Battery drain with iOS 5 on iPhone 4

I have a 4s and have fast battery drain, too. I also have a number of friends and colleges with the same problem on 4's after upgrading to iOS5. I have tried a lot of the suggestions here - so far to no avail.

I took the phone to the Apple store and they tested the battery and said it was in perfect condition. So if it's not the phone it must be the OS. A new OS (.0 release) is bound to have bugs, hopefully Apple can use these posts and info to track down the issues and release an update soon.

To date, here is what I have tried:

-Changed email to fetch

-Deleted Facebook

-Turned notifications off except for essential apps

-Quit apps frequently and rebooted the machine

-Even restored the machine after having other issues but I restored it from a backup. I did not have the time to re-setup my phone and all the apps.

I have turned off a lot of functionality I was used to having on previous iOS's. That can't be right, right?

Like many in this forum, I was having substantial problems with battery drain on my iPhone 4 since upgrading to iOS 5. Most days, my battery would be down below 50% before noon. It was hot all the time. I tried many of the suggestions listed in this forum without success. Resetting Network Settings did nothing. Restoring from Backup did nothing. I refused to turn off everything that makes an iPhone an iPhone, because, what's the point?

What worked?

I noticed that the Calendar section in Notifications was flickering wildly. I turned off Notifications for Calendar, and voila, now my battery life is essentially back to normal again.

I still have notifications on for email, texts, etc, and have not seen battery problems yet today with these running.

I had the same problem with battery drain - turned all forms of syncing, location services, bluetooth off yet still no solution.

Found in Settings > General > About > Diagnostics & Usage that it was set to automatically send diagnostic and usage data to apple daily. I turned this off because for 3 days of use, there were over 400 files sent to apple.

This has solved the problem - I've even been able to turn on all the notifications, location services and syncing I used to have with iOS 4 !!!

This iphone 4S battery is a huge disappointment. Really? I would like Apple to fix this issue asap. I came from an iphone 4 which was conciderably better. Big big difference here folks. Will Apple fix this issue?

I'm on a 3GS and IOS5 is TERRIBLE. Suddenly, my iPhone (Which I used to really like) is a drag - A real PITA. The battery level becomes concerning a few hours after starting the day from a full recharhge. Terrible terrible.

I've tried all the forums suggestions, and have tried really hard to downgrade so I can just go back to how it was a week ago - impossible - Just doesn't work.

Does anyone know how to go from this iOS5 thing back to the previous version? FYI I have tried as many methods as I could find, but continue to get a 1394 error (I think that's the number anyway).... So I've tried all the methods they suggest to fix that - INCLUDING trying another PC on a different network... exactly same result.

What a croc..... Couldn't we just get a file that apple will allow us to install the eralier OS without stopping it with a crappy error? Sheesh!.. I am sooo frustrated.

My iPhone 4 suffers from the same battery drain issues related by others. After updating to ios5, everything was fine for 3-4 days and then...... The battery would drain in several hours from a full charge. I've spent hours on the phone with Apple Tech support, gone to an apple Genius appointment and still cannot count on the phone! I have tried every suggestion on this forum and usually what happens is that things sseem to be OK for a day or so and then, the problem returns. So, don't be confident that you have solved the problem until a signifcant time has passed. My iPhone 4 with ios4 could stay on standby for days. On ios 5, it can be dead in a few hours. My wife's iPhone 3GS with ios4 lasts for many days on standby with little battery drain. Like many I would dearly like to return to the security and functionality of ios4!

I noticed today that after usng the Facebook App, the GPS locator barb was present on the top of the screen even when the app was selected off using the home key.

Once I went back into Facebook, the GPS then deactivated.

Things appear to stay running from various apps even when shut off with IOS 5. Even some have said reseting network connections solves the issue like WiFi is running even though selected off?

After IOS5, everything looked fine for me... But yesterday, I was down to less than 20% before noon. Phone was hot too. Downloaded the System Status app, and it showed the following: CPU usage was hovering between 25% and 100%, and more importantly, the system log showed a message coming up every fraction of a second:

wifid [30] WiFi:[ ]: Client dataaccessd set type to background application - ERROR

The log was filled with these.

Another clue is to look at the phone usage vs standby time (Settings - General - Usage). They used to be (obviously) different, but now they were showing almost the same, indicating that the phone never really goes into standby mode.

Anyhow, tried disabling everything, WiFi, etc... no change. Finally, on a whim, I turned off PhotoStream and Documents sync in iCloud, and suddenly the phone cooled down, and the WiFi error messages stopped. CPU usage is now down around 6%.

So far, this seems to have solved the issue for me, but apparently the solution is different for everyone... We will see in the next couple of days how it goes...

I have noticed on my iPhone 4 with iOS 5 the battery problems is in particular bad if there is a weak or no signal. I was at 80% after a 1:15h presentation in a room with no reception the battery was down to 20%. I have never seen that with iOS4.

In Las Vegas all the conference rooms and Casinos have poor AT&T reception and my phone would last about 1 day with no useage what so ever.

@robfromca

nah, i have noticed this before too on other os. the harder it has to work to get a signal the faster it eats batteries. i found that out one day when i was screwing off with my phone on an airplane. its the only reason i even use airplane mode. (and not because they tell me to)

+1 here. Before the update my iphone 4 would last me all day without fail and I stream pandora virtually all day. After the ios 5 update my phone is stone dead by 2pm. (useless as far as I'm concerned.) This is a HUGE fail. What is giong on?

Update. I spent an hour last night with Apple Tech support researching the drain problem. Restored phone to "new". No effect- 100% battery at midnight, DEAD at 9 AM while on "standby". The general-usage-"time since last full charge" readings are almost the same (Usage = Standby). "Everything" is OFF, but the phone's software is causing the hardware to drain the battery. Does anyone know how to restore the phone to an old ios4 backup?

Charged mine over night and the phone was cool to the touch when i unplugged it. 40 mins standby since last charge and already at %90 and it is very warm just sitting there with the screen off doing "nothing" please someone figure out what the **** the phone is doing that is killing our batteries. This is the first truly horrible experience I've had with an iphone.

16% gone at 1 hour. We need help now. Some people are claiming that it is being caused by messed up Microsoft exchange support. Can everyone who is having the problem please report whether they are using Exchange email please?

JUST started having this issue. Phone practically charged at mignight; Dead at 9am. I checked the logs, and it looks "time used" was 10 hours. But that's just not true, the phone was used for a total of maybe 30 minutes that day. It should've been idle the rest of the time. I just enabled sending logs to Apple. This only started JUST recently (Oct 27th first time, and now 29th, just 2 days later). Never had this issue before. I think the only app I got that could've possibly caused issues with location was the Google Latitude. But I just turned off notifications for it. The latest log for low battery lists persistent connection to apple.apsd push.app. I just turned off iClound photo stream. But this is beginning to worry me. Apple, please assign some engineers to investigate this.

I am willing to install a monitoring app or something, if needed. I have an iPhone 4, 32gb running iOS 5.