iPhone SE 2022 battery troubleshooting & observations

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Day 3, 4/10:

Battery was down to 40% at 8:30am (~22% in 8 hrs, nearly 3%/hr). Ugh. Either the battery scale is very non-linear or it drops way faster overnight. I checked the Battery page again (nearly 24 hr since changes, so mostly fresh data): 34m Screen On, 1hr 44 min Screen Off, Hotspots = 78% battery usage but only 1m activity in background; Mail 2 hr 19 min background activity. I went ahead and uninstalled Hotspots, as it seemed to be misbehaving and I haven't actually needed to use it for anything.

I then charged it to 86% @ 9:15am. Still 86% @ 6:15pm (9 hrs) w/ no usage, 85% @ 7pm (light usage), 83% @ 9:30 (weak WiFi at end of house while watching a movie, so probably pulling more juice to connect) ... 83% @ 10pm, 82% @ 11:30pm (3% in 14+ hrs). Much better!

Day 4, 4/11:

78% @ 7am (4% in 7.5 hrs, still much faster drop overnight); 3m Screen On, 16m Screen Off (last 24 hrs), Mail = 19m background (home/lock = 1m, Messages = 1m, Settings = 1m), none show any battery usage. Weird. Something is running overnight that isn't being reported. My best guess is iCloud Backup, but it should only be able to run at night if on WiFi, plugged in, and the screen locked. I went into the Manage Backups screen and it showed the last backup being yesterday (as in this morning/overnight, or yesterday morning??), but not only was the phone not plugged in overnight yesterday, it's never been plugged in overnight. Backups should only be able to run manually, unless the documentation is wrong about how iCloud Backup actually works.

The main theme I've noticed is, Hotspots, Mail, and Messenger still run in the background when they're not supposed to. Although, I do still have the lock screen notification enabled for Messenger, so maybe that overrides its inability to background refresh? Obviously, I've got things to a pretty good point now, but getting a handle on the elevated overnight usage would be nice. I may try Low Power Mode again, now that some of the other issues have been resolved, just in case there was some crossover effect.

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I neglected to mention in the first post, in additional to the minimal app setup, I have: no music player, Face Time, Youtube, Apple suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote), Health tracking, social media, etc. Essentially, it's about as bare bones a setup as you'll find, making it the ideal testing grounds for base battery usage. I suspect I'll mostly be talking to myself in this thread, but hopefully it helps someone else trying to pinpoint battery issues. If nothing else, it's documentation for my own later reference!

Day 4, 4/11 (cont'd):

75% @ 9:30am after light usage, 74% @ 11:20am, 72% @ 2:20pm, 70% @ 4pm w/ lots of texting/Messenger, 69% @ 6pm, 66% @ 8:30 w/ texting & camera, 65% @ 10:30pm = 10% in 13 hrs of medium+ usage. If not for the elevated overnight drain, that would be a pretty reasonably ~15% a day with average (for me) usage, allowing 4-5 days between charges.

Day 5, 4/12:

59% @ 8am (Mail battery activity down to 46 min background, 23 min Screen Off last 24 hr; still showing no battery usage) = 6% in 9.5 hrs. Still higher than I would like to see, being basically the same rate as when using it an average amount during the day. 57% @ 11am, 53% @ 2pm (lots of playing w/ settings & shortcuts).

I checked the iCloud Backup page again and it says the backup last ran 4/10 (night of the big drop from 66% to 40%), so it hasn't performed each night (it said "yesterday" on 4/11, so that answers the earlier question of what that refers to), in terms of accounting for overnight activity.

Charged to 81% @ 2:20pm, still 81% @ 9pm, 80% @ 10pm, 79% @ midnight w/ light use ... turned off all FB Messenger notifications sometime earlier in day.

Day 6, 4/13:

75% @ 7am (4% in 7 hrs, similar to the lowest of previous overnights). iCloud Backup last ran yesterday (4/12), interesting. I wonder if there's an undocumented feature to run it every other day (while on the charger or whenever??), regardless of time of day, if it hasn't been plugged in overnight? It would make sense that most people wouldn't encounter such a feature, as I'm probably in the minority of being such a light user that I don't have to charge up every night. I have Optimized Charging turned off for that reason. I want it charged when I plug it in, not when the phone guesses at my desired usage routine.

I also wonder if the minimal size of my backups (108 MB) -- little more than Contacts and settings -- allows iCloud Backup to run at non-standard times because of the less intensive process? I'm due for a sleepless night any day now, so perhaps I'll pull an all-nighter and watch the battery % to see if it drops a consistent 1/2% per hour or a big drop somewhere...

This post will likely be the last of the hour-by-hour recaps, as it's probably getting as tedious to read as it is to type. :-) But, there are some interesting tidbits turning up now...

4/13, turned off Auto-Brightness (didn't realize it was on, so ignore my earlier comment about running very low brightness; way too dim without it, so re-enabled it); 73% @ 8:30am with medium+ use, 71% @ 11am, 70% @ 1pm, 69% @ 3pm, 64% @ 6pm & 61% @ 8:30pm (heavy usage), 60% @ 10:30pm, 59% @ 1am, 58% @ 2am, 58% @ 3am, 58% @ 4 am, 57% @ 7am

= 3% in 8.5 hrs overnight ... seems pretty linear overnight, ~0.3%/hr, much better than previous low of ~0.5%/hr. So, that's reassuring that overnight battery drop can be in line with the lowest daytime observations when nothing funky is going on. Coincidental that it would be well behaved the night I watched over it?

4/14, 56% @ 8:30am, 56% @ 9:30, 55% @ 10:30; re-enabled Messenger notifications; 54% @ 11am w/ light usage; 51% @ 12:30 running errands (testing whether I should turn off wifi when out and about); drained it down for some duration tests; last 24 hrs: 49m Screen On, 27 min Screen Off (Mail still 1 hr 17 min background) ... 39% @ 10pm

4/15, 35% @ 6:30am (4% in 8.5 hrs overnight, slightly higher than yesterday's best)

As of the morning, iCloud Backup still hasn't run since 4/12 (aka last time charged), but ran @ 5:31pm today while charging, so the documentation is indeed wrong about it only running overnight. I'm guessing it's setup to perform the backup any time on the charger, if it's been more than a day since meeting the overnight criteria.