rapid battery drain after upgrading to iOS 5

Happy to report that my battery issue has cleared up. I'm not sure exactly what the problem was or what fixed it. At this point I suspect that either 1) the poor batter life was a result of a couple days worth of backround activity to get my various accounts in sync via iCloud, or 2) Apple quietly fixed a bug and rolled it out via over-the-air updates.

Either way, I'm getting all the way through the day with battery to spare again. Wish it hadn't happened, but glad its gone.

There could be another reason--Apple's servers were slammed, and often unresponsive, so the phone kept re-trying. That would explain why, in my case, the phone worked fine--and then all of a sudden would heat up for periods.

Joel

Hi all,

I had exactly the same issues after the upgrade to iOS5. I finally got my phone up and running but was losing battery power at an alarming rate (100% to 10% in six hours). I followed HDCrazy's advice and this has transformed my battery life (iPhone 3GS). I hadn't set up an iCloud account, so I deleted my mobileme account and did a hard reset.

Result? After 6 or 7 hours my phone had only lost 4% of its power (no calls, but received emails and had to set it the phone up again). I charged it up to 100% again last night and left it in Airplane mode overnight and woke to an iPhone with a 100% charge. Amazing!

For me at least, HDCrazy's solution has solved a continuing issue with batery life on my iPhone. I've had issues with battery life after each successive iOS 4.x.x update with the update to iOS5 being the worst.

It would be interesting to see if those who haven't updated to iOS5 and are still on iOS 4.x.x get better battery life following HDCrazy's solution. I'm also starting to wonder if the battery drain was a cumulative effect of iOS5 plus iOS4 updates.

Follow the workflow from HDCrazy, posted Oct-13-2011 9:29 pm.

I did so too and it works. After deleting the mobilme account and let do everything by iCloud, the battery drain is as before the update.

good luck.

i experienced the same battery drain then I received a text message from AT&T that I just exceeded my Cellular data limit. I checked usage and it was way higher than ever experienced before even while at home while on WiFi. I turned off the cellular data and the battery problem resolved. When I turned it back on the battery drain began again. I compared it to an iPhone 4S in the family which had no such cellular data/battery drain problem. All settings were the same. I first rebooted the phone, didn't help. I restored the the default settings the restored the phone from backup, didn't help. I reset the network, didn't help. Also, I reset the cellular data usage to zero on both the 4 and the 4S, The 4 is burning through cellular data like a madman possessed. I called Apple, didn't help.

Besides the exchange issue eating up battery it also appears being in a low signal area consumes battery much faster on the 4s.

I'll know for sure once I head out today if the drain drops significantly more.

Other things to do to improve the battery life:

Turning off unneeded location services such as time zone and traffic if you don't use them.

Turning off automatic sending of log data

Turning off notes and calendar features from accounts that don't have them or use them.

Disabling iTunes sync over wifi

Doing all of this has turned my drain from 2% every 5 minutes to about 10-12% an hour. However I live in a low signal area, so I think that accounts for the still higher percentage.

Go to Settings-Location services-system services. Turn on the status bar icon. After you do that you will see ions of the icons turn pink for the service that use GPS. Most probably it will be Time Zone service. Turn that service OFF. It should fix the battery drain issue. Check it out.

Sorry for the typo. It should read "colors of the icons turn pink"

Here's what I did and it seems to have resolved the issue

1. Turned off everything under Location Services/System Services

2. Turned off sending of disgnostic reports under General/Info/Diagnostic and Usage

3. And for good measure since a lot of people said it helped I did the "delete iCloud account/keep data on phone/hard reboot/set up iCloud again"

So far today I am at a Standby Time of 11 hours 40 minutes with a usage time of 1 hour and 50 minutes and I am still at 70% battery. That seems to be pretty much what I got out of iOS 4.

Hope that helps

Well, unfortunately, the new handset did not resolve the issue. I have tried the iCloud removal/add solution, with no success. I've tried the other solutions here as well, with the exception of removing ActiveSync accounts (I will not stop a service of something for which I specifically bought the handset. Again, with no success.

Just for the sake of comparison, I have a Verizon handset that is utilizing LTE. It retains better battery life than the iPhone at this point. I'm going to wipe this 4s, and send it back. My original iPhone 4 on Verizon does not have this issue post-upgrade, so I believe Apple has bigger problems on their hands here. I'm certain they will issue a patch at some point. But, I do not want to wait on a fix given the cost of the handset.

Joel

So what counts as "Usage" under Settings/Genera/Usage/Usage? I fully charged my phone last night, unplugged it at 10:42pm, still had 100% charge at midnight, was at 97% at 1:30 AM after using it a little bit in there, and was at 76% at 6:30. The only thing running was an alarm clock, which I know does drain it faster than if nothing is running. So 76% isn't great but it's not horrible compared to how my 4 performed when the alarm clock was running.

I just checked out the Usage stats based on what someone else just posted and it's showing 13:11 of Standby (corresponds to when I unplugged it last night), and 8 hours and 50 minutes of Usage. Whatttttt??? I am wondering if my alarm clock app counts toward that. And if it doesn't, what the heck was my phone during those 8:50? For at least eight of the thirteen hours since I unplugged it, the phone was sitting completely untouched.

I'll note that I'm currently at 22% and my usage of the phone this morning has been what I'd consider "standard." Not really enough to suck up 55% in 5 hours--it certainly wouldn't have done that on my 4. So I feel like there's definitely something going on, even though I've turned off a bunch of stuff since I set it up in an attempt to not kill the battery.

I've been having the same problem on my 4. Have narrowed it down to exchange I think which was sending 1kb of data a second, and recieving the same - even when connected to a wireless network. Absolutely killing my battery which was down to 30% by lunchtime.

Funnily, there is no such effect on either my ipad or my ipad 2 which have exactly the same accounts on them

Apple - you have to fix this. My beloved iphone has become pretty much useless.

I'm surprised there is not more mainstream media attention to this - yet!

Hey dudes, I noticed the same drainage issue on my iPhone 4 not long after updating it to iOS 5. I have found one thing that is causing the serious drainage on my iPhone and everything else I have left alone. In Settings/Location Services, I turned OFF the "Weather" option. This provides the "live" weather as you are driving or in transit somewhere. Unfortunately, once this is done, you'll no longer have the changing weather locations based on where you are, but I'd sure rather have my battery last more than 4-5 hours, and you can still have your "set" weather location as in earlier iOS versions. Drainage seems to be a lot worse if you're inside a building in which the iPhone is unable to determine your location utilizing the GPS satellites thus keeping the GPS on for much longer periods of time draining your battery that much faster. I hopes this helps someone else.

I've been struggling with this for the last three days and I believe I have solved the problem. Like a few other folks have mentioned, try blowing away your exchange email accounts and then re-creating them. Once I did this my battery consultion driopped to normal and my phone cooled down. I've droped from 100% to 95% in the last three hours. Before three hours was 100% to 15%!!

Nothing else seemed to solve the problem.

This seems to have worked for me.

I followed your instructions and in the past hour plus, my battery has held the status quo (with no usage) as opposed to losing several % of battery power with no usage over the same period of time.

I have re-instated mobileme as an email account and have iCloud set up to do its thing. Everything appears fine.

Thanks for your post.