Home & Lock Screen consuming screen time after iOS 18

I figured it out. For me at least it was the new Mirror my iPhone feature introduced with MacOS Sequoia and ios18. I have an M2 Macbook Air that I only restart once a week and it appears that even when it was in standby mode it would maintain a connection to my phone thus consistently running in the background and draining my battery, even at night in battery saver mode. This seems like a major bug as when I disconnect my phone it should be disconnected.

I removed my mac from my phone by going to Settings > General > AirPlay & Continuity > iPhone Mirroring to effectively disable Mirror my iPhone and battery drain was reduced significantly. I will be keeping this feature off until Apple acknowledges the bug and notifies us that it is fixed in a subsequent update.

I had exactly the same problem on my iPhone 15 Pro Max running IOS 18.1. Read this forum thread, and a couple other ones. Nothing helped.

Then, yesterday, while browsing the Settings app on the phone, I realised that the Raise to Wake (in Display and Brightness) feature was enabled again, and as far as I remember I had it turned off. I flicked it off again, and today the battery looks remarkably stable.

It's still early, but give it a try. It does make sense I think, as the phone would constantly switch on and off again while traveling and just walking around.

Hey, so just a quick update: I think i’ve managed to resolve the issue! Yesterday I checked my photo gallery, scrolled all the way down and noticed “optimizing gallery” at 76%. Force scroll down once or twice just to be sure. Apparently, it was stuck for me. First clue were double albums generated in my photo app (memories, trips, yearly etc.) so i decided to check icloud sync as well and force start the sync, but it did not work at first. I decided to manually delete few blurry images that appeared in my gallery (clearly they were stuck at some point and were easy to distinguish, mostly). I deleted some duplicates from library, deleted all generated albums and memories (original photos remain untouched). Once again kick started library optimization simply by plugging in the charger, leaving wifi on and locking the phone, i kept photo app open just in case. What happened after surprised me, last 24 hours 5% usage from home and lock screen. Hourly usage is not in double digits anymore, i have 2-8% hourly usage, few intervals it shows no usage at all. I think the issue is gone but it might be too soon to tell. In case you haven’t tried this, do it, triple check if there’s anything stuck syncing/optimzing. Fingers crossed this helps you and anyone dealing with this frustrating issue!

Fixed, but an annoying fix…

15 pro…went to Apple Store this weekend and they ended up wiping the phone back to “new”…NOT restoring from iCloud backup. Photos and other things were still backed up to the cloud, but the settings/configs start fresh as if it were out of box.

No Home Screen and lock battery drain now.

Annoying, but it worked!

Since upgrading to 18 and 18.1 I’ve had the same problem. Have to charge the phone 2x a day. Despite battery at 100% capacity. “Home” has been using battery constantly. Phone running hot. And it seems to get worse when the battery is low. I have the phone on low power mode most of the time since the change to avoid draining completely. As I was travelling I turned the phone to wifi only thinking maybe it was the network selection. But that didn’t help. I put it in flight mode but that wasn’t doing a huge difference either.

Today by chance I noticed that the Home app needed an update. It was a couple of taps and it said it was “updated”. It seems to be better since I did that update. I also saw Instagram app was sometimes running in my pocket. Last night it was apparently running for 6h and my phone didn’t even manage to fully charge. I updated the app. I hope this was the problem. Will update if not.

I’m happy to report that I updated the phone to 18.2 Public Beta a week ago and the problem seems to be gone completely.

I went from having to charge the phone 2-3x/day to the battery lasting 1.5 days. Same phone, same apps, new OS.

Wow, that's all a bummer and a pain. On December 30, 2024 I did the full factory reset and then repopulated the phone minimally with only my contacts and passwords from ICloud and Google Cloud. I saw no positive change at first but the % going to Home & Lock Screen has GRADUALLY gone down to a 10 day average of 10% and around 9-10% on any given day recently and I'm overall satisfied with my battery life for my needs. On January 2, 2025 I went in to an Apple Store in NYC to the Genius Bar and talked to a series of 2 people and the second basically told me this is a bug that Apple is aware of that hopefully will be fixed in a future IOS update. My understanding from what they were saying is that there is some unnecessary battery usage for everyone probably related to the Home & Lock Screen but the % varies depending on your app usage patterns (Which apps, how much etc.) and possibly also just on random factors. Now take all that with a grain of salt of course. Also I want to add that the 18.3 update a few days ago hasn't made any difference that I can see -- I had heard over in a discussion on Reddit from someone with this issue who was IOS doing beta testing they thought this issue had at least partially improved from one of the 18.3 betas. But no dice for me. Are you also dissatisfied with overall battery life or is it just this nonsensical Home & Lock Screen use that bugs you?

Hi, I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max and I can tell you that I have the same problem as you, but with iOS 18.2, after 3-4 days of time for the update to set up, the situation has improved a lot. Apps no longer consume battery in the background. The power consumption has set.

The consumption of "Home and Lock Screen" remains about 14-16% in the 10-day chart, but does not seem to affect the duration. Have you noticed that "Home and Lock screen stays active 1 minute every hour? It's a strange thing, try it too

Select the portions hour by hour in the graph and below you will always see the consumption of 1 minute.

Let me know

Yes Apple Store was able to fix. They reset it as “new” so all settings and config was reset, but I was still able to pull down photos and other content from iCloud.

what solved the problem for me was going into the Home app and following the prompts to update the Home system from within the app.

I’m having the same issue. Had “Home & Lock screen” consuming over 50% battery, the phone getting warm and slow to charge on my iPhone 14. Upgraded to an iPhone 16 Pro and have the exact same issue (migrated data, didn’t start from scratch on the 16 Pro). iOS18.1 is also no better.

I tried a bunch of things, like removing all widgets and no improvement.

Now the only two things that are happening in the background and may be eating up my battery are the Apple Watch connection (also using Bevel, which means more frequent measurements on the watch) and I’m using two lines (two eSIM). Any of you that are experiencing this unusual discharge are also using any of those?

So I’m having some similar issues with my new Iphone 16 Pro and I’ve seen this discussion, similar ones on Reddit, and an article in the “Mac Observer” about people having these kind of issues after IOS 18 updates, and I’m wondering has anyone permanently resolved this? Separately has anyone reported it to Apple? Yesterday I spent an hour or more doing a chat and then a phone call with two different techs from Apple and they said they had no records of other similar issues. The tech said Home & Lock Screen should use 3-4% of battery max which matches all other devices we have EXCEPT my 3 week old (and still in holiday extended return window) Iphone 16 Pro running IOS 18.2, and on that I’m averaging 14% over last 10 days (and that 10 day average has been stable for 7-10 days too) and 18% in the 24 hours after I talked to the tech who said that none of my settings or my diagnostics explained this (after remote diagnostics and screen sharing). They told me to wait 2-3 more days since I said some of the settings they wanted me to change I had done previously but only in the prior 24-48 hours (though most I did much earlier). I haven’t noticed ANY positive change with ANY settings changes in this area. I started noticing this oddity because I was digging in when after a couple weeks I still felt my battery life was decent but not terribly robust for a new $1000 phone. For next 12-24 hours I am trying an experiment turning off Face ID unlock and using only code to see if that dramatically helps as that would at least isolate the problem (even if it’s still not acceptable). I’m open to a factory reset, and eligible for a replacement/return based on extended holiday policies, but I’m a bit disappointed I have to say. It’s simple math to figure out this must be lowering the amount of time I can use the phone before it runs out of power, and it’s frustrating there’s an ongoing issue like this unresolved.

I have exactly the same issue since upgrading to iOS18. iPhone 15 Pro Max. "Lock & Home Screen" is consuming about 32% of my battery, and it drains from 90% to 10% in 3-4 hours, plus the phone is very hot, so it only charges very slowly if at all. Which then means that after it's discharged, it's very hard to get it back up to a high charge level again. Additionally, and I assume also because it's hot, it's running slowly so screen responses are somewhat delayed compared to under iOS17. It's not quite useless yet, but getting to that point.

Thank you very much for your reply, I’ve seen your comments and was hoping you will see mine eventually. I “carry” this issue from 18.1, through 18.2 and 18.2.1. Now that i got new 16 pro device on 18.3 it still persists, so at this point i guess i have to stop worrying and trying (specially since i did more than most people first with factory reset on my old device, then buying a new one, lol). Generally I can’t say I have a bad battery life. It gets me throughout the day with some juice left before the bed. Yesterday i did a lot of settings and safari search, almost 8 hours SoT used around 60% of battery so that’s a good result, with indexing still in process. Home and Lock screen - 34min on screen, 15%. BUT, i’ve literally disabled every possible setting i could find on the web including Apple Intelligence altogether. Also running limited frame rate, but im not using low power mode. I have OCD and this thing is driving me crazy, lol. Today its 10 mins on screen (out of total 4 hours 30 mins SoT) and its 12%. To put into perspective tiktok doomscrolling for 45 mins did 14% drain so it’s like having an extra app active every day, without having one. Today i reseted my network settings and now my phone is still indexing something in the background so i’ll wait. If you find a solution or potentially find out if there will be one at all, PLEASE remember me and let me know 😊 Oh yeah and i am using apple analytics logs and literally trying to find out on my own with the help from chatGPT and DeepSeek 😭

This is happening to me as well and I have tried EVERYTHING including a full reset and waiting a week for things to even out. I have tried putting the phone in airplane mode, batter saver mode, but nothing works. I recently paid for a battery replacement service through an Apple store. I believe this is a bigger problem than is being reported as many people simply charge their phone overnight and wouldn't detect it but there are plenty of complains about overall shorter battery life and hotter phones after the 18.0 update.