rapid battery drain after upgrading to iOS 5

I do not have Exchange email, but I had the battery drain. This morning I turned off the Diagnostics & Usage item under System Services under Location Services in the Settings app. I also performed a single hard reboot. My phone has been unplugged for a couple of hours and only 3% drain (and I've used it a bit).

It would seem that either there are several different problems people are having, or the Exchange email is a red herring.

(iPhone 4 32 GB Verizon phone.)

Go to General>about. Then go to bottom to find diagnostics and usage. This is how you really turn it off. Mine had lots of info generated. But I also ultimately restored my phone for good measure. Now it works fine.

With every major upgrade of iOS users have had battery 'problems'. It has been reported in the past and I suspect it to at least be partially true that the problem stems from a battery calibration problem that occurs when the new version is installed.

I have experienced the problems with every major upgrade on every iPhone I have ever owned (3G, 3GS, iP4) and even on my iPads.

In my case I found that a hard reset (or two or three) have cured the problem on all of my iDevices. Now I routinely perform a hard reset after an upgrade.

I just upgraded an iPhone 3GS, two iP4s, and two iPad2s, performed the hard reboot on all 5, and have not had a battery problem on any of them.

I don't know if this will work for anyone else, but it worked for me.

Same problem. Before iOS 5 upgrade I would go from 100% in the morning to about 60% at night. Now I'm at 50% by noon.

There are suggestions that the problem is related to Exchange accounts, has anyone verified this? I depend on this feature to sync with my Google Apps account.

I have tried everything mentioned and still no good. I do think that for me at least it seems to drain much faster in areas of poor recption than in areas of good reception. I am very close to going back to an earlier ios if that is even possible.

My wife and I both have the iPhone 4. I upgraded mine to iOS 5 and hers is still running iOS 4.3.3. Since the iOS 5 update, my phone's battery has been draining absurdly quickly even when idle. In one hour (idle) my wife's phone went from 72% to 70%. Over the same period, my phone went from 86% to 60%! My wife is now very wary about updating her phone!

I also recently updated to iOS 5 and have noticed an unusual increase in battery drain. Just a few moments ago as i was using it for maybe 2-3 minuets going from settings to calendar, back between apps, i noticed it drop 2%.

Have not really tracked it as it sits idle, and i should do that. But i definitely feel like there is an increase in battery loss. I think i have managed to turn off any unneeded services off, especially location based ones. I hope there could be a software patch to come out soon to fix this bug. It is really annoying.

And i have not seen it mentioned on many of the normal apple news and rumor sites i check out who will usually address people complaints.

I am having the same problem as all of you with my 3gs 16g phone. Tried many of the suggestions given so far but without success. Turned of location services - tried hard rebooting. Still draining like crazy and heating up. Can someone explain what happens when you restore to factory settings? Do you then have to reinstall everything including ios5? How big a pain is that and is it worth it in this situation? Would it actually solve the problem?

Hi,

Have the same rapid battery drain problem on both my iphone4 and 3GS. Usagetime=standbytime under settings/usage. This is bad and explains the hot phones I have. I ended up turning off the icloud except for find my iphone. Resetting the network connection and hard resets didnt help me. The icloud turn off did. I am wondering if this is effect users who migrated from MobileME ONLY since not everyone has this issue?

Any of you with battery drain issues a mobileme user?

Hey folks I seemed to have resolved mine so I will explain my particular situation and what I did to resolve it.

First of I have had an apple ID in iTunes almost since it has been out with one email address. I have had a MobileMe account for about three years which as you know is different.

When I installed ios5 the migration from MobileMe was down but I was allowed to procced with the iCloud setup under my apple/iTunes account setup. But it still converted my email account for MobileMe to iCloud hence I believe the trying to finish the iCloud synch was not completing.

Since then my battery has been stable. But the odd thing is I still can't add my iCloud address into message etc. I get a mailbox is already in use message. Any thoughts on that?

Welp,

HD's trick fixed it for me as well!!

1. I went into the email settings and deleted my mobile me account (keeping all information on phone when prompted).

2. Deactivated iCloud account (keeping info)

3. Did a hard reboot

4. Signed back into iCloud.

5. Watched my battery not drain and my iPhone 4 not get hot!

It is worth noting that in "Location Services" then "System Services" that "Setting Time Zone" and "Mobile NetworkSe..." were both using my location but becasue "Status Bar Icon" was off I didn't notice. It's also woth noting that since I switched these off I have lost 3% just typing this... Ok back to the drawing board!

Hi all, I had the same battery drain problem since installing iOS 5 with the phone perpetually hot all the time. But I found a solution! After trying the hard resets and resetting my mail accounts in vain, I realized iCloud has the this function Documents and data that is defaulted to on. After turning it off with rest of iCloud still disabled, the phone is suddenly working as per normal with no more battery and heat problems!

First of all thank you for your feedback. I am glad I was able to help some of you.

I have continued to search for other setting that might have been enabled and are causing rapid battery drain. Have in mind that we are talking about extreme battery drain here and not a slight difference from the previous iOS. Many changes have taken place with the new iOS and to take full advantage of them we must sacrifice some battery performance.

Here is something I have found that was automatically enabled in this iOS and was not in the previous one.

Go to your e-mail account settings and make sure that you don’t have Calendar, Notes or anything else turned on for any accounts except icloud.

Enable them for the icloud account only.

If you are using Gmail or a Yahoo accounts, disable all those options.

You may even want to temporarily turn all e-mail accounts off with the exception of I cloud.

If the problem goes away then enable one at a time but not the Calendar, Notes or anything else for those accounts.

What I found that is happening, is that this options got automatically enabled upon doing the upgrade.

The phone is going out and looking to sync with Calendars, Notes and other features form those e-mails that are not there and because it does not find them it never stops trying.

Please try this and give me some feedback as I am continuing to search for other things that might also be causing this rapid battery drain.

There IS an issue with PUSH under IOS5 which affects battery life on my iPhone4 - I've run the following test:

1. Fully charged my phone and sent delivery mode to "manual" every 15 minutes - battery life still 60% after 6 hours

2. Did the same thing but this time with Push turned on and battery was less than 35% in same duration.

If I open the Exchange inbox with push turned on, the status bar at the bottom of the screen is permanently active - Connecting - Checking for Mail - Updated . . . . . continuously every 3-4 seconds.

If this isn't a bug - I've never seen one!