If you had battery problems with the 4S AND you fixed it, what did you do?

So, I got extremely tired of battery drain and I decided to start from scratch on my phone.

From inside of the phone, I went to Settings > Reset All Settings and Data and waited for my phone to be completely clean. I then plugged it into iTunes and configured it as a new phone.

After removing all the things I didn't need, (like advanced Location Services, bluetooth, etc.), I checked how well my phone was performing in terms of battery. Without any apps installed, just text messages and iCloud, the battery life fared well. I was no longer getting standby drain.

I then started to customize my phone and install a few apps. I was very selective as to what apps would go on my Notification Center and Location Services. I stayed away from Exchange (Google Sync) merely to establish a control for my experiment.

After installing Facebook and not allowing it to use Location Services... my battery drain issue came back. When Facebook was in my Notification Center, I started receiving the same battery drain I was getting before. Even when I took Facebook off of Notification Center, the drain would still occur. I'm really disappointed with the Facebook devs, I have strong reason to believe Facebook is having some sort of issue that is draining the battery.

Since then, I've uninstalled Facebook and I've been using Twitter and installing apps normally. The battery seems to be fine. I haven't bothered adding Google Sync to my phone as I keep hearing that its a huge battery drain. Regardless, this shouldn't be happening. Apple needs to address this immediately and pull apps that are faulty from the App Store. The Facebook app is absolutely atrocious... It's a pain to use and now has a battery drain problem.

I will be leaving more information as I keep toying with my phone. However, I advise everyone to start from scratch and see what works best for you. Not everyone has the same needs and the battery drain issue DID disappear after I deleted everything on my phone.

Cheers.

Ok I think we need to get the word out on this one. I read this post after myself trying nearly everything but starting from scratch. I went to bed with my phone near 40% and woke up to a dead battery, with my iphone 4 it might have lost a couple %. Anyway.. I deleted facebook after seeing this post... Bingo! Seems to have really made a difference.. phone was on 36% when I went to bed.. woke up with it on 33%. This may not be the only app with is an issue for people but it definitely was on my phone. I won't be putting Facebook back on anytime soon.

Interesting fb app analysis. Ok no harm in deleting and trying it out. The mobile fb website has the exact same layout anyway (m.facebook.com). Plus everything works on the mobile site; not buggy like the app.

I too noticed that just signing out of the facebook app by going to account>log off has fixed my battery drain. Only reason I was logging out of it was because I kept getting notifications for games. Turning off push notifications didn't seem to stop the notifications from coming in. So I signed off the app, and now I can get almost 2 days standby time easily, with about 8 hours usage. When I sign back into the app and don't log off, the battery drains quicker. So trying to fix one problem actually led to fixing an even bigger problem. Seriously, I encourage everybody to try this out. Remember I didn't delete the app, I simply log off when I am not using it.

It seems that the FB app is causing some problems, but what for those of us (like me) who don't have the FB app installed and are still experiencing the battery drain?

Had the some of the same issues with my battery draining by the minute and made an appointment the Genius Bar. They ran a battery analysis and the phone was running fine.What seems to be happening across the board was configuration and capacity issues. I had run some of the same setups as dimgl and manually stripped out the majority of my b/g apps. The battery was @100% when went to bed @11:00 PM and was @48% around 6:00 AM running on standby. Much better than before when I was running full tilt with Wifi, bluetooth, and 20 apps or more in the background. I'd have my phone on in the car and would have wifi drive-by's. My charge would only last for 4-5 hours. Think of it this way, suppose you move into a brand new house and for convenience sake decide to keep lights on in most of the rooms 24 x 7. Next, you put in a few wide screens that keep on at the time so you can watch the same thing from a number of different rooms, throw in some other media, appliances etc. for some good measure and then check your electric bill. The more things you have on, more it's going to cost you. Most people turn on lights when they need them and so on with other appliances or media. These batteries obviously have a finite capacity and I'm guessing that the stats that Apple gathered were based on an out of a box unit with a basic configuration. Granted, nobody buys a phone to run it on standby but to use it to the the max.

I would still like to know what to realistically expect from the phone and I know these phones change with user configuration. I'm going to log some overnight run times and get back to you from time, for example last night I was measuring battery life on standby with this format:

32gb iPhone

Carrier: Sprint

WIFI: off

BluTh: Off

B/G Apps: (2) Settings, Phone

Notifications: Off

Activity: Stand by

Battery usage: -62% 8 hours.

Tonight I'm going to run iTunes non-stop to see what I get and another night I'll add subsequent apps to see if there are any power suckers amoung them. I think if a bunch of us run numbers under different circumstances we can get a idea of the field capacity of the battery. A thought would be to use the above usage format as a signature. Add to it as you see fit.

Jim

Hi

I was having the same problem and almost close to return the phone, I didn’t think it was an IOS 5 or an app problem because my wife's iPhone 4 was perfect with all the apps and with all the features ON, but just to be on the safe side I tested and imagine my surprise....... it was indeed an app's problem, i am not sure which one because i don’t use Facebook, but anyways this is what i did.

1) Do not connect the phone to the computer

2) Delete and erase the phone completely

3) Setup the phone with icloud (NO COMPUTER)

4) Do not install any app

5) Check your battery life

Mine its back to normal , but Apple need to address this problem soon , the beautiful of the phone are the apps so i hope they check and fix this issue fast.

Thanks.

I visited the Apple store yesterday and I mentioned that my phone would shut off automatically. The Apple Rep said that I was overloading things and that was the cause of it shutting down , freezing up, battery issues etc. He looked at it and I had numerous apps running in the back ground. He mentioned its much like a computer where you have a lot of windows open and your computer slows down. He said tap the home button twice and you'll see everything thats running in the background, touch and hold any app till it jiggles and then you'll see a red minus sign in the top left corner of each app, touch the minus sign and that will shut that app off. The more you have the more the battery runs down. So basically shut those so called windows down and you should see a much better battery life. Hope it works for you.

Hi

I have to disagree with you evidently more apps you have more battery you use... but

What happen if you don’t have any app running on the background and your battery its running down fast...?

That it’s the problem we are facing now ... that’s why i recommend check out your phones with no apps at all and check then app by app and see which one it’s giving the problem, because it seems that even if they are not open somehow they are using **** of a battery.....

And for Doogs63 pal if you phone shuts off that’s another story we are talking about the battery here please don’t mix the topic, if I were you i would returned the phone for a new one , I never in my life since the first iPhone never saw an iPhone shut off automatically like you are describing.

Thanks in advance.

Well Carlos178 pal, If your phone battery is running down with no apps then perhaps you should return your phone. I was just stating that my phone with all the apps running in the background that I was not aware of , made my phone shut down, plus drain my battery quickly. I was not changing the topic!.

Based on your Facebook comment, I deleted from my phone this morning. I think it has actually changed a lot.

I noticed yesterday that when I went to Settings>General>About>Diagnostics & Usage, and looked in the actual data that Facebook is dominating the list. Specifically, with a million awdd_YYYY-MM-DD... Files

I don't know what it's dong but it's awfully chatty about it on the logs. Makes me think they are trying to collect extra data, or the event manager for the app is too aggressive... Either way. It's gone now.

I've owned all models of the iPhone except the 3G, and up until now, the 4S was acting like the 3GS did when it first came out... Battery mysteriously draining ....

I've also noticed that since I deleted FB app, I'm not getting nearly any low memory notifications in this log file... That suggests that on top of the awdd files, Facebook has a memory leak in this version.

So far, I have removed the sim card, cleaned that and the sim receptor. Restored the phone. Tri turning notifications and such off and on. Deleted and restored iCloud.

None of those things appear to have fixed the battery issue as much as deleting Facebook app.

What's strange is that my iPhone 4 was OK Witt heap, and my iPad doesn't seem to bothered by the app. For some reason, the 4S and it dont appear to get along.

We'll see... I'm only half way through the day but so far, it appears to have helped.

I read this article on macworld and it helped a bit. That process monitor app is pretty cool.

http://www.macworld.com/article/163200/2011/10/troubleshoot_iphone4s_battery.htm l

Anyway I put my phone in restore mode and did a restore and set the phone up as a new phone. I then configured it will icloud and my mail acount and tweaked the settings the way I like them. I can defintely say that without any apps but everything else running as Apple would have you set it up, the battery life is great. The entire time I was tinkering around in my settings etc my phone stayed at 100%. At this point I'm thinking all the app devs just need to play catch up with their software. Doesn't really seem to be an iOS 5 issue, more of an iPhone 4S issue with regard to the apps in question. For now I'll be monitoring my CPU usage with the app mentioned in the article above as well as the diagnostic info while I add my apps. Any offenders are getting the boot until they are updated.

So far I've deleted the Facebook app and I went through my email accounts and turned off notes for all but the iCloud account.

It's made a huge positive difference, but it's still not quite up to snuff with the trusty iPhone 4 I had.

What worked for me was to turn off

Settings>Location Services>System Services> Settings Time Zone

Battery performance seems normal now.

Ran the battery down to zero. Did a complete reset, deleted Facebook and set it up with what you see below.

32gb iPhone Black

Carrier: Sprint

WIFI: off

BluTh: Off

B/G Apps: None

Pass word lock: off

Notifications: Off

Activity: Stand by

Battery Charge 100%/13-3/4 Hrs

Getting a little less than 14 hours with the phone doing practically nothing. Tonight I'll run Music till the battery runs out. I'll also try to measure the surface temp before and after.