Battery drain with iOS 5 on iPhone 4

I was having the issue, and I am using Exchange (mail, calendar, contacts). Removing and re-adding the Exchange account did not help. What solved it for me was iCloud. Now that it is off, I am back to normal, and I did not restore the phone. But it seems the solution is different for everyone.

I guess the best way to troubleshoot is to either get an app that shows the CPU usage or look at your usage vs standby time, and start disabling stuff. I still have all locations on, so start with mail accounts.

Good luck to all.

I am having the same problems but with the iphone 4s. I charge to 100% overnight, unplug at 9am and I am at 10% charge by 7pm. I only have regular usage - 30 calls a day, read my emails and a little bit on the web. I do use a blue tooth speaker for my phone calls. I don't use Siri very muchj at all.

The 200 hours of battery life seem like a dream, I would be happy if I could get 20 hours. I really am limited to only 10 hours at the moment if I am careful with the apps I run.

While I am at home this is not a problem, but when I go on a business trip it can be a real problem. I am still taking my ipod on business trips to listen to music or watch a film on the plane - I don't want to risk not being able to use my phone due to low charge when I reach my destimation.

I love everything else about the iphone 4s - I just need the promised battery life.

OK I can confirm that usage data is blanking out as well. I have been tracking standby time today since i unplugged it and POOF... it just blanked out while i was eating lunch. I have wifi sync turned off and i didn't plug it into anything while i was out so no reason for sleep time and use time to blank out.

Had no problems after the IOS 5 upgrade on my iPhone4 until last night. The phone had drained to 0%, then I gave it a full charge last night. This was the first time the phone had drained to 0% since the IOS 5 update. Was down to 35% charge overnight with no phone use. It use to only drop about 10% overnight.

@Dave-p - That's what happened to me. No problem initially then bam all at once.... Did you update any apps right before this happened?

P.S. After a phone call to apple care they acknowledge the problem exists and that they are already investigating the cause. After confirming that I was having a problem not just a moron they asked me to bring in the phone to an apple store so they could dump the logs and usage details off the phone. I'm bringing it in tomorrow afternoon.

I have a lot of aps and typically get updates almost daily, but don't pay much attention to the updates and not sure which ones got updated right before the problem. My guess is it's related to letting the battery drain down all the way.

Also, the problem seems to have gone away. I shut it down this morning, re-charged it again, rebooted again and it's now behaving like normal. Strange. Good luck!

Same here, terrible drain after upgrade to iOS5 on my iPhone 4.

What I did was start to switch off the weather app and stock app in the notification centre. In addition I switched off the local weather feature in the weather app.

This bugger continuously determines the weather based on you location.

I seem to have better battery life now.

Having a similar problem. Upgraded on release date, current on all apps installed. I've tried a few selective disabling of features, but nothing drastic like a reset to factory defaults. Used to end a typical day with 50-60%, now I'm lucky if it's still at 30%. Pretty bad.

I've experienced a noticable drop in battery like on my iPhone 4 since the upgrade to iOS5, too. Last weekend, I was in a hotel. When the room's alarm clock went off at 7am but I had my phone's alarm set for 9am, I moved my phone from the charger on the desk to my nightstand so it'd be closer when it went off. In those 2 hours while I slept, it dropped from 100% to 80%! I turned off all the notifications and reduced the screen brightness, and it's been better since, but still way worse than pre-iOS. I used to have to top off the charge at work if I had evening plans, but now I'm doing so just to make sure I have enough juice for the bus ride home. I typically use for 20-30 min on bus to check twitter & news in the AM, at lunch to surf the web and 20-30 min. home w/ Twitter, surf web, Angry Birds, etc. Also listening to podcasts on bus & walk to bus, so maybe hour total per workday. Maybe get 1-2 calls a day and 2-3 texts.

Update - After a visit to the Genius Bar today to let them take a snapshot of my phone they had me do a firmware level restore. This is different that just clicking restore in itunes. I have done this and set up as new phone then didn't let it sync apps automatically. I DID NOT turn off anything at all. i have turned on bluetooth and synced my favorite headphones. Everything in icloud is off except photo stream and find my phone. I will say that I immediately noticed that the UI is slightly different than it was after installing ios 5 for the first time. Implying that the first install was somehow incomplete and trying to use settings from ios 4 and 5 at the same time. I will start monitoring battery right now and post results.

only app i added is iBooks and i synced all my books and a few songs.

Problem appears to be solved. 1 hour since I unplugged it and I'm at 99%. It took 44 minutes to drop that 1% and that would extrapolate to about 73 hours standby. I can live with that. The real teller will be if it is still working correctly after a few days. Tomorrow my IT department will be adding my new exchange settings to it so I'll keep my fingers crossed and keep you updated. If anyone wants instructions on firmware level restore let me know.

Ordered my new iPhone 4Gs as soon as it was released. It came from China so took some time to get here. Battery was totally dead when it arrived, as expected. Charged it overnight and had a fully charged battery the first time I used it. The minute I unplugged the phone to take with me, it immediately started draining the battery. A fully charged phone has been lasting no more than 6 hours, sometimes less. This continues to be the story. Soooo disappointed. Been waiting for 3 years for the iPhone 5 but went ahead and bought the 4s when it came out. Battery life in my old 3G was better than this! Without a portable charger, it is impossible to count on this battery to carry through a day of traveling! Hope Apple finds a cure for this problem soon!

We purchased 2 lots of 2 phones from the APPLE store on the internet ahead of the release in the store but delivered on the 20th. The orders were placed 5 mintues apart however each order came from a different factory.

The first to arrive was directly from SHENZEN and there were no problems at all with those 2 phones.

The second order had come from MUMBAI via Shenzen and both those phones had issues in regard to battery life as well as wifi connections. Hoping this information assists someone at Apple in addressing the problems that must be evidently coming from the Mumbai factory.

my phone wont even let me charge it. the usb port isnt recognizing or even acknowledging its plugged in. the usb port is working because i plugged something else into it.

ive tried uninstalling and reinstalling all the apple applications and quicktime but still nothing. i believe the update messed with the phones ability to recharge. PLEASE HELP

I have two iPhone 4s. Both had iOS5 installed at the same time, about 8 days after release. Both having HUGE battery life problems since the iOS5 install. Been trying everything to get this fixed. Now, only have notifications "on" for Phone and Messages, and only have location services "on" for FindMyiPhone....... EVERYTHING else is turned off. Still getting killed on battery life. Used to charge the phone about two times per week. Now, it is two times per day. Help, Apple!