Battery drain with iOS 5 on iPhone 4

One blue shirt at an apple store suggested a full wipe and restore from a backup to correct "what ever little thing may be wrong". I will probably be trying this as I have tried many of the other solutions out on the web.

I will say I'm a little disapointed, I would like a more official answer to this issue.

Thank you.

FRAGgleROX Did he say restore from a "backup" or restore as a new device? I believe the problem I was having was baked into the backup I was restoring from.

Did not work (still have battery problems):

1. Restore phone to factore defaults - iOS5
2. iTunes recognizes "new phone"
3. Choose restore from a backup of a previous iPhone (iOS4 backup)

Did work (less battery problems):

1. Restore phone to factore defaults - iOS5
2. iTunes recognizes "new phone"
3. Sync as new device
4. Set phone up as if I never had a previous iPhone.

I am extreamly disappointed in Apple, didn't think it could get worse while the Android phones are getting much better than the iPhones. But Apple found a way x2. My iPhone 4 battery is draining rapidly, full charge at 8am, dead by 4pm with little usage while I am at work. Heats up pretty good also. When I was charging via the car charger and playing a podcast, the charger could not keep up and it lost 4% of charge in a half hour...remember while on the car charger, and yes it was charging.

The other problem was the iTunes update, none of the 3 iphones may family has will back up after the upgrade of iTunes, which makes the upgrade to iOS5 problematic. I had to basically install as a new iPhone, good thing I have most of my data synced on an exhange server. Lost my text messages, but no biggie.

I reset my son's iPhone as a new phone to upgrade it also, mostly be cause it needed it. What a mess of apps, text messages, songs, etc.

I would not dare attempt this on my wifes phone until Apple owns up to their debacle and solves it, if I know what is good for me. If I loose just one of her precious text messages, its the couch for me.

Any help would be appreciated. I have tried everything I found on various sites.

EdHayes3 wrote:

FRAGgleROX Did he say restore from a "backup" or restore as a new device? I believe the problem I was having was baked into the backup I was restoring from.

Did not work (still have battery problems):

1. Restore phone to factore defaults - iOS5
2. iTunes recognizes "new phone"
3. Choose restore from a backup of a previous iPhone (iOS4 backup)

Did work (less battery problems):

1. Restore phone to factore defaults - iOS5
2. iTunes recognizes "new phone"
3. Sync as new device
4. Set phone up as if I never had a previous iPhone.

Thank you for the clarification on the restore options. I took another look through every setting on my phone and I believe that I came up with a solution for my phone. In my case it was the Time Zone Location Service. You can find this in Settings > Location Services > System Services (Way at the bottom) > Setting Time Zone.

For me this option would not stop using the location service, hence the "Hot Pocket Phone". I disabled all Location services and then reset the network settings found: Settings > Reset > "Reset Network Settings"

Did a reboot and then turned back on the Location Services. So far so good.

Thanks for your help everyone.

i submit that the Did Work, did not work. when i installed iOS 5, it was fresh-new-install not from a backup. i have had backups disabled through the plist hack since forever because i got tired of it using 80gb of my hard drive with the worst backup format ever. but i am not here to argue about that.

so i set up the phone as new the first time, and it is leaking power like crazy. for grins i set it up as new phone again like your outline and there is no change.

It's possible the Apple folks not only restored my iOS, but also the hardware firmware. I suggest taking it to an apple store. Make sure you call their support or go online to set up an apointment before you go.

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.

someone just posted a really length post targeting the Facebook app as a possible source, and now it is gone. If he was right that would explain why I could feel the power getting sucked out of my phone while using it. I will have to replicate his experiment about dropping everything and then adding Facebook back after establishing a baseline.

[edit] whoop, that post is back.

Hi, same problem over here.

Tonight at about 2 am unplugged the iPhone 4 with 100% from charging. When I wake up in the morning it was turned off - battery run empty. No Apps were in taskbar, iclud turned of, localizations turned of, no push - notheing. Theres nothing smart on that phone anymore...

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

I tried the reinstall and other suggestions and same results. Started toady at 100% and down 25% to 75% in standby in 1 hour. I DID see BIG results by turning off ALL Facebook push notifications. That action alone siginifcantly slowed battery loss. After 1 hour starting at 100% now at 95% with only a few access and mostly standby.

i experienced the same problems with drain after upgading - tried all the incremetal steps - net restore, hard reset, messing with notifications, settings, etc.

I finally went to verizon and asked them to do a full factory reset - suspecting there may be a confilct with an app that handt been optimzed for ios5 running udetected in the background. I deleted all 3rd party apps from itunes - evernote, linkedin, salesforce, shazam, tapatu, places and synched my phone from the backup. i then reinsatlled the apps i wanted from the store. ... so far so good. my battery life is back to what it was.

no way of confirming but i bet one the apps installed under ios4 was basically looping in the backgrouns causing the battery drain.

hope that helps.

After the first few days of ios5, my iPhone4 has returned to normal battery consumption. The only change I made was turn my Exchange Calendars off then on again, as it was causing a flickering in my Notification Centre. Not sure if that was it, but whatever was chewing through battery has stopped.

I've been having the same issues after downloading ios5 last week. Last night, I toggled my cellular data button off then on once, charged to 100%, powered on today all day and had 93% battery capacity at 6:00P.M. This is a huge improvement from where it was before. Just thought I'd throw it out there!

Restore did not work for me. 😟