iPhone 4 iOS 5 battery drain, iCloud constant data pull.

Hi Craig,

After reading your post I thought I'd say I have had very similar battery issues since the iOS 5 update. I have deleted my iCloud account as well and Im currently monitoring my battery levels again.

I have had to fully recharge my phone 4 times since yesterday morning and I have only received 1 call and about 5 messages! Its almost useless since this new update so hopefully your suggestions will help as i have tried all of the other options such as turning off Location Services for apps that I dont need this service for as well as Diagnostics and Usage being turned off too!

Lets see how long the battery lasts now!

Regards

Jason

After confirming that iCloud drain the battery and the fix for it for now is to go to settings/Mail, Contacts, Calendars/fetch New Data/Advanced/ and change iCloud from push to Manuel

It will only sync when you check your data (Calendar, reminders...), so far the battery life is back to pre iOS5:)

Need Help check our support Knowledgebase Article "iPhone iOS 5 battery drain" @

http://support.ucscorp.com/

usccorp.com,

I tried just now what you suggested. The data drain still continues. Turn off wifi and check your cellular usage when iCloud is signed in.

To check cellular usage Settings > General > Usage > Cellular usage - reset this first and then go back after few seconds you will see the data keeps draining.

For now I have just deleted iCloud and the data drain and hence the battery drain has stopped.

Best luck.

Removing the default iCould account, which I wasn't using, in the Mail settings fixed the issue for me.

last month, i had not yet merged my mobile me with icloud and my verizon data usage was only 50% at the end of the billing cycle. this month...i'm ALREADY at 50% of data usage i STILL have 2 1/2 weeks to go until the end of the billing cycle. the ONLY difference in my usage is that i had installed icloud. after some investigating and reading this thread, i went into: 1.settings. 2. icloud. 3. Documents & Data 4. TURN IT OFF! turn OFF photo stream. then, i turned off my icloud storage and backup. i think EVERTHING i downloaded, uploaded, whatever was basically getting downloaded and copied to the cloud...getting billed TWICE. after i turned off the "documents and data" the 'mirror' cloud email account dissappeared from my 'mail, contacts and calanders'. i couldn't figure out why i had TWO icloud accounts listed under my 'mail, contacts and calanders'. now i know why...it was the BACKUP! TURN IT OFF and only use the cloud manually....back up to your cloud using wifi at home. use icloud in an ER, not EVERYDAY! fingers crossed that this fixes the problem.

I can confirm what the OP has found - that it is theiCloud draining the battery. 5.01 did not fix the issue but then i turned off iCloud and the battery appears to be back to ios 4 levels.

What a total joke Apple!

I had the same problem the minute I upgraded my Iphone 4 to 5.0.1 and turned on my new ICLOUD account.

My Iphone was drained dead over night!

I have now deleted my ICloud account and I am back to normal.

I have ICloud on my new IPAD 2 and have not noticed a problem but since my IPAD is new, I really do not know what the "before" was to compare to.

Liz

I had exactly the same experience. I ended up shutting it of, feeling disappointed that my high expectations with Apple were let down in this way. Apple should make an easaly googleable page explaining how iCloud works:

1) simple tech specs like: when cellular data is used, how much, that it is ticking constantly, why and so on

2) HOW iCloud works. It took me ages to figure out that the cloud contacts become "masters" where the data lives and that changes is done to it rather than to my "main device". ehm this is leaving the subject but one shouldn't have to figure these things out by the collected trial and error experiences of the community of users. sigh.

I have been beside myself over the horrible battery drainage I've been experiencing almost ever since I got my new iphone 4s!! 😠 I waited soooo long for this upgrade from my iphone 3GS and then within a couple of months I started noticing how quickly my battery was dying! So here I am spending my day searching for solutions, as I see, much to my chagrin........ are sooo many other fellow iphone users.......!! But thanks to all of your expertise I have just now deleted my icloud account and turned off everything having to do with it that constantly uses the internet in the so called background of this phone and as soon as I did that "Voila!" my battery jumped back up to 100% (as I had just charged it right before)

Now the only thing that's chapping my hide is that over the past week in my attempts to solve my battery drainage by turning off all the apps etc that I bought the phone to enjoy, I ended up going quickly over my 200mb data plan!!!! Now AT&T has just informed me that they're charging me an extra $15 for going over it by a few mb's!!! All due to the fact that IMHO Apple made a phone with all kinds of Bells and Whistles that the darn thing can't even handle doing without it's users having dead batteries every several hours!!

That is just plain incompetent as far as I'm concerned! Why make a Smartphone that can't handle being Smart!! They constantly have to upgade everything hardware and software-wise because they obviously want people to spend more money!! Plain and Simple!! I was thinking about purchasing an iPad or perhaps a nice Mac Book laptop but after having to spend the day here, reading about all the problems with their products I think I'll stick with the windows based laptops and I may give up on the iphone altogether after this bad experience!! I was very happy with my iphone 3gs but Apple must constantly tweak and/or come out with newer and supposedly improved phones, iPads and computers that need new operating systems so often that you have to keep buying something new all the time and yet the IOS versions don't keep up noe solve the problems that inadvertently arise!! I would much rather plug my phone into my computer hook up to iTunes to backup etc than to have a dead battery every 12 hours so Apple you have a very BIG problem you desperately need to fix ASAP!!!!!!

And I'm Sorry but today I am a very, very disgruntled Apple customer!!!!!! 😕