My iPhone 17 battery is draining fast considering my screen time was 4.5 hours. I’ve attached a screenshot of my battery usage and screen time today. Any suggestions on how to get more screen time from my battery?
[Edited by Moderator]
iPhone XR, iOS 18
You’re welcome!
FaceTime has to encode video and audio in realtime to send, and decode video and audio at the same time so it can be displayed. It’s very CPU, GPU, memory and battery intensive. Combined with most people increasing screen brightness and you have a huge battery drain.
Safari’s battery capacity consumption is largely dependent on the website you visit. Play a video game or just watching a video can cause daily battery capacity to drop significantly.
Try deleting Alarmy, restarting your iPhone and then downloading a fresh copy from the Apple App Store. Observe the apps behavior for several days and post a reply.
Tap View All Battery Usage. It is what you see on that screen including both battery graphs and the top 5 apps consuming your battery that is helpful for evaluating battery drain.
Also, what is the latest version of iOS on your iPhone and when did you update? It is expected you will see increased battery drain and heat for about 4 days after the update, and with iOS 26.6 it may take slightly longer as Apple states additional indexing is being performed to ready your device for iOS 27. With iOS 26.6, you should also see a message in Battery Settings that the update may not have completed indexing files in the background yet, which will increase battery drain.
So FaceTime is hugely battery intensive. I don’t mean to sound flippant, but FaceTime is can be a very large consumer of battery capacity. How does the battery perform if if you don’t use FaceTime?
I think Spotify is suspect:
Note that in only 8 minutes of use, it used 70% as much charge as FaceTime did in 52 minutes. Seems way out of line.
Thanks for your response. I’m currently on 26.4.2 and haven’t updated to 26.6 yet. I noticed that my app Alarmy has a high background time, how can I fix this? Also, is it normal that safari used 13% in only 28m of screen time? It seems very high to me.
[Edited by Moderator]
Thank you for the response, I didn’t know FaceTime was that big of a battery drain. However, even on the days I don’t use FaceTime I’ve noticed my battery drains fast. It’s been like this for about the last 2 months. I’ve noticed most of my apps use 1% every 2m of screen time which seems abnormal.
Will do, thanks for your help.
You’re welcome and I hope you have a great day!
iPhone 17 battery drains quickly
