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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 21, 2020 12:32 PM in response to amberge

It is clearly a bug as amber said. My iPhone, on low power mode, can lose 10% battery life in an hour even without be used.


Even Apple customer agent agreed that this was not normal and that my settings were optimal.


Again, I'm happy that iOS 14.3 works for you. On my end I can't wait for a fix from Apple has I'm struggling to keep my iPhone alive with a very limited daily usage.

Dec 21, 2020 12:49 PM in response to AzizBhimaniMax

I’ve tried turning off all the things you’ve mentioned & more, but why do I even have to do so?! Didn’t all of us buy these iPhones to actually use them? I’ve never had any problems with my Apple devices, but this battery issue is ridiculous! I’ve purchased & returned 2 iPhone 12’s because of the battery heat & drain. Now I’ve got an iPhone 11& I’m still having the same problem. I’m beyond over it & I’m ready to buy a Samsung.

Dec 21, 2020 12:53 PM in response to amberge

Oh really, no i am not an Apple Genius, just an user like you, like to tell you one thing that you should not trust any company, they are just here for your money, they will control you with their power in order to take your money and we are puppets that are losing our way with this technology, go relax, sleep, go to your work and forget about your phone and see how the life really feels for real not reel.

Dec 21, 2020 8:51 PM in response to FinalCutPro7473

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.

Dec 22, 2020 7:14 AM in response to Chrisyaxley

I have the similar issue.

my battery iphone X, keep draining in 10 percent.


every time i fully charge my iphone X, the ios get stucked and need restart. But it charged 100 percent completely.


i restart regularly 3-4 times a day.

to refresh the battery icon indicator.


but sometimes its working but sometimes it is not.


really need help bout battery draining in 14.3.1.

really wait for the new ios.


when my ios get stucked, it cannot do the screen capture when i pressed the power and volume up button.


thank you.

Dec 22, 2020 1:50 PM in response to JazzSoft

As I wrote earlier, after installing a 14.3 upgrade, I've noticed that my battery started draining rather fast - up to 50% - 60% in an hour (1st gen SE) so I had to constantly charge the phone, thanks to a battery cover. The original battery's health indicator was at 86%, which is reasonable for a four years old phone. I think that the upgrade exacerbated the issue, so I bought an aftermarket battery and installed it. So far, so good (knocking on the wood).

Cheers to the community.

Dec 22, 2020 2:37 PM in response to valbmmet

After a couple of days of my phone giving me a solid two days charge after resetting & then restoring today my phone went back to not taking charge & needing to be plugged in constantly. I was on the phone to Apple support for well over a hour, and they have sent out a box to pick up the phone as they believe it is a processor issue.

Personally I think this is nonsense as the battery drain only started after the osx 14.3 update, but whatever, if the issue gets sorted I dont care.

Pretty annoying that a £1000 phone can be rendered useless by a software update though. After issues with my Macbook updating I will be turning off auto updated on my devices from now,

Dec 23, 2020 12:02 PM in response to cyrille273

We all know it's 100% software bug and only solution is Apple to release a patch. It may be 14.4 or something.


We can cooperate each other to narrow down the issue so that we can get the patch from Apple sooner. Instead of insulting other people's intelligence, do something positive.


I'm a macOS/iOS/iPadOS app developer and probably know more than average iPhone users.

Dec 23, 2020 1:33 PM in response to JazzSoft

Hello, I can say my situation too,

I have Iphone 7 (old but still fine), before I had 63% battery health and ios 14.1, now I have brand new battery - 100%, and ios 14.3.

Now after update it´s worse or comparable with the old bad battery...

2 hours of using on low brightness, just social sites and safari, no videos, it almost drain all battery... nonsense

iOS 14.2/14.3 battery drain bug!

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