Battery drain with iOS 5 on iPhone 4

Yes my 4s seems a lot better now, but it wasnt as bad as some.

Had phone on since 6am and it still has 90% power.

been on web and photos. Not bad 10% gone in 6 hours 🙂

I did the update like everyone else but when I plug in the Iphone 4 to either charge or sync with Itunes the phone goes into this cycle of powering down and back up again, if I charge it while it is off it is fine, but the battery % gets stuck and then when I power it down and turn it back on it says the battery is dead. I have done about 10 restores, I even deleted all apps, info, ect from Itunes and set it up as a new phone disabling Location Services, Icloud ect. I don't know what else to do... Can anyone help?

Just to let people know; this solution seems to have worked for my phone too. Significant improvement in battery life after switching time zone support off at the bottom of location services options.

When I went into this option I noticed a compass arrows next to the options there; indicating that your iPhone is currently requesting your location.... or has done in the last 24 hours. This even though I had not moved time zones! I switched it off and there has been a massive improvement.

I'd recommend trying this before anything else; I had tried everything including a full factory settings reset and it made no difference whatsoever.

Good luck everyone :-)

I was struggling with this and seem to have found some resolution for myself. I am not sure which step wored but I:

1. Went to location services and disabled all un-needed services for the system.

2. Turned off exchange

3. Performed a reset of the network settings.

Good luck!

It was turning off exchange. If you change your email setting from "Push Data" to "Fetch data" that will fix battery problem.

This didn't work, the battery % gets stuck and then once I plug it into a charger it turns itself off and back on non-stop until I unplug it.

after to much trying to fixed this issue i find solution :restor ur iphone by ur PC then take the last packup when u remeber ur iphone working well then install it in ur iphone and it well come like new battery.isa

Hello everyone!

After a few minutes of posting before my battery started to drain very quickly AGAIN! I fooled with it much of the morning until I tried one more step. Instead of resetting all the network setting I instead reset all settings. Once I did this I have been back to normal battery life!!! Instead of losing 8-12%/hr I am now losing 2-4%. This will not delete any of your data (it will confirm this when you go to reset, if it does not confirm this you are using the wrong reset.) I believe it is the first option in the reset menu.

By doing this I lost all my customization such as ringtones, wallpapers, wifi networks, etc. But I think it is worth while! Be sure to backup before you do this if you are faint of heart, if not give it a try!

I feel so relieved, I thought I was going to have to give up my phone. Best of luck to everyone else who is experiencing this issue!

I have the same issue and the things I have tried so far pretty much cover everything that has been suggested on here. When I upgraded to iOS 5.0.1 I have selected to set the iphone as new rather than restoring from backup thus eliminating any issues caused by corrupt settings. I have now restored it again but this time from my backup and the drain is the same. The only thing that's left are apps and I am not that keen on deleting them one by one and checking but it seems like it's the only option that's left.

Forgot to mention, the battery drains only if i am using the phone, it does not occur in standby like it does for others. I understand that usage = battery drain but i've been using iphone 3G, 3GS and 4 so I know what the 'normal' drain is.

So I called Apple again today and bought a care plan, I did a restore right after this and now my phone seems to be working better. It isn't turning itself on and off while plugged in but the battery % hasn't changed.

To start; thanks everybody for taking the time and trouble to post your experiences.

I, like lots of you, started suffering battery drain some time after upgrading to 5.0.1. After a few days decided I probably 'wasn't alone' and googled the problem and found this blog. I have worked my through all nine pages and tried many suggestions including wiping the phone a reloading as new to no avail. Last night I tried the 'Location Time Zone off'' suggestion; and it seems to have worked. Suddenly the phone that was my pride and joy was back to normal. Fingers crossed that it will stay that way. Without the help from this blog I would never have worked this out for myself.

The point I would like to make ( to Apple) is why do I have to rely on the goodwill of people taking the trouble to report their experiences on this site, and others like, it rather than Apple admitting to problems.

On a related subject I have a first generation ipod - a friend told me that there was a recall on the product due to a battery problem.. Apple had never let me know this and it was not easy to find out what to do. Eventually, at the end of November, I found out; by the middle of December I got a reply and immediately sent off the old device. I am still waiting for it to be replaced!

I am sure we all buy Apple products because of their iconic functionality and design; I think it reflects poorly on the company that they cannot be more upfront and reactive when problems do occur.

I welcome any thoughts about this: and thank you all again for allowing me to get my old phone back.

I had a similar issue with battery drain after updating to 5.0.1

The battery would drain even while in standby mode and I'm talking 24% in 4 hours

I did however find a solution to the problem via apple tech support

Apparently when you do a backup on iCloud you should have no apps running in the backround as there is a small chance that these processes will continue to run after a backup is restored.

The solution was to do a restore to factory setting and use iCloud or ME to get back any contacts etc

but not to use the iCloud backup. the one that's saved on the phone.

I've noticed a large increase in battery performance after doing this and memory is low under 30% with nothing running, I know it's somewhat of a pain to lose alot of the info stored but it is what it is.

This is the issue, you have to completely reset the phone back, erase ALL settings and returns to a fresh iphone with no data and just the standard apps. Then you can restore your itunes or icloud backup.

Hooked the phone up to Xcode and notice almost a Gb in error logs on the phone and new errors were adding every second, also the load average was up over 1.5 and this is really working the phone, no wonder my battery was reducing 1% per minute. I have had this problem about 4 times before and full reset and restore fixes it for about 3-4 months, then I have to do again. A full reset removes the logs, so it is my thinking that there is a problem with Apple not truncating the logs and it just gets to a point where the phone is consuming resources just to maintain logging. As the console log increases in size the battery drains faster !!

After reset load average is back to 0.4 - 0.7 which is acceptable with the functions I am running.

Please note this is for iPhone 4 with 5.01 (in fact had the same issue on 5.0 and 4.xx). I can't comment on 4S. It is bad coding on Apples part and they should wake up and review this instead of denying - the last time I went to Genius bar and asked them why the phone was fine one day and then the next day started reducing battery by 1% a minute, running all the same settings and no updates they told me "I was not right for an iphone" (after i said that if I disable all the things I use why would a fork out $1k for an iPhone, and if so please explain why it worked for months then stopped working !)

Same I have an iPhone 4 too purchased with 5.0.1 installed. Basically, I don't know how good the battery was on 5.0, but there is no way im downgrading. Like you said as soon as I start to use the phone it drains rapidly. I put my phone on standby when it was at 33% and woke up 10 hrs later to find it at 30% so that is quite good I suppose. No standby battery drain for me too. My conclusion is that, when you get pass the lock screen something constantly runs in the background and drains the battery rapidly.