Q: iOS 5.0.1 - Made my iPhone 4S battery performance worse!

I'm new to this discussion board, so bare with me. I own a iPhone 4s also. I too upgrade to iOS 5.1. I was one of the lucky ones that had no real battery issues. Well until I up graded to 5.1.  My battery drained extremely fast and I really don't use mine intensely like others.

After hours of research and testi g on my own phone, I believe I have found the solution to the battery drain.

So far, after utilizing the steps I will outline below, my phone has held fast and stopped draining.

Here we go:

go to

SETTINGS,

GENERAL,

scroll to bottom and press RESET.

THAN PRESS ( and this is important) PRESS RESET ALL SETTINGS

( do not press ERASE ALL CONTENT and SETTINGS) !

Pressing RESET ALL SETTING will NOT delete or erase any apps, photos, videos ect.

What it will do is reset your phone back to FACTOR SETTINGS and treat your phone as a newly programmed phone.

You will NOT loose your cellular carriers connection either.

After you have pressed RESET ALL SETTINGS, the phone will cycle through it's resets ( ie. Switch off, display apple logo and progress bar, shut down again, show apple logo and another progress bar and than shut down. ( patiences is important here. It takes a few minutes)

After all this turn phone back on. If you had a custom background screen and lock screen, they will be gone but fear not. Go to SETTINGS, WALLPAPER and to your photos and change it back.

You will also have to enter in your custom settings again ie. Reenter password for WiFi and other custom changes you did to the phone originally.

NOW here's the last step after you have added back your custom changes: go to your physical home button at bottom of phone and DOUBLE CLICK to bring up short cut apps you use the most, HOLD down on one of the short cut apps to get them to wobble and show minus sign and DELETE every one of them. AGAIN...DELETE shortcut apps not actual app.

This function that keeps your most used apps available for instant access, actually drains your battery considerable. It actually keeps them active and not dormant.

Personally I think they need to get rid of that function.

My battery life held fast now. Usually at 100% it would have drained almost 30% or more over a short time but now it really hasn't moved.

Only pain is that you will have to remember to delete these shortcuts more often.

Good luck. Hope this helps

I think it's in your heads... And you just love to complain. You also probably don't know to shut your apps off by triple clicking and leave them running all the time, yet wonder why the battery drains. That or you ruined your phones from the start by not properly following the start up charges. Ie. draining it completely then allowing it to charge 100% uninterrupted. I've had not 1 issue and it's weird you all do. You expect a miracle phone. I'm just amazed. Try a droid for a week if you want to see what true battery issues are like. You get about a hour talk time per charge.

Hi,

Can anyone confirm if my battery is ok.

iPhone 4s

ios 5.0.1

Followed your instructions and completed a full reset of all settings.

Battery @ 1%

Standby: 1 Day 3 Hours

Usage:  5 Hours 23 Mins

Used wifi for approx 30mins at Home.

All apps closed after used from Multitask.

iPhone used for Calls, iMessage, Text, Temple Run, Facebook, Safari, iPod (1 1/2 Hours)

All unused locations OFF.

All unused notification OFF.

iCloud: OFF

Sound:  60%

Brightness:  50%

Mail: FETCH MANUALLY

Facetime/iMessage:  ON

Any comments/advice will be greatly appreciated.

Go Hard Jersey:

Uhm, your wrong, but thanks for the insight. There's a lot of issue, that is not in anyones head. I've think I've managed to resolve my iphone battery issues, but by careful observation and application of some basics.

1. Reset absolutely helps. Why ? Likely some residual app stuff, who knows, but helped. That level of software tech we will never be 'privvy' to unless an insider at Apple corp.

2. Awareness. If you are in an area with WiFi, and poor 3G (like at my home), turn WiFi ON so your updates and email and everything run through WiFI. If not, you will strain on 3G, and lessen battery life a LOT.

3. Leave bluetooth of if not using it. Thats basically all I really toggle, is bluetooth. I leave WiFi on, since at my office, I'm plugged in and don't care. When at home, it then picks up WiFi automatically so I don't 'forget' to turn on WiFi in my p[oor 3G area. I turb off 'Notification' for WiFi networks. On the road, that will pop up every 100 yards with a new netwok name.

As far as Droid's go, you speak in general terms, which isn't fair to Droids or any other phone. (I've owned three, liked em', but Love my 4s). Regarding battery life, I don't think any smart phone on the market even touches the battery life of the Droid RAZR Max.

So next time you post, back up or otherwise qualify your statements so it's worth using my precious 4S battery life on to read.

Lol

Hi K1NG,

May have forgotten to add this to my above help reply. Sorry. After you have done all of the steps I outlined in my reply, let your battery run completely down to where it shuts off, than recharge it completely.

That will definitely help along with the above steps. So far my battery is at 95% and that's after using it a tiny bit after I wrote the reply. I've now seen a vast improvement. Good luck.

I'm pretty bummed...against my better judgement I upgraded to 5.1 last night.....went to bed @100%. All apps, wi fi etc turned off...and 6 hours later down 16% that sure seems like a lot for doing nothing but being on stand by......

Huge mistake......I hope they do fix this soon...

For anyone new to the thread be sure to go through these steps to address the battery after updating to iOS 5.0.1:

1. Reset all settings (settings app-> general-> reset)

2 a. Go through initial setup steps (lang, wifi, siri, enable location, etc) and choose setup as new phone (don't worry your apps, data, contacts, mail will still be there). Do NOT restore from iCloud or iTunes (It can copy back corrupt settings)

2 b. If you do not get the complete new setup screen with language setup and setup as new phone or restore from iTune/iCloud backup, be sure to go back to #1 and reset all settings again (it should happen the second time)

3. Turn off system location services timezone and iAd (settings -> location services -> system services)

4. Fully discharge battery (until you get the spinning wheel and it shuts off)

5. Fully recharge battery (overnight if possible)

In my experience this improves the Standby battery drain issue significantly in most cases.  It reduces drain from 2-4% or more per hr to 0.5% or less. It has worked for many, many users now. If it does not work after a few try's you may have a real battery or hardware issue and should contact Apple.  Good Luck!

You can check details on my thread along with numerous successes here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3484755

I've already done things very similar to this, including a full restore, but anything's worth a try at this point.  What I've seen is that I do various things, and it looks good for up to a day.  Then later the same day, or the next day, things fall apart, and battery usage goes back to the dark side.  This is always accompanied by the reappearance of the 30-50% CPU usage spikes and other associated bursty CPU activity, instead of the nice, level 11-15% CPU usage that I see when things are working right.  Even though I have a CPU process list, that apparently is not helping me associate the responsible process with thet weird pattern of CPU activity.

I've seen these spikes return with location services and iCloud off, as well as my gmail account turned off.  Not very many apps left, also.  So what's causing the spikes and battery usage?  Apple could figure this out if they were so motivated.  Someone else mentioned that Apple was going to monitor their phone, I have some hopes that person will come back here with some information on the cause and real solutions.

Anyways, I've followed davidch's instructions above, and hope that this one sticks, I'm ready for a solution.  Right now I have location services and iCloud still turned off, just because it simplifies getting from effect to cause.  Even though neither of them is apparently directly associated with the spikes, since the spikes come back when they are off.

I was contacted by Apple. I had communicated to them directly on their site, but they also referenced my posts here. The gentleman with whom I spoke took the time to ask a lot of questions. He was not at all dismissive. While I appreciated general suggestions about battery conservation, he got it and seemed to believe that the poor performance turned on a dime following the installation of 5.1. Besides, he asked about my battery level at the start of out call and it declined about 10% by the end of our call. They installed an app to monitor my battery performance and will check with me at the end of the week. I did feel they were concerned and wanted to help find a solution. Hopefully I can report back some good news.

I too had the app installed to monitor my battery issues on my iPad and iPhone.  Basically they decided they were where they expect them to be.  How can they be where they expect them to be when they got dramatically worse after installing 5.1?  Not at all happy.  And no it is not in my head. I can watch the battery numbers lower as I use either device. I guess Apple is denying there is a problem again like the infamous antennae.

I'm *really* sorry to hear that...but what's a few users to a multi-billion dollar company?

Kind of makes one a little cynical.  I guess that the visibility of this issue needs to be raised.

I had an appointment at the genius bar today. Told them that my battery percent jumps around and my battery went bad after the 5.1 update. Told them I've done 2 clean installs and still seeing problems.

They replaced my 4s battery and told me I could replace the phone of I keep havin issues. No apple care just through warranty.

Have tried this and it seems to do the trick. Installed my iPhone as a new one with iTunes a couple of days ago. I did NOT restore my backup. I kept all settings the same as before 5.1 (location-services on, iCloud on, gmail as Exchange with push etc.) and drained my battery till the phone turned off. After a full recharge at night I saw better battery performance the next day (yesterday) and today (after the second charging cycle) it's even better. It's the end of my workday and got almost half of a battery left while it was a very busy day on the phone (and lots of playtime on it - video, facebook, games). These are pre-5.1 values for me so I'm very sattisfied.

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Resume; restore it/ update it with iTunes and let it drain completely before recharging. Within 2 days all should be fine.    

Since having my battery changed by apple and having 100% charge with EVERYTHING I could think of turned on, turned on, this is my battery usage.

WAY better than before. For the usage I did lots of internet browsing 3g and wifi, using multitasking, spotlight on, navigation, netflix, screen brightness on half, all notifications and icloud on.

Definetly reccomend having them swap out your battery. All 4s are still on warranty and is free to do. Just be sure to have done factory reset at least before going in and let them know your battery meter jumps around a lot.

I had the same problems described here. What I did.

- Disabled all other iCloud -features except photo stream (that is the only feature I have found worth using in iCould). Especially "Find My iPhone", which I think is the biggest problem.

- Turned Location Services off

- Rebooted

Now the battery in my iPhone4S lasts approx. 4 days with very light usage. When I'm not using the phone the Usage -counter increases about 30min/day, instead of 2-3h/day.

I think the biggest power drainer is the "Find My iPhone" -feature. It keeps bringing the phone out of sleep mode constantly, uses the gps to find the location and then sends the data to the network. It is also a feature that the 4.* -version didn't have as default.