rapid battery drain after upgrading to iOS 5

Same here. After I turned off all the (IMHO) unnecessary "system services" under location services and deleted/readded my iCloud account I now feel I have better battery life than I ever had before.....I am currently at Standby of 6 hours 56 minutes and Usage of 2 hours and 2 minutes and have 76% left.

I have been following this discussion as my iPhone 4S was having loss of battery problems as well. While I tried reducing all my apps/notifications/brightness/etc. nothing was working. I finally decided to bite the bullet and restore my iPhone NOT from a backup, and then resync everything (music and apps) and let the iCloud do the rest of the work (email, contacts, reminders, pages, calendar). I also have an iPad; so most of my information was saved in the cloud already. Now, after the restore and sync, the battery seems to be holding fine. I sent over 5 txt messages and didn't lose 3% battery!! :p

I read somewhere that there might have been a glitch in iOS 5 causing some kind of background program sending data all the time... thus causeing the drop in battery. I figured a totally restore from scratch was the only way to fix it. As far as I can tell it has worked.

Following up on my previous post, it seems there's some bug in iTunes where wifi syncing gets stuck on, even when explicitly disabled. Firewalling my Macbook seems to have stopped it from constantly talking to the phone, but it didn't fix the battery issues - the iPhone 4S was still eating 4% of the battery per hour in standby, so evidently there were other issues as well.

What finally seems to have fixed things is doing a full restore via iTunes; I'd previously tried resetting all the settings which had not helped. Now finally the usage and standby times are not the same, even after adding back services like iCloud.

Good to know. I did a restor via iTunes and seem to have noticed much longer battery power/hr. However, I may beginning too see some battery power being eaten up on standby as well... Are you suggesting that even with wifi sync off, data is still being transferred?

Hi,

I have tryed every single tip/trick written in this thread, NOTHING have worked. I just disabled a lot of features but my iPhone keeps draining the battery. I have noticed that the CPU consumption is above the normal boundaries. It is above 1.03 (average), and it reach peaks of 3.3. I don't know so much about Darwin but in other Linux systems that is A LOT of power consumption.

I'm waiting to talk with an Apple engeneer that drop me a call few days ago, he wanted to ask to me some stuff related with my iPhone 4 and abnormal power consuption, so I couldn't contact him at the number that he gave to me, every time a voice mail system picks the call, even when he said that I can return the call to him. I don't know how Apple works, so internal policies an communications doesn't work so good.

Finally just when I updated my iPhone 4 to iOS 5 my Macbook Pro DIED, the hard drive just have gone to nowhere; It can't be detected, I tryed my disk with another system and is fine. I can't understand how a 2 years old laptop just died without notice or previous error messages or even any simptom of any kind of issue with nothing; mediocre hardware? cheap parts? bad quality control? I don't know but these days Apple is draining my patience too. All my Apple hardware, (iPhone and MacBookPro 13), are failing or just went unusable.

So Brian, I hope you can help me with my iPhone, and even with my Macbook Pro, I hope that being from outside USA you can still help me.

Regards,

Oscar.

SAME HERE!!! I went to bed last night with 100% battery on my 4S and with the airplane mode turned on. I woke up 7 hours later and the phone was completely dead. I called apple support, went to the genius bar and they plugged my phone in and checked my battery and stated that everything was just fine.

They did notice that the music player, springboard, and mobileme (actually already converted to iCloud) were crashing and could attribute to the cause. They suggested a total restore and to setup the phone as a new device. I was reluctant to do so but did it anyways and this has not solved my problem.

With regards to the springboard, I can be on the phone or even the phone sitting idle and at times I will get a black screen, see the little sprocket spin as if the phone was shutting down, then a few seconds later I am back at my password lock screen.

Running IOS 5 on my iPhone 4 never gave me any of these issues, only experiencing on my 4S.

Scott

Thought I'd give an update. I have tried every single thing in this thread (iCloud trick, location tricks, network settings reset, restore, restore as new, disable the sending of logs, notifications), and only selected this last change as a last resort. (Last resort, as it turns off functionality I need.) To sustain better battery life on my 4s, I turned off two (by turned off, I mean, deleted--which is annoying since one of them has my contacts) Exchange accounts I had on the handset.

I want to baseline the phone without those, and then I will add one back, test the results, and then the other. This shouldn't be necessary at all. My hope is that Apple will fix this soon, thus negating my need to take the phone back. (It would have been taken back already, but I don't like lines.)

Joel

I have done all the fixes suggested minus doing a full restore where I wipe everything out since I do not want to get rid of my text messages.

I am still having all the same issues. as of this post, my phone is fully dead. I am sure it is not a hardware problem as this is my second 4s

I really hope apple is working on this problem as I cannot have a phone with such a short battery life.

I also let is die completely to load it up again and same issues. It should be worth noting that is has a lot of trouble charging completely as well.

One last update: with iCloud, location services etc all enabled, everything seems to be running fine again now that I did a restore from iTunes and a clean install. I should note that I have cellular data disabled and only use the phone on wifi. I noticed that after the reinstall the wifi icon appears quickly when I unlock the phone; I have the feeling it was always on before. So my guess is something had caused the wifi to never go to sleep, and the restore fixed it. Only lose a few % overnight now, and the 'usage' time reflects my actual usage.

I discovered that my battery draining (iOS5 upgrade on an iPhone 4) was related to excessive cellular activity even while on Wifi. I received an overage notice from AT&T on day 4-5 after the upgrade. None of the suggestions here accomplished anything including a restore to default settings. I called Apple, nothing. I called AT&T and described the problem. They did an OTN (over the network) update and the phone is back to normal and they refunded the overage charge. This was my wife's phone and her data usage never exceeded 50Mb in a month. The unexplained cellular activity was generating 50-100 Mb per day even overnight. But all is well now. Two ways to check it, 1) go to the AT&T (or other carrier) web site, or 2) clear cellular usage counter on the phone and check it in an hour or so.

Same Problem!

I´ve tryied the Suggestions doing a Hard Resest after disableing iCloud. This brings some improvement, but only for Standby-Mode.

I´ve discovered, if i´m using one or more apps (even receiving mails o.s.e.) the battery drain is high.

Using Apps and let them run in background also causes i high energy-usage.

it´s not satisfying me, that i have to charge my iphone after using some apps a few times a day :-(

with iOS 4.3.x the batterydurability was much better.... PLEASE APPLE correct this as quick as possible. This is definitly destroying the fun of the iPhone!!!!

Thanks for the tip, Ironex. I checked my usage since my upgrade and I have 70 GIGS downloaded. That's almost 5GB a day since I updated (to the developer final release).

I would have to constantly be streaming video to get anywhere close to that >:(

Luckily I have unlimited data or I would be furious right now. I guess I'm going to have to try a full restore tonight...

As many of you, I've started experiencing extreme battery drain on my iPhone 4 after an upgrade to iOS5. I could literally watch the charge go down minute after minute.

I've downloaded a utility to show CPU usage, and CPU was constantly utilized at 90-100%. Yesterday, after turning off all location services, and a bunch of non-essential services as per suggestions on this, and other threads, disabling mail push, and rebooting the device worked for a bit, but today morning after a bit of usage the drain returned. I fired up CPU utilization app, and sure enough it was back to 90-100%.

Acting on some suspicions some of you guys had, I deleted my exchange email account, and fired up the CPU app, and utilization immediately dropped to 7-9%, probably usage by the CPU app itself. So far, the drain has not returned ... it is visibly much better for me, and has been stable/normal for a few hours now even with light usage.

I'll turn back other features, like location services, and see if that has any effect.

ib.

To follow up, I turned the non-essential services back and the battery drain was normal, that is, insignificant. I ran a timer for 90 minutes, during which time the battery went down to 99% on idle, with a few gmail and hotmail emails delivered. For me, Exchange account proved to be the culprit.

ib.

Did you guys renable Exchange after doing a delete or do you need to just rely on IMAP or POP for gmail?