iOS 6 iPhone 4s battery drain

Guys just to confirm... you guys who claim to have battery drain, are you also having problem with your inbound communication (call and text)? like text is delayed even in hours and calls cant make it through to you even when your phone shows strong signal? Mine is such, and i tried changing to a new "prepaid simcard" not postpaid and the results were... prepaid 100% before sleep, 96% in the morning, with my post paid simcard 100% to empty bat overnight. Can any one confirm if this is also true for you? I heard one office mate having the same inbound problem, then He just asked a "reallignment" from the customer service center of our carrier and the problem was fixed. Now if my theory is right..this might be the one causing the battery drain and inbound problem. I will go to my carrier service center asap and will try my line to be "realligned" though im not sure what it is or what is being relalligned, i guess its something about the carrier settings that is embeded within the simcard that is affecting my iphone's battery. Will keep you guys posted.

I think I fixed my problem and I wanted to share my troubleshooting.

First, I noticed that my usage and standby times were identical, the phone would be warm to the touch even whilst asleep. I bought a mophie juicepack and it would drain that battery by noon trying to keep the phone juiced up while the usage kept climbing.

After months of poor battery life, I decided to try and fix it systematically.

Troubleshooting.

First, charge battery to full so you get the usage and standby times in the settings.

Second, close all apps in multitasking bar, lock phone for 5 minutes. Is usage time still same as standby time? Then no current apps are rogue causing the os to run while asleep. It means it's a system application or daemon.

Third, delete one of your mail/calendar/contacts accounts. If all you have is iCloud, delete that account and remove all its data from your phone (don't worry, it's backed up online anyways). Lock phone for 5 miunutes. Is usage time still same as standby time? Then that account isn't causing the OS to run while asleep.

Fourth step, repeat step 3 for each of your accounts on your phone. Whether it be outlook, exchange, what have you. Once you have found that usage time does not equal standby time, you have found the offending service.

Fifth step. Once you've found the offending services, you can either remove it permanently, try re-adding it and see if the problem persists, or go onto the server side application/website to look for corrupt data.

In my case, the offending service was iCloud. When I deleted the account, the battery drain went away and I noticed usage and standby times separate. iCloud has many applications, and I needed to add them back one by one to see if the usage and standby times were equal. After hours of troubleshooting by adding each one, waiting, then checking usage, I found out that the calendar was causing the problem. Once I turned calendar syncing back on in iCloud, the phone heated up while asleep and battery drain resumed.

I decided to try and fix this because I wanted my iCloud calendar working. I went to icloud.com and logged into the calendar app. My partner send me appointments that I typically forget to reply to. So I had a whole bunch of gray appointments in my calendar. I went through and tried to reply to each one. Turns out there were a few of them (repeating calendar events from months back) that wouldn't propagate a response (reply or reject) to the event. It stayed gray. I had to find out which of my appointments were broken like that and delete all of them.

Once I did that, the hot iphone went away and usage returned to normal after turning calendar syncing back on. I guess the broken calendar appointments kept trying to sync do the device but would fail, leaving the device constantly attempting to complete the sync into perpetuity. Deleting the broken events server-side fixed the problem.

So that's my long journey, hope it helps some other poor soul.

My iPhone 5 has short battery life too. The problem started

On my 3GS when iOS 6 came out. But now that I am on the 5, I wonder if the higher rez videos are causing the battery problem. Will a large file or a higher resolution use more battery life than the same videos in smaller size?

Here's hoping for a solution!

John

if you disable the icalendar on Notification Center, the battery is much better

A very silly question at this point of time ? What exactly would qualify as a good battery backup ? Say once a battery is fully charged , how much of standby and usage time is every one getting by the time battery goes to 20 % ?

I have also noticed that battery drain is very fast when using camera ( without flash) . In fact even faster than GPS usage. Camera is not usually mentioned as a battery draining service in any of the battery saving tips. Is any one else having the same observation ?

One and a half to two days before you hit 20%.

Yes, GPS is an unusually high drain. If your using GPS a lot, then it's going to cut down time to needing charge. I hadn't noticed the camera, I use it, but only once in a while for one or two photos. I usually have a much better camera with me. JD

I know this isn't your question but I hope it helps. My friend just got a new S3 and it goes through battery real fast. He's also got a couple other devices, but instead of a backup battery I convinced him a simple USB power block is the way to go. I know I had a battery problem that did not make sense on my iphone for a while until I did a synch, full charge and hard reset. Another time it was just itunes U downloads going on in the background but hard to see from itunes U itself, I had to go to iTunes to see the list of pending downloads that were stuck and downloading almost randomly once I left the house. But that aside, a smartphone is going to go through some juice if you use it. A simple USB power stick from Amazon or wherever can charge your iPhone and have juice left over for your friend's S3 in a pinch. They'll likely have a charging cable on hand too if they use their phone a lot...

Finally i solved this issue once and forever

im a big fan of apple since first iphone were released , i like apple way how they do own hardware and software , but i noticed lately that they dont give a dam** care about all issues that related to their updates , i have iphone 4s and i tried all over the tricks to stop battery draining , while other people with differnt mobiles are satsfied with their phones , final solution was to sold the iphone and getting a new phone galaxy S4 , honestly im much more happy specialy that i found all the software i needed with android , no headache now and extra awsome features i got , and im very sure these features will never ever come to apple iphones , simply samsung is brilliant company and they do the phones just like the way that people love it , but apple do the phone just like the way that apple company only want it , many thanks to apple company for last years of good work , and sadly i had to move on after this last update .

Regards

Derick, appreciate the systematic testing you did and the thoughtful post!

Tol, u from Phil? My 4s kc is draining too fast. Like a full charged going down to less than 4-6 hours with minimal use. Wifi is on. Ios version is 6.1 Can u help me?

Hi guys , my iPhone 4S battery drains extremely fast , it was 90 before I slept and when I woke up , it's only 1% left ! Does anyone have any idea how to fix it ? I actually experienced the same

Problem last year but after I removed my sim out and reinserted , the battery was stabilise . The same problem

Is haunted me again and the way is not

Working anymore

:(

Shuyii wrote:

.... but after I removed my sim out and reinserted , the battery was stabilise ....

Thank you for posting that. It reminded me of a thread a long time ago where battery drain was traced to a dirty SIM, and cleaning it with a pencil eraser resolved the problem. Tried that on one of the iPhones on our work contract that was suffering rapid discharge and was notably warm to the touch, and it appears to have solved it. This iPhone was also showing the same useage and standby time up to that point, but is no longer.

You should let your boyfriend upgrade your phone for you.

I have the same problem for almost 2 months now with iphone 4s, IOS 6.1.3. Battery drain at about 20% per hour, and excess cellular data usage. I managed to stop the battery drain after reseting all phone settings twice. I have also cleared most of my calendar events. This helped to have a normal phone operation and battery that lasted for 2 days. This lasted for about 15 days. Yesterday it appeared again simply by adding a calendar event on the phone ! Dataaccessd process crashes repeatedly !

Hi, I had the same problem: Install IOS 7: It solved the drainage problem. IOS 7 supposedly has a much better power management for idle tasks. My iPhone 4s lasts for a day now with normal usage.