Battery drain in iOS 14.4

Is the 'exposure notifications' turned on, if so try turning them off and see if this makes any difference. I've suggested this before for users with iPhone SE but never get any feedback.

I did this with my own iPhone SE series 1 because battery drain went haywire after iOS 14.4 - this coincided with Apple's inclusion of covid tracking code (something to do with bluetooth always checking for possible contact proximities) with this update.

Anyway, after turning off the exposure notifications, the battery drain became much more settled and has been consistent with usage for some 3 months now. There's no harm in trying this out on a short-term basis and it just might prove to be the answer.

Hi Siddey:

I've had the same issue after upgrading to iOS 14.1 and then iOS 14.4. A painful, but effective fix for me, is to do the following:

1. Backup the iPhone using iTunes
2. Erase the phone (entirely)
3. Restore the iPhone from iTunes

Note: Save your photos before doing this.

I guess there's some "gremlin" in the iOS upgrade that causes the drain, even for normal apps like messaging, etc. I have an iPhone 8 and the battery health is decent.

Good luck and I hope this works for you.

Drew

Hello,

Yeah, there is a lot of chatter on that. In the meantime, until it gets sorted out, try this:

1) Go to Settings > Battery > BATTERY USAGE BY APP to see the apps that are consuming your battery.

2) Check “Battery Health” in the link: 

iPhone Battery and Performance

Good luck.

If you backed up the phone before updating, I suggest you restore to that previous incarnation. Quite a few of the higher level community specialists will suggest it’s a battery fault - as they have previously. When my iPhone started playing up following iOS 14.4 update I turned location tracking, background app refresh and exposure notification settings all to OFF and although not what I consider to be a long term fix, it has improved battery drain to almost pre-update levels!

Good luck

iOS 14.4 certainly has destroyed the battery management system of smaller sized iPhones. I can only suggest backing up the phone and then doing a full reset as others have suggested!

Remember some apps are power hungry and do background refresh, possibly turn off that feature for those apps too!

Mine is not quite as steep as that, but it does seem to be correlated with whether safari is running (either in foreground or background). If I kill safari the batttery percentage holds up fairly well, OTOH with safari running I can watch it go down in front of my eyes.

If you turn off location services this may be of help, I believe this also uses Bluetooth which appears to cause more rapid battery drain since iOS14.4 update. Try that!

Do you sync and back up your phone to iTunes on a computer?

Try following this link! https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201252

You write “Remember some apps are power hungry and do background refresh, possibly turn off that feature for those apps too!”

Remember nothing changed on my phone prior or after iOS 14.4. .  No settings changed or apps added. Just 14.4 installed and now massive battery loss. 

Of courses I could put my brightness to 1 not use any features to try to help whatever broke in the iOS update but that is a very poor solution to a bad update don’t you think?

FYI if you do any research on the net you will see it’s not just you write "destroyed the battery management system of smaller sized iPhones". I have read the same issues with  SE through iPhone 11 Pro.

If you have backed up your phone to iCloud or synced to a computer then try restoring to that version! Follow the link - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204184 My guess is that older iPhones should not be updated to iOS 14.4 and that any future updates will not redress battery drain problems! Good luck

Yes, you're correct about the apps before the iOS14.4 update not affecting the battery rundown as much, it's only after the update that I went through all the possibilities and that smaller iPhone batteries were mostly affected. I have noted that other more recent larger phones are experiencing rapid decline in battery capability also, which is why I believe the problem is Apple's coding and that they don't appear to be inclined to fix this issue or admit that it has anything to do with this included traceability!

Whatever Apple has done to the management system appears to have aged batteries irreversibly. Since the latest iOS 14.2 updates and turning off optimised charging mode in settings my series 1 SE’s battery drain is much better and if I don’t use the phone drops by only a few percentage points over the course of a day!

I doubt very much that battery drain will ever be as it was prior to iOS 14, the damage won’t be undone in entirety!

Good luck

Thanks for bringing up this issue.

I have iPhone7 and noticed SIGNIFICANT degradation in battery life when iOS 14.4 came out about a month ago. This was a ‘new’ battery that was replaced back in Oct.

Phone will show 100% charge for 20-30 min, then shutdown. Then once restart, it shows 10%.

Apple, you have to take responsibility for some flaw in iOS 14.4 and fix this, please.

anyone else having these types of problems?

Thanks for the tip. Exposure Notifications might well be the culprit. I noticed that my iPhone X battery would drain in the middle of the night (like 4:00 AM) even when the battery level was 60% in the evening. Those drain times look correlated with the times that Exposure Notifications was active; Exposure Notifications is active every 4 hours.

(BTW People are also reporting issues with iPad. I cannot confirm that. My iPad Pro 10.5" is having no battery issues with iPadOS 14.4.)