Battery drain with iOS 5 on iPhone 4

After installing IOS5.0.1 the battery life of both my and my son's iphone4 has dropped dramatically. We have no facebook

on the phone, use wifi very little and calls and textmessages are very few a day. Now the battery does not last 8 hours !

We have no push-programs on the phone. Apps are rarely used. So why the steep drop in battery-life since IOS 5 ?

Is there a way to go back to IOS 4.3 ? How do you do that?

Will Apple still do something or do they react as with the antennas?

Same Problem here. My battery is empty after 5-6 hours without using the phone at all.

I turned off some features, but it doesn't help.

If you're having this problem with battery drain, be sure to contact Apple support and let them know. While I'm sure they monitor this forum, it's the details of each of our situations that may assist in getting the problem addressed and ultimately repaired. When I spoke with them, I was told that not many people had actually contacted Apple about this problem; the more people that do contact them, the more serious they will be to resolve it.

Folks, I had same problem. Battery draining in hours, and iPhone getting very hot. I think I found the culprit, iCloud connection. As soon as I deleted my account it stopped draining. So far so good for me. However, I did like the iCloud to share my Reminder, Notes and other stuff with my iPad. Oh well.

Hi,

For the last 2 days, my battery is being drained like mad on my iPhone 3GS. I thought, my phone was at the end of its life, but after having read this forum, it looks more like there is a problem with the software rather than the hardware.

I've read some people mentioning all the typical tips & tricks on how to optimised the battery life, but this is not the problem as I've always had my bluetooth on, wireless on, 3G on, Fetch on 3 email accounts every 30 mins, etc... and my phone was working just fine.

Now I'm lucky if I get 2 or 3 hours out of it.

I've disabled the location service, switch the fetching from automatic to manual, disabled bluetooth, but left my 3G and wireless on and the problem remains.

One user mentioned, the cloud issue but I've upgraded to the latest version of IOS5 including the recent patch and everything was working fine.

All apps are removed from memory and again, no luck... Recent updates??? The only one I can recall, are the likes of Facebook, Twitter and a few others, so I have to assume that it is down to one of these, but which one??

The other I've noticed is that my phone seems to refuse to charge now when the screen in turned on, and it is seriously slow at charging when the screen is off and this is the case whether I charge it via my laptop, a third-party charger or directly from the usb cable plugged into the wall.

Another thing I've noticed, which was never the case before, is that while charging the phone is getting hot, which it never really did before, well certainly not that hot!

Yet another thing I noticed is that my phone now switches off when the battery is roughly 25%??? Insane!!!!!

This is a complete pain as most people, I rely heavily on my phone and personally I'm not in a mood to upgrade if I don't have too, nor am I in the mood to wipe it out, re-install, start checking which app could be the culprit!!!

I've installed an app which I'm sure will use some battery as it is monitoring everything thats going on, and maybe it will help me identify the problem but somehow doubt it. The app is called "Battery Doctor" and no, it is not that app that is the problem as my problem started a couple of days ago (friday) and I only downloaded it today.

Any ideas??? Apple??

Thanks.

T.

I noticed both an overall performance and battery life degradation on my iPhone 4 after I accidentally pushed 3000+ photos to PhotoStream. I started receiving Out of Storage warnings on the phone as well. PhotoStream just ate up all available storage on the phone! (edit: PhotoStream only does 1000 photos at a time, still with my music and apps, enough to eat up my storage)

It could be in low storage situations that iOS begins to run less efficiently? I would guess that for Location Services and Push Notifications that it has to reload and resave the state of each process that uses those services (every minute or so?), and as storage becomes tighter and more fragmented, the file system requires more and more cycles just to perform basic file IO.

I will free up some memory and report back.

Joe K.

Okay, I reset my PhotoStream (a whole 'nother battle) which freed up a couple of GBs, recharged overnight, and today I am getting much better bettery performance!

So my recommendation, if you have exhausted all other avenues, is to free up some storage memory -- I guess you can delete some music, videos, pictures, and apps -- and see if that helps any. This will probably only work if you are close to max capacity already.

Joe K.

As my phone became pretty much unusable, as the battery would be fully drained after 2 or 3 hours, I was left with no choice but to wipe it (Reset) and re-install the OS from scratch!

Since I've done that, what a difference!! WOW!!! Here I thought that maybe my battery had given up altoegether as the phone is 2.5 years old, but no, it wasn't the battery!! What a change!! It's back to normal where I'm getting over 2 days if not used (compared to 2-3 hours)!!

It re-installed IOS5 which I didn't expect, but I guess it makes sense!!

What sersiouly bugs me is that I'm pretty sure it is not related to an IOS issue or an apple related software as this only started to happen after installing patches for various apps such as e-bay, twitter, facebook, etc... among others... I've yet to re-install these apps as I'm afraid it will re-occur, so I decided to install them bit by bit just to see if I can spot the culprit and so far so good, without these apps anyway!!

What baffles me is that apple does not provide an app to monitor which application is sucking up CPU time and/or battery time!!

Not only has my phone stopped heating up but the user CPU usage has dropped from 25/30% down to 4% to 14% on average. Huge difference and I'm assuming this is why a) it has stopped heating up and b) it has stopped being drained.

So while I could be wrong, I have to assume it was (is) down to one of these apps and is somehow causing it to use the CPU and therefore drain the battery.

I'm not sure whether these apps can install files/drivers on an iPhone which can run in the background, but when my battery was being drained, there was no application left in memory, none, so it makes you wonder whether it was an app or is it OS related, but if it is OS related, why isn't it happening any longer since re-installing it!!

Anyway, that's my update!! As I said, I really wish apple would allow you to turn on an option via the general settings or provide an app which while it would drain the battery, would monitor which app is consuming what cpu and for how long and if at all possible, how much %tage of the battery is being used by each individual app based on cpu usage.

This would help to identify very quickly if a driver, file, app, etc... is causing the OS to be overly used and therefore cause the battery to be drained and the iPhone to get overheated!!

Pain but on the positive side, my phone is back to normal!!

T.

Im Having the same problem in 6 hours stanby mode my iphone battery will fade away and lose more than 50%, before i didn't suffer from this problem but after i updated my software from 5.0 to 5.0.1 , plz guys if any1 can help me dont hesitate,thank u

Another thing I noticed is that even when pushes are turned completely off, I'm STILL getting info pushed to the phone. For example, over the past few days, my applications have been getting updates. I'm not searching for them, my phone is telling me that I have them out there via the app store which isn't even open!

I have push notifications turned off for everything.

How many other things are silently running in the background and burning battery even when they're supposedly turned off?

I experience the same problem with battery life after upgrading to iOS 5.1

Battery goes down to 50% withing 6 hours. Just by laying around.

Performing a complete Reset seems to have done the trick. I'm getting about 2 days of idle use on a charge again. I suspect the install process itself fragments the file system so utterly on some devices that they just become unusable for very long.

Anyhow, if nothing else works try a Reset.

I did a fallback to iOS 5.0.1

That works perfectly. Battery life is back to usual values.

It looks like a bug in iOS 5.1 beta 2 which affects all iOS phones.

My Iphone 4 just totally flat after 2 weeks having the upgrade from ios 5, at first down to 25 % battery life then to 10 % and when I put it on to recharge it seems its not charging so I tried my wifes iphone charging cable but still not charging. The phone cannot be powered up and no signs of recharging the battery eventhoug it is connected. Called my network provider and refered me to Apple Store but they cannot diagnos the problem with it.

Try restoring from itunes (remember to back it up first!! 🙂 ) to version 9A406. It has worked for me 🙂