iPhone 14 Plus iOS 16.4 Battery Drain

Reply to ghales comment on "Here is a photo of my husband’s IPhone SE"

Your husband's SE is just like my iPhone 8. One week after updating to 16.4.1 and closing down almost everything including emails, the battery on my iPhone 8 is at a stable draining speed of 7% per hour, even at standby or shutdown, on airplane mode or low battery mode.

Before the update, I charged the battery by 40% everyday, roughly from 40%~80%, which means a 1 cycle in 2.5 days. Now I have to charge the battery by 50% 3 times a day, from 40%~90%, which means 1.5 cycles each day. Before the update, the battery health is 90% after 3.5 years usage, now it's 89%.

I hope the honorable Apple developers find the above info useful and give us a solution soon. Thanks all for the input.

Well, I did my update several weeks ago. I turned off everything that I could think of that would be draining the battery and running in the background! Battery drain is getting worse not better..I’m very frustrated. All of these updates are creating issues on my phone. I’m seriously considering switching over to an android.

It appears that thousands of iPhone users are having this issue. Lucky you if you are not having the issue.

Not experiencing the issue certainly does not make you” special.”

Although your answer certainly does seem unsympathetic and not helpful for people who are experiencing a serious problem.

Hi, I have good news to report back! After struggling with battery life for 12 days, my iPhone 8 seems to regain battery health, from a draining speed of 7% per hour to 2% per hour. I charged it by 40% last night and it lasted 20 hours; that's not too bad.

I followed several Youtubers' suggestions on turning off many features and the last thing I did was turning off screen time. Also, I remember someone mentioned that after an update, it takes a few days for the system to do tasks in the background, e.g. indexing of photos, and that consumes battery life. So, I'm not sure what actually did the trick.

According to Apple's change log, iOS 16.5 "fixes an issue where Screen Time settings may reset or not sync across all devices". Maybe it's a clue? I haven't updated to 16.5 yet. If you have it already, please kindly share your experience.

I updated to iOS 16.5 last night. I was desperate. I figured the battery drain couldn’t be any worse… to which the Universe replied “challenge accepted”. Yes, it seems worse. I’ll give it a week or two to see if it settles down. If not, I’ll start shopping for a new phone. Don’t think I’ll ever update iOS ever again. 🫤

Nope, 16.5 still drains the battery. I installed it last night. My battery was at 100% at 7 a.m. It is now almost 3 p.m., just 8 hours later, and it's down to 50%. I have Location Services off. I have Screen Time off. I have Background App Refresh off. I have had the phone mostly off today except to take a couple of photos and to check mail and weather and, briefly, Facebook. If I do not charge it for the rest of the day, it will be 100% depleted by 11 p.m.

My battery health is only 87%, down from just maybe 88% before iOS 16. I don't know if the percentage is a factor in daily battery drain. All I know is that with iOS 15, I did not have to charge the battery during the day to keep the phone functional from about 8 a.m. to about 11 p.m. or midnight. It rarely got below 25 or 30 or even 45% in all those hours, even on high-usage days. With 16.5, it has already lost another 2% in a half hour since I posted my last response.

Is everyone here making official complaints with Apple? I’m glad I read the posts because I thought the same as the rest: maybe the newest update would correct this issue. I’m glad I didn’t do it. I can’t imagine Apple is reading all these and not realizing it’s a massive problem. My battery is brand new. It shouldn’t drain after a few hours. Shame on Apple. We all know they could fix this if they wanted to do so. Just hate to go back to android but my mom has an LG and the battery life is awesome. Great functions, etc. sorry, Apple, but things are not looking good for you

Thanks for the reply. Most of us have done all of your suggestions long before griping here; short of maybe resetting the phone. I should not have to reset my phone to make up for update issues. And there is absolutely no feature you could add that would make this aggravation worth it. Get rid of all the goofy extra stuff like new emojis or what not and give me my battery back. No one who lives in the real world can be tethered to a charger 24 hours a day. And as you can see from other community posts, the most current update improved nothing. Apple is comprised of some of the smartest people in existence so you cannot tell me Apple cannot do better. Apple customers should not have to sacrifice how they use their phones to make up for Apple’s shortcomings; and this is indeed a shortcoming. This whole go into your settings and turn off notifications, and turn off app background updates, turn down screen brightness , ad nauseum. I object to having to change how I use my phone because Apple’s updates are seriously lackluster. Makes it seem as though Apple is taking the lazy way out by making their customers do the work. I’ve done many, many updates on this phone without this type of issue. Again, I’m obviously not the only one with this issue. I’m not trying to sound ugly or confrontational or take it out on any one specific person but putting the onus on the paying customer isn’t really acceptable. Your customers pay extremely high prices for Apple products because they expect the best. We shouldn’t have to be the ones provide the fixes or make the sacrifices.

Bravo! I agree with everything you said. Many of us have reported on this Community forum the problem persisting through the several iOS 16 upgrades and/or have reported the battery drain problem directly to Apple. I find it astonishing that, to my knowledge, they are not acknowledging the problem anywhere and saying they're working on a solution.

Seriously looked at switching over to a Samsung galaxy 23 S ultra. Unfortunately, quite a few of the apps do not transfer over from iPhone to android. WhatsApp, in particular is extremely difficult to transfer over and no guarantees that you will get everything even if you back it up and transfer it by cable. Other issues are Pro version of apps on iPhone may not transfer over to android.. also, while some apps may look the same on the play store, they may not be from the same developer. In short, iPhone does not play well with android when it comes to transfer of data and information.

Thank you for sharing this.

It’s a disappointing that customers need to reset factory settings for something that was wasn’t their fault (ios not loading properly).

Hopefully there would be a solution that is as simple as an ios update instead of doing the extra work of backing up, resetting, restoring data).

I’m soooo not tech savvy so I think I’ll make an appt at the Genius Bar and have them do this for me, show them what Apple did for you. I was on the phone for almost an hour with online Apple Support back in April, right after the iOS 16.4 debacle and my phone was - again - restored “as new”. Nothing changed.

This information is great. Thank you for taking the time. Hopefully this will help a lot of Apple customers. Some day maybe I can find the time to set aside and do the same. If I had an Apple Store nearby…but sadly.

Again, thank you. Still a shame customers have to do this to fix Apple’s problem

I'm not sure if anyone is having this issue but, last week I updated my iPhone 14 Pro Max to iOS 16.5. I noticed the battery kind of drains a bit quicker, I got the phone back in March of this year. I really want Apple to make another update so all iPhones have a better battery life