

(14.2 kept turning on optimized battery charging, so I can't comment/draw a direct comparison)

This issue - battery - has been echoed by friends with iPhone 12 and 12 Pro Max devices, as well.

We're all seasoned iPhone users with at least six generations of iPhones ourselves (my wife and I do "tick" and "tock" - we alternate years - so I actually have ten generations of iPhones in my house).

Dec 18, 2020 7:31 AM in response to FinalCutPro7473

Have been having the same problem. It’s gotten much worse since installing iOS 14.3 a couple weeks ago. This morning, battery dropped from 55% to 44% in an hour, while not being used at all and then dropped to 26% while reading email, checking weather and accessing this site which took a total of 45 minutes. I removed all widgets, so it’s not that.


it also takes much longer for the battery to charge.

Dec 18, 2020 12:39 PM in response to sebastián128

Since ios 14.3 battery takes too much time to charge and battery drains overnight without any apps usage and without any network connectivity eg wifi or data....

it seems again apple mades deliberate changes in battery and in ios 14.1 battery was perfect and how it behaves devastatingly bad in ios 14.3....

iphone battery gameplay will not gonna end i think.....

iOS 14.2/14.3 battery drain bug!

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