iPhone 14 Pro Battery Draining Fast

For quite a while, mapping applications like Google Maps and Waze would use massive amounts of battery if you left them open.

Likewise, Facebook used to hit Location Services hard so it always knew "where" you were posting from, and you could almost watch the battery level drop as you used it.

Other times, other applications got stuck in loops and would end up using large amounts of battery.

A great way to check that is to check Settings -> Battery and see what is shown as using most of your battery.

Sometimes It's reported as Home Screen, but other times it can be a third party app you forgot you ever downloaded.

That seems convincing -

BUT

a change in iOS is highly likely not to be the cause. The reports here are very few in number, and the internet is not seeing 'millions' of complaints. Further, given past history, Apple will be exceptionally thorough in testing battery life and issues.

So where might this issue stem from?

A downloaded or maliciously introduced item of software which previously stayed within the parameters of 'OK'.

No one here has enumerated the 3rd party software they have onboarded. If ALL the people with problems did so, we may be able to find a common factor. Items such as Facebook, twitter - anything which remains active in the background may now find that due to a change in the OS constraints it used to have, it can now stay connected to the battery at all times. Facebook was notorious for such stuff - the laws of physics and operating systems state that anything in the execution stack will use energy, whether you know about it or not.

And let's face it, none of us know exactly what's going on, because there are no utilities (I'm aware of) that disclose what's in there at run time. Apple will have them, hackers will have them.

The closest you can get is to use the 'energy impact' information Apple provide.

The only way to positively identify the culprit would be to clear your iPhone - erase for resale. and then power on and conduct some timings for power loss. Add 1 application and redo the timing - and repeat.

I allow nothing to remain active, and close down - that is - Closed, not just asleep. everything when I'm done with it. Nothing anyone wants to send me is so important that it won't wait until I'm ready to check for inbound messages.

Batteries run for days and days...

What do you mean by third party software?

Apple has always been thorough with permitted apps to download. Following your logic a 16.3 update brakes this rule.

So what's the difference from Android then?..

I mean software produced by teams who do not have the OS developers on speedcall, and who do not have available intimate knowledge of the nuances of the OS and any changes.

Apple do, as you say, check the software they sell against some criteria. Foremost is that they are not malicious or destructive to user's best interests. The intricate interconnections between applications calling for OS services can only appear when a given combination of software is in place and executing.

How many non-apple authored applications do you have on your phone? How many are active in the background with or without your knowledge?

Android has exactly the same problems, so do all software systems, from the mighty machines that run petaflops a second down to my trusty old Windoze XP.

I invite you to locate the problem by removing software products until the issue goes away.

None of the above being intended to say that there is no issue with the OS, merely that, by definition, every app on your phone is running in fewer places than the OS, so encounters fewer confrontations with system services, and fewer reports of bad behaviour.

That's absolute nonsense. iPhone admits battery drainage is from "Find My" and nothing else.

When I disabled Find My Phone, removed Find My, disabled location sharing and disabled access to my location for "Find My" my battery worked like before.

Well, it's usually pretty obvious if it was made by Apple - they aren't shy about advertising.

Pages

Numbers

Keynote

Music

Safari - all the usual suspects - contacts, mail, camera, photos, notes.

Roughly - whatever didn't ship with the phone.

But - stanek8 seems to have located the issue. Do what (s)he says first. - any kind of 'find me' using location has to be alive all the time to do its job - obvious candidate.

Same. Apple advised me to get a new battery after hours and hours of trouble shooting. I'm doing everything correctly according to them, and they also said they are getting a LOT of complaints about this, an the rep acknowledged I probably got a lemon. I was told to bring it to an apple store to get a new battery. A problem bc I bought the phone at apple in the USA since I was going out of the country for several months. There's not much support in Indonesia, unless I want to leave my phone in a little repair shop for 5 weeks. A friend gave up on iphone and keeps saying "I told you..." so annoying.

I had an iPhone 8plus with 72% battery health and i could spend more than 12 hours without the need of recharging. With my brand new iPhone 14 pro , battery health 100%, it’s almost impossible to complete a day without recharging even with very short screen time.

i’m very disappointed and need an response from Apple.

Yes, because WhatsApp and Instagram are using huge amounts of battery power.

You're blaming the phone, so try this experiment:

1) Reboot

2) Do not use WhatsApp or Instagram for three hours

What does your battery usage look like now?

Rebooting was one of the first things i tried, and didn’t make a difference.

On the chart shared you can see Whatsapp and Instagram eating all the cake because it were the only apps i used that day. Actually it was a surprise for me all the percentage it showed because I use my phone lot less than on an average day.

And I’m blaming the phone battery for three reasons

:

1st and most evident: if you buy an iPhone (or any smartphone) its to use it, not to see how the battery behave when you are not using it. And the iPhone 14Pro its “the more powerful iPhone ever” But i haven’t even been able to use all my productivity apps!

2nd: as I said on my first comment, my old iphone 8Plus with lot more apps in play could last up to 2 days without recharging when it was new. And now. (4.5years later) with 72% battery health last the same hours with better performance that this iPhone-14 pro.

and 3rd: as you see in this forum and others down the internet: it is not just my iphone or my way to use it.

so I think it’s safe to say that there’s an evident downgrade of quality in iPhone batteries.

The reason I asked is simply this:

Apps that are not properly written and/or not written to properly deal with new operating systems (iOS 16 or even 16.3) can use huge amounts of battery, draining the battery quite quickly. iOS does not get involved in this as it is presumed the app is doing what you want it to.

Imagine an app that did nothing but check Location Services for location updates at a rate even faster than mapping apps do. Such apps have existed in the past and run batteries down in no time.

What you posted shows WhatsApp and Instagram used a full 55% of your battery. What precisely is Apple supposed to do about that? They don't control either nor can they just tell them to stop running if they use too much battery.

Another factor to consider is: 5G. 5G is much more power hungry than older cellular technologies were, and there is nothing Apple can do about that, either.

CNet: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/the-6-hardest-truths-weve-learned-about-5g/

The iPhone 8 did not have a 5G radio.

Both of these factors can impact battery life significantly, and neither has anything to do with a "bad battery" or poor design.

One additional factor is screen brightness: the iPhone 8 used a backlit LCD screen while the 14 Pro uses an OLED screen. OLED provides much better contrast and colors, but worse battery life if you have brightness set high as rather than a backlight emitting light, every individual pixel on an OLED display emits light.

(When displaying a largely black screen, an OLED display uses about 40% of the power of an LCD screen; when displaying an all white screen at full brightness, an OLED screen can use up to three times more power.)

How do others compare to this? I’ve sent this message to  support.

I made a 16 minute audio call with no other apps running, this drained 5% of the battery power.

Netflix stream in HD quality (probably 720p)

48 minutes used 8% battery which equals 6 minutes per 1% of battery so overall that’s 600 minutes streaming per 100% charge or 10 hours streaming per 100% charge.

YouTube video at 1080p quality.

30 minutes used 7% battery which equals 4.2 minutes per 1% battery so overall that’s 420 minutes streaming per 100% charge or 7 hours streaming per 100% charge.

While streaming no other apps were running, no widgets and in low power mode. Screen brightness was set at just over half.

Now compared to apples figures which states up to 20 hours streaming for my model, you can see I’m not getting anything anywhere near these figures. The performance of my iPhone was considerably better on the previous iOS version.

Note all of Apple’s battery specs are listed as “up to.”

Their figures have in the past been calculated using media already on the phone, not streaming over Wi-Fi and especially not cellular.

Remember the two biggest power users are the display and the cellular radio, especially if you have two bars or less of signal and even more so if you are connected to a 5G network.

I know it states up to and I mentioned up to in my post! You stated “not streaming” where as Apples up to figures do state streaming! Anyway the discussion here is that apps on 16.3 are using more power than on the previous iOS version. Again I was getting lots more stream for my power on the older iOS 16.2

Which app?

Their procedure makes it clear the streaming tests use the AppleTV app for all streaming and the streams were purchased from the Apple iTunes Store.

Streaming via other apps may require updates from those app authors to become more power efficient.

As far as the video test and streaming I also said “in the past”; Apple now does include a streaming spec and my post above delineates the test they use.