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iOS 16.1.2 Battery Drain by Siri

On Sunday, December 4th, I upgraded to iOS 16.1.2 on my iPhone SE and now I am having to continually charge the phone 1-2 times daily. Previously on 16.1.1, I could go 2-3 days without charging. I have not added any apps or made any changes. When I review my battery usage, Siri would seem to be the culprit; however, I have Siri disabled. The phone will be idle from 11PM-7AM and will go from 80% down to 15%. The image below shows I actually used the phone more before the upgrade and had less battery usage. I have reset the phone and the issue remains and I don't really want to factory reset it to resolve.


Is any one else seeing a similar issue?

What can be done to correct?

Why can't we revert back to 16.1.1?

WTF Apple?


Posted on Dec 8, 2022 10:45 AM

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Posted on Dec 9, 2022 10:45 AM

I have an iPhone 13 Pro with 91% battery health -- of which the health of the battery dropped from 98% to 91% after the ios 16.1 update. The past few weeks, my phone has been losing 8-12% an hour and running hot with it just sitting there and not much activity. Actually using it for anything that you would want to use a smartphone for drained it even faster. I have both called Apple "customer service" and visited the "Genius" bar and everything checked out and they couldn't find any issues with the battery or the ios. I explained to both that there are known threads out there describing these issues that many are experiencing, but they had no knowledge about it. Not sure what the point of these boards are if Apple doesn't actually review or assist and they leave their customers to fend for themselves. Pretty poor all around service when they won't acknowledge known issues.


Following the advice of someone else on another thread, I disabled contact sync and that seems to have solved the problem. The problems for me seemed to be around syncing the contacts to iCloud, so I turned that feature off for now. If I find the battery drain has continued, I'll update here. Hopefully, ios 16.2 fixes this issue when it is released next week and we can turn contact sync back on. There should be no reason we have to dumb down these smart phones.

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Question marked as Best reply

Dec 9, 2022 10:45 AM in response to cAnuCk_cRacKer

I have an iPhone 13 Pro with 91% battery health -- of which the health of the battery dropped from 98% to 91% after the ios 16.1 update. The past few weeks, my phone has been losing 8-12% an hour and running hot with it just sitting there and not much activity. Actually using it for anything that you would want to use a smartphone for drained it even faster. I have both called Apple "customer service" and visited the "Genius" bar and everything checked out and they couldn't find any issues with the battery or the ios. I explained to both that there are known threads out there describing these issues that many are experiencing, but they had no knowledge about it. Not sure what the point of these boards are if Apple doesn't actually review or assist and they leave their customers to fend for themselves. Pretty poor all around service when they won't acknowledge known issues.


Following the advice of someone else on another thread, I disabled contact sync and that seems to have solved the problem. The problems for me seemed to be around syncing the contacts to iCloud, so I turned that feature off for now. If I find the battery drain has continued, I'll update here. Hopefully, ios 16.2 fixes this issue when it is released next week and we can turn contact sync back on. There should be no reason we have to dumb down these smart phones.

Dec 10, 2022 1:32 PM in response to SKramp

@SKramp - Amazing, thank you!


My battery health is 100% and I had tried a ton of other settings, such as disabling location services, disabling background app refresh, etc... and the solution you offered seems to have taken care of the Siri Battery Drain. Now I have to go back through all the changes I made so my phone is back to a somewhat normal state.


[Edited by Moderator] 


Dec 12, 2022 8:49 AM in response to cAnuCk_cRacKer

Me and my partner both have iPhone 13 pro’S with 94% battery health but have noticed a significant increase in battery usage. My girlfriend noticed it first and I waited for the update and it ran automatically over night but have noticed I am having to charge more frequently for the same usage after 16.1.2 update.


there is definitely a battery drain problem that needs to be fixed for non 14 phones

Dec 12, 2022 9:43 AM in response to cAnuCk_cRacKer

Same thing is happening to me. Installed 16.1.2 on iPhone 13 pro and noticed significant battery drain from background activities. First it was Apple Music, then Mail, now Siri. Turned off background app refresh and disabled Siri but that doesn't help - background activities just shift to something else. It's almost like iCloud is in a sync-loop and is constantly running various processes in the background.


Installed 16.1.1 on 6th gen iPad mini and experienced the same problem - Apple Mail shows 12 hours of background activity which used 30% of the battery overnight (I don't use Apple Mail). Again, seems to be an issue with background iCloud sync activities causing excessive battery drain.


Both devices were fine before the update. My normal usage is 25-30% in a day is now 80% with no change to my daily screen time. Oddly, the iPhone "fixed" itself for a few days but now it's back to significant background battery drain. Fingers crossed that 16.2 fixes this issue...

Dec 12, 2022 12:26 PM in response to cAnuCk_cRacKer

I’m using a brand new iPhone 14 Pro and have serious problems with the battery and ios 16.1.2. Battery health is 100%, but despite this, approx. 25% - 30% is lost duting night time when the phone is not in use. I have turned off several power-hungry features such as background app activities, Siri (used 72%?) and 5G. It's really annoying eith such an expensive phone and then I can't use it for what it's meant to be.

iOS 16.1.2 Battery Drain by Siri

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