iPhone 14 Pro Battery Draining Fast

Always-On Display has the potential to drain your iPhone 14’s battery life.

The feature is on by default but if you don’t need it, you might try turning it off to see if your phone’s battery life improves. Here’s how to do that:

• Go to Settings
• Tap on Display & Brightness.
• Scroll down to Always On and turn Always-On display off or on.

How long ago did you install 16.1? Recall row the first 48 hours or so battery usage will be worse for any installed iOS update as it rebuilds various databases and indices.

You have 14 days to return it if you bought it from an Apple store.

But your phone has a problem that is fixable, so the best approach is to find why the battery life is poor and fix it. My iPhone 14 and those of many associates is better than any phone I have ever owned. I charged my phone overnight last night (you should also). Now, at 8:30 PM my battery charge is still at 75%. Every other phone I have ever owned would be down to 20% by now, and on some days I would have had to charge it during the day. And there have been many similar reports.

Battery drain has only one cause: apps that use energy. There is nothing else that drains the battery, so to fix it you need to identify the app(s) that uses the most energy. Start in Settings/Battery.

pfdemai wrote:

When I received my phone, I restored it from my iPhone 11 and this was apparently the issue

• I had to completely reset my iPhone 14 Pro after syncing all its data to iCloud

• I then did the setup again but WITHOUT restoring an iCloud save (I set up the phone without connecting my Apple ID)

• Once the phone was set up I then connected to my Apple ID and synced all the data

• Had to download all the messages, download all the apps from the App Store (they are stored on your profile to find them easily)

• Finally MAGIC HAPPENED !! Left my phone overnight on my stand table and lost about 5-6% of battery

• I had heavy usage of the phone while restoring the data and the battery didn't drain nor did the phone overheat while charging

When I received my 14 Pro Max, I restored the backup made that morning of my 13 Pro Max, and I have zero battery issues.

I'm glad you found a solution, but whatever issue you had is by no means universal.

pfdemai wrote:

•Dear Lawrence, I'm sorry but YOU CAN leave your phone without charging overnight and you actually should if your battery is not below 20% as you will use one more charge cycle than necessary and then shorten your battery life :)

Yes, of course YOU CAN, you can do anything you want including standing on your head while holding the phone, but that doesn’t make it right. And if you don’t charge overnight with Optimized Battery Charging enabled it will shorten the useful life of your battery in the long term.

The absolute best way to get maximum use on a charge, as well as slow the decline of battery capacity long term is to enable Optimized Battery Charging (Settings/Battery/Battery Health) and charge the device overnight, every night. The battery will fast charge to 80%, then pause. During the nighttime pause the phone will use mains power instead of battery power, allowing the battery to “rest”, and thus reducing the need to charge the battery quite as often. The phone will resume charging to reach 100% when you are ready to use your phone; it will “learn” your usage pattern. If you enable iCloud Backup (Settings/[your name]/iCloud - iCloud Backup) the phone will back up overnight also, assuring that you can never lose more than the current day’s updates. Here's more information→About Optimized Battery Charging on your iPhone - Apple Support

The key is “low signal.”

If you’re in an area with low signal, your phone will use a lot of battery to communicate with a cell tower, and even more if it’s 5G, both conditions your screen shots indicate.

So this doesn’t strike me as particularly strange, as your phone was probably trying to sync contacts over 5G and was having to turn up its radio to high power to do so.

BigBoost17 wrote:

This is the worst. My battery drains to less than 50 % half way through the day.

I hate that the home screen is alway on.

wish they would change that.

You can easily change your screen to not be always on.

Settings > Display & Brightness

Turn OFF Always on

We don't have the same apps, and likely not the same settings on our two devices. We likely don't have the same location services turned on. Or notification settings turned on. You may not have set up cellular services the same as I have. You need to isolate what's eating up your charge. And the best place to see that is Settings > Battery.

Same

Spent Hours with a few Apple support staff. Did all the tests, everything is fine, software up to date, did all the troubleshooting but the issue persists. The rep finally told me it’s a lemon battery and since I have apple care I can get it replaced.

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...

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.)

Hey everyone, as I said in my previous post, I wasn’t having this issue. Unfortunately I’m starting to notice it now, it’s pretty bad. Followed all the instructions on Apple’s Support website and this Discussions site, nothing helps. I did, however, make an interesting observation: it’s not just the iPhone 14 Pro/Pro Max. It’s happening with my 13 mini, 12 Pro, SE 2nd gen (yes I know I have too many iPhones lol), and my family member’s 11 Pro Max and another family member’s 13. What I noticed is that it’s almost 100% certainly related to iOS 16. All the iPhones were having this issue, except my previously mentioned family member’s iPhone 13… which was running iOS 15.6 b/c she is always wary of the latest updates wreaking havoc with her devices. I finally convinced her to update to 16.3 and she’s having the same issue. Anyway, just wanted to throw that out here and ask if anyone else has noticed this battery drain only since updating. Regardless, leaving feedback for Apple will help to get this issue resolved sooner: Feedback - iPhone - Apple

So my iphone 14pro is also draining fast. I have to plug it in by noon every day because it's less than half battery. My app drains as a % are normal apps like messaging and safari, not data intense apps that usually use a lot of battery. My phone is also very hot at times which is worrisome. I am taking it in to the repair center for them to do diagnostics but I also bought apple care last night so I can get a replacement if it is not fixed. The apple tech that I talked to on the phone said he had the same issue with his 13, exchanged it, and the new one works fine. I think it's a hardware issue. Perhaps a batch of the batteries is faulty or something. If that is the case, a replacement is the only solution.

I deleted facebook app and my battery is back to normal. Facebook drained the battery of the iPhone.