iOS 6 iPhone 4s battery drain

I was a late convert to iOS6 and tie the dramatic change in battery life to the installation, Very frustrating and agree with DanH and ChicagoBubba...what's the point of having an iPhone, regardless of version, if we have to 1) use trial and error to determine the culprit, 2) disable the very features that make having a smartphone attractive. I have a 4S and the battery life is barely 24 hours with everything that others have listed disabled, no use of Siri, etc. I used to keep a lot of it disabled before just to increase battery life anyway and would easily get 48plus hours.

Thanh for your advice ! Im going to try ur way. Hope this helps my phone 🙂

Battery for iPhone 4 and 4S should be replaced after one year according to Aware Bear Computers. That will replace iPhone batteries for $49:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/aware-bear-computers/apple-iphone-battery/prweb102 16824.htm

One shouldn't have to replace a battery after a year though....

I agree, and if they do need to be replaced after a year Apple should make them detatchable so customers can replace them themselves. This article said that in testing iphones, the battery has 80% function after 400 charges.

If people experiencing battery drainage are charging their phones two or three times a day it isn't going to take long for the battery to lose power even if their is a new update in the works to fix the problem. They have already lost some battery function just from having to charge so many times.

At this rate the battery will be at near 60% function toward the end of a two year contract assuming that one has to recharge only once per day: 700+ times.

Yet another reason not to go back to Apple. While the phones are nice, Apple has the consumer at their mercy... any phone I've ever had, I was always able to buy replacement batteries and swap them out myself, at a fraction on the cost. Even with mine, which is still under warranty, they tell me my battery is good, but is it? Or are they waiting until my warranty expires to tell me I need a new battery, so that I have to pay to get a new one? After all the lip service I got at the Apple store the other day, I don't trust a single one of them. People should NOT be having this many issues with an update, and should NOT be having to wait this long for a fix. Shame on Apple.

I have a 4s that I puchased new 2 months ago and it already had IOS 6 on it.....everything was fine until this past weekend...not sure what I did, but I want to bed at midnight with a fully charged phone, and it was drained to zero by 6am

something has to be running somewhere in order to just start draining this way.

Hello,

I waited until the battery gets to 0% and recharge to 100% twice, now is working better but not equal past performance.

I have an update that I also posted on another thread:

Before shutting down, it was losing 1% about every 5min or so....notifications were already turned off

1:00pm - complete shutdown

1:08pm - turned on phone: 73%

1:18pm - 73%

1:28pm - 73%

1:38pm - 73% NOTE: since it has been turned on, I've only woken up the phone to see the slide to open screen. I also noticed that the wifi has not connected yet and that the bluetooth status is up but off. there have been 2 words with friends game notifications

1:48pm - 73%

1:51pm - 73% NOTE: logged in, wifi connected, put back to sleep

2:01pm - 71% NOTE: wifi full strength...iphone literally 3ft from the wifi router

2:06pm - 70%

2:16pm - 68%

2:31pm - 64% NOTE: disconnected from my wifi network by forgetting it, but left wifi on

2:50pm - 59% NOTE: turned off wifi

3:02pm - 55% NOTE: eliminated all app processes, turned off email push

3:23pm - 55%

3:38pm - 54% NOTE: turned on wifi

3:48pm - 54%

4:03pm - 53%

4:45pm - 49% NOTE: includes 22 minute phone call

4:55pm - 47% NOTE: spent the last 5 minutes turning everything back on and set email to fetch every 15min

7:00pm - 100% NOTE: did a full charge... everything is turned 'on' with my email set to fetch every 15 minutes instead of push

7:50pm - 100% NOTE: did about 15 minutes of email stuff.....can't tell tell between push and fetch....guess at worst its a 15 minute lag.

I guess the conclusion for me is that email push using exchange server as well as google was draining my battery although it was not always like this.......I will research some more when I have the time.

Also sounds like there might be more than one cause to the symptom.....

as for the full charge/full drain/ full charge theory, I have an advanced degree in electrucal engineering and have worked on pawer management products for handheld devices, and don't see how the method of charging the battery can be of much significance, and if it is, it sounds like a horrible design scheme

Hi,

For what it's worth my degree is CIS, with years of professional experience troubleshooting network and PC issues, mostly on the software side though.

I've never had these issues with Apple products before and have less experience troubleshooting them. This is just personal perception and guesswork for me. I did not take advantage of the tools and dump logs made available more than a casual glance. I just changed carriers and upgraded my phone, half frustration and desperation, half lack of time to mess with this, laziness and been thinking of upgrading phone and service anyway.

So, I think the whole charge cycle advice is real, but software based. It seems to have helped many, and it did me. I also did a hard reset right after though. I took the shotgun approach and things improved greatly.

I think my issues were tied to buggy software and out of control cell data usage.

My first problem after upgrading was my battery life dropped 30-40% about, and dropped faster when using Safari, especially pages with heavy JavaScript and auto refreshes and key logging on input boxes it seemed.

After following almost all advice here, including discharge, recharge, reboot, things improved drastically.

Then I started using iTunes U. I tried to only download tutorials when on good wifi, put iTunes specific cell data to off, and would get messages when I left saying it could not download them over cell data when leaving wifi, so I thought that couldn't be it...

My phone heated like crazy and burned through my entire shared plan in days. I desperately had to turn cell data completely off, crippling my phone since the culprit ignored all iTunes settings to restrict to wifi. My phone wouldn't register the cell usage my carrier was telling me I was using up. Both phones, 4 and 5, different carriers seemed to behave the same shortly after trying to download iTunes U tutorials over wifi.

Also, after 6.01, iTunes Match seemed to suck battery and data even on playlists I had conscientiously downloaded from wifi first...

I look forward to Apple adding true battery and cell data logging on an app by app basis, and including their own apps in that user level of logging and control, so I'm hoping they do just that. It was great not needing those tools when things "just worked". It seems like they're trying to add some of the cloud and multitask features that made android popular, but forgot all the mess it caused with out of control data and battery before android added more user level monitoring tools and refinements.

Thanks netsoup and to everyone who posted ideas.

Bottom line...the problem with mine started after Apple Maps. The problem stopped when I stopped using Apple Maps one week ago (in fact I've never had better battery performance).

I will try an experiment today and use Apple Maps, and post the results tomorrow.

waiting for this to make a decision on whether to go for iOS6 on my 4S , now that google maps app is around

the iphone maps works fine for me...I traveled cross country and used it in san diego and in the bay area and it worked fine for me.....and I did not notice a battery drain......not saying it isn't someone elses problem, but it appears there is a common element of processes not stopping when they should

the one thing I can think of with the maps is whether someone uses the iphone map for directions and then does not end the trip when it is done....does it just sit there and keep the location stuff running?

my battery drain was all about the push mode on email....I changed it to fetch every 15 minutes, unplugged my phone at 6am fully charged, surfed the net for a half hour drinking coffee and had a half hour phone call, and it is currently at 93% which seems good to me.