rapid battery drain after upgrading to iOS 5

ndaversa wrote:

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

That was the final part of my test. After running iOS5 for a few hours yesterday to verify that the battery drain did not return, I re-added the Exchange account. It has now been 14 hours, and things are looking good. My iPhone 4 is back to normal as far as I can tell.

Many guys (and gals) on this thread and others reported success with rebuilding the iPhone iOS5 install from scratch and reconfiguring everything manually. Others had success with just removing and readding their mail accounts. It appears removing and re-adding the Exchange account worked for me. I didn't touch my gmail and hotmail accounts in any way.

ib.

OK folks, I resolved all issues in their entirety with the help of a genius bar tech who recognized that I was very technical. WARNING! Sync or backup your phone prior to performing these steps!

First, do a MANUAL download here of the IOS 5 that matches the model of phone you have and save that image to your desktop or some other place on your computer. PUT THE PHONE IN DFU MODE, not recovery mode (google on how to accomplish if you are not familiar). The reason why you are going to put in DFU mode is so that you will be able to not only get a good copy of IOS 5 installed but to ensure that your firmware is not corrupt, which appeared to be the case with my battery drains and springboard crash issues.

One you are in DFU mode (your screen should be black the whole time, again google), open itunes and it will give you a warning that says that your phone needs to be restored. If you are on a mac, hold down the option key and press RESTORE in iTunes. This will open up a box that will allow you to "locate and select" a file, which will be the IOS 5 image that you manually downloaded before.

Once you do, the iphone will start to restore. After all of the restore cycles have been completed, you will be prompted in iTunes to either setup as a new phone or restore from backup. I USED RESTORE FROM BACKUP so that I could preserve all of my settings. Everything has been working PERFECTLY ever since completing these steps! I will probably go ahead and make a separate thread related to this fix.

I hope this helps! Scott

So, I got extremely tired of battery drain and I decided to start from scratch on my phone.

From inside of the phone, I went to Settings > Reset All Settings and Data and waited for my phone to be completely clean. I then plugged it into iTunes and configured it as a new phone.

After removing all the things I didn't need, (like advanced Location Services, bluetooth, etc.), I checked how well my phone was performing in terms of battery. Without any apps installed, just text messages and iCloud, the battery life fared well. I was no longer getting standby drain.

I then started to customize my phone and install a few apps. I was very selective as to what apps would go on my Notification Center and Location Services. I stayed away from Exchange (Google Sync) merely to establish a control for my experiment.

After installing Facebook and not allowing it to use Location Services... my battery drain issue came back. When Facebook was in my Notification Center, I started receiving the same battery drain I was getting before. Even when I took Facebook off of Notification Center, the drain would still occur. I'm really disappointed with the Facebook devs, I have strong reason to believe Facebook is having some sort of issue that is draining the battery.

Since then, I've uninstalled Facebook and I've been using Twitter and installing apps normally. The battery seems to be fine. I haven't bothered adding Google Sync to my phone as I keep hearing that its a huge battery drain. Regardless, this shouldn't be happening. Apple needs to address this immediately and pull apps that are faulty from the App Store. The Facebook app is absolutely atrocious... It's a pain to use and now has a battery drain problem.

I will be leaving more information as I keep toying with my phone. However, I advise everyone to start from scratch and see what works best for you. Not everyone has the same needs and the battery drain issue DID disappear after I deleted everything on my phone.

Cheers.

evilbyte wrote:

ndaversa wrote:

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

That was the final part of my test. After running iOS5 for a few hours yesterday to verify that the battery drain did not return, I re-added the Exchange account. It has now been 14 hours, and things are looking good. My iPhone 4 is back to normal as far as I can tell.

Many guys (and gals) on this thread and others reported success with rebuilding the iPhone iOS5 install from scratch and reconfiguring everything manually. Others had success with just removing and readding their mail accounts. It appears removing and re-adding the Exchange account worked for me. I didn't touch my gmail and hotmail accounts in any way.

ib.

To follow up, a friend of mine was also experiencing drastic battery drain and overall performance decrease. After checking the CPU usage, it was also getting maxed out. We applied the same treatment to his phone, ie. removed and re-added Exchange, and his phone has been fine now for the last 6 hours or so.

ib.

Hi folks, I commented the other day that I was able to get some increased battery life by restoring my new iPhone 4S. However, I am now noticing hardly any change. My phone lasts about 3 hours. Now I have been reading the discussion of fixing the Exhange mail, and seeing positive results. I use the iCloud for my mail though, and have been seeing nothing but battery drain since I got my phone.

I have tried decreasing my apps, locations services, etc. but to no avail. Any more help out there for me?

Austin

I have done the exact steps as described by Scott, just charging my phone. Fingers crossed.

In my case (iPhone 4, update to iOS 5) the cause of the battery drain was an active wi-fi connection even in standby mode. With previsous versions of iOS wi-fi automatically disconnects in standby mode (with mobile data enabled). With iOS 5 wi-fi disconnects in standby mode only if wi-fi syncing is disabled in iTunes.

Can anyone confirm this?

Scott, I did exactly as instructed in your post. Made no difference , in fact it is draining even faster now.

Now , I have removed my Hotmail account and will see if that makes a difference.

If not, I believe a rogue app is responsible. That's the only thing I havent tried yet-removing all apps.

(I have iCloud enabled-fetch only, location services, use WiFi at work, i use push notification in notification centre for standard app likemail, text, faceb, twitter, notes, calendar, reminder)

removing mail made no difference - still was draining 10% per hour without using the phone.

I have removed Facebook app as suggeste before and will report back.

P.S. it is still using cellular data even though i am connected to WiFi. I am using a lot more MBs than before on my 3GS

I had same problem an I tried it all! And every time it was the same.

At the end I just gave up (waiting for fix from Apple) and after a couple off days it just got better.

So I am tending to think more like this guy :

"...My suspect on what’s happening? Perhaps it’s trying to re-index the filesystem, or doing a full scan of the phone. Perhaps to establish a full catalogue of the filesystem on iCloud for backup sync comparisons. Who knows? If you do, perhaps you can shed some light here. But whatever it was doing, it seems that it stops after a couple of days. My iPhone 3Gs no longer randomly goes into full CPU utilization anymore and I didn’t even turn off any features..."

My "fault" was that I did recovery almost every day since update came and IF it was something like re-indexing it just started from beginning every time I did recovery. Maybe, just maybe you have to give it some time...

My battery woes are now gone thanks to the full reset of my phone. I'm now able to use Facebook just fine. I'm not sure what was causing the rapid Facebook drain, but after toying with my phone I was able to get satisfactory results. Wish you all the best of luck.

Best way to get rid of your battery issue with iOS: wipe your phone clean.

A complied list of all of the battery optimizations:

1. Reset your network settings

2. Turn off your Bluetooth radio

3. Avoid enabling Push and Fetch mail on Exchange accounts, although this might be counter-intuitive (what's the point of having a smartphone if you have to turn it off?)

4. Selectively turn off Location Services and turn off all system services Location Services features.

5a. Selectively turn off applications you don't need to be notified of that use Notifications.

5b. Turn off Weather and Stock notifications. I've never seen anyone I know ever need this.

6. Avoid downloading apps that you're not using or will constantly poll and activate GPS

7. Turn off Diagnostics and Usage in General > About

8. Add a Restriction to iTunes and Ping (if you're not using these services)

9. Avoid turning on GPS-enabled Reminders when you have Exchange accounts.

10. Turn off iPod Equalizer (Music EQ)

11. Turn off Spotlight features you're not using

12. Turn off Push features that your applications may be using that you don't need.

For granular battery optimization,

12. Turn off vibration.

13. Turn on Automatic Brightness

14. Use Airplane Mode where there's no reception.

15. Adjust the Auto-Lock so your screen is not constantly on.

16. When you're not using your phone, turn off your screen.

17. Avoid spamming Facebook... It's not because I hate Facebook, but the app is poorly designed. If you constantly refresh your Facebook or leave it in an infinite loop of loading pictures or notifications Facebook will continue polling the server for data. Out of most of my normal apps that are not supposed to be battery intensive, Facebook and Messenger seem to drain my battery the most.

For battery maintenance, run your phone down to 0% and charge it to 100% while its off, run it down to 0% again, and charge it while its on. Keep your phone in normal room temperatures (no extreme heat or cold) and avoid dropping your phone.

Although my battery life is far from optimal, I'm at 20% right now from a full charge and I'm getting 13h standby and 6h of usage. Not so shabby for iOS 5. I used to get insane numbers on 4.3.5 though, going almost 1d on Standby and 7h of usage, but I'm not asking for more.

Wish you all the best of luck!

-dimgl

OK - battery still draining , I am going to sit this out and wait for update or something, I've had enough and wasted so much time on the bloomin phone.

I have, restored form back up , restored as new, restored from DFU, removed apps, removed mail, removed facebook, removed iCloud, put it all back one by ones , removed it all one by one etc etc etc,,, i've tried so many different thing in Location services, Wifi, 3G , 50 cent, CMENAGS KDKS settings 🙂 I don' t know anymore.

I give up.....I will sit it out for a week or two and if it does not improve , I will book a meeting with a Genius.

Have you checking your cellular data usage? I did the full restore, reset network, all that to no benefit. I found that cellular data was accumulating at a rapid pace even while on WiFi and while asleep at night. i called AT&T who did an "OTN" (Over the Network) update and the problem stopped. No more excessive battery drainage and no more unexplained cellular data usage.

Yes , it is still using Cellular even when on WiFi.

I called Vodafone UK and they don't do OTN here.

She said that Apple told them amongst other things that we should switch of WiFi when not using it as it still runs even when the phone is in standby due to the Sync to WiFi feature.

She also laughably said to edit the APN entry to something random which should stop access to Cellular if I dont want it and reset it again if I need it again. What????? I tried to be as polite as possible and excused my self from the conversation.

As I said before , I give up for now and will sit it out - I am sure Apple/Vodafone will fix this as it seems a fair number of people are having this issue.

Hello everyone - I was having the battery drain issue (woke up the day after upgrading to a dead phone, and found it was hot the whole time). Closed down all open apps, and did hard reset - no improvement. I followed the advice to delete my Exchange account (which I use to access work e-mail and calendars) and then just reinstated it with exactly the same info, and the problem has gone away. I also turned off the time zone support which seemed like it was using the GPS all the time - i haven't yet gone back to turn this back on to see if it helps.

So worth trying just the Exchange thing, although it looks like other users might have additional issues that require more drastic solutions. Good luck.

Wouldn't it be nice to see an Apple support person contribute to the post, to acknowledge that they can replicate the problem and are working on a fix?...