Battery Drain on iOS 26 and iOS 26.0.1.

oldmaninflorida wrote:

Yes I've updated. It has zero impact on the problem. it's mostly security bug patches. But in an odd twist one of my apple watched ended up half drained with sitting on the charger. I don't think it's a battery bug for the watch. Apple stuff tends not to reconnect to the charger after and update.

Always do a manual restart after an update. It helps.

I’ve been on the new 26 for weeks now and my 15 PM drains like crazy. It goes down fast even when not even touching the phone which itself is pretty warm. Not to say hot.

*Something* is using up power a lot but it’s not me. No Siri let alone Apple Intelligence active on my phone an not a lot of background stuff either. Furthermore it’s the same apps ok my phone for years now so that’s not where this is coming from I dare say.

I feel Apple should at least give us some indication if this is taken seriously. I’ve been on iPhones since the 4 and the way things are going the 15 might well be the last.

When you say it is the same apps you have on your phone for years so that is not the problem, do you realize that apps such as Facebook are updated as much as 13 times every month, so while the app name may be the same, the version certainly is not and that is where the problems occur. Facebook 4 years ago drained very little battery compared to today. Google has even called out Instagram for increasing the battery drain on Android phone in the later version. So, using the same apps is irrelevant when it comes to troubleshooting.

"Something" certainly is using up power, but you have not provided any information to see what that could be. Useful information would include:

• Battery Health at Settings > Battery > Battery Health > Maximum Capacity?
• Are you primarily in a low cell signal area where you are seeing a single bar on 5g?
• Post a screenshot of Settings > Battery that includes the green battery graph along with the top 5 apps consuming the battery. You will see the ones noted with Background Activities that are consuming your battery even when you are not using the app.

The app that's causing me the most problem is FaceTime: which is Apple's! I make a 1 hour FaceTime call 3 times a week first thing in the morning. After the call is over battery says that it's used about 12 to 13% (which is what I might expect). I never use it again for the day. By the end of the day it's up to 42%! I even tried deleting FaceTime and then reinstalling it from the App store. At the end of the day, battery said that a "Deleted Application" had used 42%!.

You bring up 2 issues.

• The battery percentage you see are not updated in real time, so that is why you see 12% immediately after a call and 42% later. It is just like step calculations in the Health app where you can walk 500 steps and immediately look and it will be a much lower value. It is a short time later that the actual step count will be showing 500 steps.
• If you are seeing this in the FaceTime app with a 1 hour call using 42%, then I agree there is a problem there and it may be best to schedule and appointment with Apple where they can pull logs from the device and perform diagnostics. Of course battery health would cause that and also a cellular connection where you are only seeing one bar, as that would require the maximum amount of power to transmit to a distant tower. You could try in Airplane mode and using WiFi to compare the difference.

You can't ignore the reports from other users who did find a third party app consuming the battery in Settings and once removed, found that they have all day battery life as expected. That is particularly useful for them to identify the app and compare the results. Your issue with FaceTime is not the same as theirs and others are not experiencing the same thing, which would be the case for those with the same OS. You need to figure out what is unique in your setup and Apple may be able to help with that using their diagnostics tools.

I regularly use FaceTime on iOS 26.2 and see nothing like that in my battery usage, although I do frequently use a WiFi connection. I know that does not help you at all in identifying the issue you have, but an inherent bug in FaceTime or the OS would be easily reproducible and third party tests are useful to confirm or deny a specific bug.

I would never say that Apple has never had a bug in any of their updates as that would be a ridiculous statement and I think we can all agree that bugs are possible and have occurred. It is just in this case that you have identified where you are having an issue that we are not able to resolve over s Support Forum, so you need to take the next step to follow up directly with Apple.

VictorSMiller wrote:

No recording. On WiFi. The question is: why does the battery keep being used by FaceTime long after the call is over?

I don't think anyone here can answer that. Have you considered Force Closing FaceTime after the call concludes? To Force Close an app, with your finger swipe half way up your screen and hold until the App Switcher of all most recently used apps appear. Take your finger and swipe up on any app you don't need immediate access to, such as FaceTime, which will fully close the app.

I've tried that. I even tried deleting FaceTime from my phone after the call was over (deleted the whole thing, not just offloaded), and reinstalling from the App Store. At the end of the day battery showed that a "Deleted App" had used 42%.

VictorSMiller wrote:

I've tried that. I even tried deleting FaceTime from my phone after the call was over (deleted the whole thing, not just offloaded), and reinstalling from the App Store. At the end of the day battery showed that a "Deleted App" had used 42%.

I use FaceTime on my iPhone and your experience is certainly not my experience. I'd recommend reaching out Apple Support. If you're in the US, you can call Apple at: 800-MY-APPLE. You can tap the Support button at the bottom of this page. You can visit the Genius Bar at your Apple Store --> Genius Bar Reservation and Apple Support Options - Apple

FaceTime is not actually using ~40% of your battery capacity; it is using about 40% of the charge that happened to be consumed in that time window. The numbers you are seeing are a relative breakdown, not a second, hidden drain.

How iPhone battery usage is calculated

In Settings > Battery, the percentage next to each app is “share of battery used” during the selected period (last 24 hours or last 10 days), not a direct reflection of health or total capacity. Apple states this in several support articles.

If you used only 12–13% of the battery during/just after your morning call, that is the absolute drop in battery level. The “FaceTime 40%” later is the proportion of all drain since last full charge that FaceTime is responsible for.

Why FaceTime ends up so high? FaceTime is resource‑intensive: it keeps the display on, uses the camera, encodes/decodes video, and maintains a constant network connection, all of which are among the most power‑hungry activities on an iPhone. If the rest of your day is relatively light usage (email, messages, light browsing), that 12–13% hit from the call can easily represent ~40% of all the battery drain that occurred in that 24‑hour period. For example, if you only lose 30% total in a day, and FaceTime used 12%, it will show as about 40% of usage.

I thought that it might be relative, but why is it when I add up all of the "relative" percentages that battery displays, it pretty much corresponds to (within 1 or 2%) to the total amount that battery says has been used? If it were relative, that wouldn't be. If all of the percentages were all relative then they should add up to roughly 100% (perhaps adding 1% for each because of rounding). For example, right now, my battery is at 54%, the usages from battery are

facetime: 28

nytimes:3

gmail: 3

safari: 2

linkedin: 2

firefox: 1

x: 1

messages: 1

home and lock screen: 3

This adds up to 44. And 44 + 54 = 98 (which is close enough to 100 to be taken into account by rounding).

I know what the support articles say, but this doesn't correspond to reality.

VictorSMiller wrote:

Why do you ask that we post screen shots, when you never respond to that posting?

In your specific case, you did see that my personal recommendation is for you to contact Apple directly for phone diagnostics. The same recommendation was followed up by lobsterghost1. It is through those screenshots where a problematic app can be identified. It is because of those screenshots that should also be useful for you so you can see no one else is experiencing the same FaceTime battery draining issue and a good reason why you need to contact Apple directly. You are also able to see by viewing my subscriptions and even in this thread in particular that I have been very active as far as following up on those posts.

When asking for help on a Support Site it is absolutely necessary to provide the relevant information for the problem you are investigating. Simply saying your battery is draining without providing this information is not useful to anyone. That information is not only valuable to me for a response, but also all the others who are looking to provide assistance. You will also be able to find that certain apps have been identified from a users post and when it was removed they were back to all day battery life. By providing those screenshots, you are able to compare the apps installed that are the same on other users devices experiencing the same thing. That is just a basic step for troubleshooting.

Right now is later in the 24 hour period. Watch the numbers change and the 24 hour period changes. My explanation also accounts for what happens when an app is deleted. Its prior usage doesn’t/can’t change. Just take a few moments and think about it.

VictorSMiller wrote:

The question is: why does the battery keep being used by FaceTime long after the call is over?

I think that has already been answered where the percentage does not immediately calculate when you quit using the app and the numbers you see are not in real time. That is why you see a different number than what you see immediately after closing the app. It works the exact same way in the example given about step count calculations in the Health app, where you can walk 500 steps and immediately look in the Health app and see they are not recoded, yet some time later you can look again and see the 500 steps number.

That is super easy for you to test where you will find your answer. Start your day with a 100% charge, then record a video for about 5 minutes. Check your battery percentage for the camera app you will likely see nothing or very little. Then check again later and you will see the percentage updated when those results were calculated showing they are not real time values.

It’s relative to the period of time. At what point in the day (number of hours) are you measuring the percentage of capacity used? I can’t give specifics without seeing screenshots of the actual graphs. The support articles are accurate.

Please point me to the exact article. Your explanation violates basic arithmetic. If the denominator (total usage) increases, the percentage used by an app that is no longer running should decrease, not increase. What you claim to be saying is that the percentages used by the apps are not the actual percentage used.