Severe Battery Drain on iPhone 16 Pro After iOS 26 Update – Possibly Widget Related?

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Severe Battery Drain on iPhone 16 Pro After iOS 26 Update – Possibly Widget Related?

I’ve been using my iPhone 16 Pro for about a year, upgraded from a 13 Pro, and battery life used to be incredible — easily lasting a full day, even with travel, photos, videos, and maps. I didn’t even need to carry a power bank anymore.

Everything changed after updating to iOS 26. The first public betas seemed okay, but later builds (and even 26.1 beta, and now on non-beta 26.0.1) caused massive battery drain. By lunchtime, I’m already around 50%, and sometimes I don’t make it through the day with light use.

I even did a full restore without iCloud sync and manually set up everything again — no improvement. Battery health is 92% with about 300 cycles, so hardware seems fine. I also ran a diagnostic with Apple Support and plan to visit an Apple Store soon.

Today, I removed all widgets after reading they might cause background drain — and surprisingly, battery life improved a lot (around 90% left at lunch). So it looks like there might be a widget-related issue on iOS 26, maybe specific to iPhone 16 Pro.

[Edited by Moderator]

iPhone 16 Pro, iOS 26

Posted on Oct 25, 2025 3:52 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 25, 2025 4:07 AM in response to middleeastbeast

Are you using any third party Widgets? Frequently the cause can be widgets that the developers or user abandoned. For example a friend of mine was have excessive battery drain. After reviewing apps using battery capacity I found Home and Lock Screen using excessive battery. Long story short he had left a banking Widget in a Stack that kept checking balances at a closed account. It was using WiFi and/or cellular constantly.

Apple Widgets are usually well behaved, but occasionally they can be suspect too.

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Answer 2

Oct 25, 2025 1:30 PM in response to Jeff Donald

Yes, I was using quite a few of 3rd party widget. Could be they have issues.

But at the end of the day, it's not a big difference without widgets as I can tell right now.

I am on 70% usage today (battery was charged to 100% in the morning) and I have only 3 hours 20 minutes screen time. No widgets, no social media apps, notifications are turned off for most of the apps.

On the right is iPhone 16e, on the left is mine phone - iPhone 16Pro.

I'm pretty sure there is something in iOS 26 that doesn't work very well specifically with my model.

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Severe Battery Drain on iPhone 16 Pro After iOS 26 Update – Possibly Widget Related?

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