Is iOS 6 draining iPhone 4 battery faster?

I noticed this since I went to IOS 6 too, that my battery is draining like 20x faster then normal. With IOS 5.1 a battery would take me thru 2 days with basic usage, now with IOS 6 its dead in less then a day. I have everything turned off and all and it's not helping the battery life much.

I regret updating cause IOS6 have been nothing but problems for users of older products. So how do i go back to 5.1?? Cause IOS 6 is horrible.

Yes I am having the same fast battery drain with my Ipod Touch and IOS 6

I take your point but - might as well switch it off altogether. The point here is that battery life was better before the upgrade. It is unacceptable to have to go through all these steps just because of an update. What is the point of all this functionality, if it has to be switched off.

Definitely having this problem. We have 3 iPhone 4 in the house and all of them are experiencing a significant change in the battery life since ios 6. We were at the Apple store yesterday to purchase something and asked the person assisting us if they have heard about a patch to address the issue. We were disappointed with the response...not very "Apple". He said we have only heard of battery improvement with ios 6. We felt this was either a canned response or he didn't know what he was talking about. After reviewing forums, chats, Google search etc., it is evident this is not only our issue. I am trying any and all of the suggestions posted to see if we can find a fix.

Sadly, my power issues continued, so Exchange was either not the true culprit, or maybe not the only one. Also, setting iCloud:Safari to Off didn't seem to help.

My current "fix" is to prevent Safari from running. Using the System Status app, I am able to see if/when the CPU usage is getting stuck above ~50%, and currently it happens every time I start Safari. If I close Safari from the task bar, then power cycle, my CPU usage goes back to ~5%.

As long as Safari is never started after a power cycle, it seems I can use Mail and other apps (including Chrome to browse the web). For now, I set Settings:General:Restrictions Safari -> Off. Unfortunately, it means links from email no longer start web browsing.

So after doing a reset as a new phone, I had better battery life, but not as good as 5.1.1 After more experimenting, I turned off everything that has tondo with passbook. I seem to be now getting much better battery life. I also have a few other things turned off that I really don't use, but I was still getting crappy battery life, before I turned off the passbook stuff. Anyway, for now, I am getting better battery life like I was getting in 5.1.1, which I felt was pretty decent.

Me too, having the same fast battery drain problem. Love the new features that come with iOS 6 EXCEPT for the battery drainage issue. How can one enjoy its updated full feature when one has to watch out for the battery level constantly? It's a big damper on the latest update. I tried all the suggestions here and possible fixes but I still get the same battery drainage problem. Hope Apple comes up with another software update to fix this issue...soon.

I followed someone's advice to disable Safari Settings|Restrictions|Enable|Safari Off

I also turned Facetime off.

Battery life returned to what it was before IOS6.

I have now turned Safari and Facetime back on and turned Restrictions off and battery seems to be holding up.

Apple must know what the problem is/was surely?

I upgraded the software to ios 6 on my iphone 4 and immedaitely noticed a rapid increase in battery drain. I came to this forum and read some threads, and tried the following suggestions, which WORKED for me. My battery life is back to what it was before the upgrade. IN fact, my battery life actually seems BETTER than what it was.

I did 2 things:

- restore with backup

- rebooted my phone (hold down the home and off button together until phone restarts.)

I'm not sure if it was either one of those two things or the combination of both, but it worked.

Yay!

PS, I had also tried turning off the new Passbook app but that alone did nothing to improve my battery life...

R.

I did something similar. I also upgraded my 4S to iOS 6 over the air, and the next day the battery was draining really fast. Yesterday I rebooted holding the home and off button together, then recharged to 100% overnight. I have not changed any of my settings, and this afternoon I have usage of 1 hour, 3 minutes and standby 7 hours 21 minutes. My battery is showing 85%, so I don't think I can grumble. This is better than it was before I upgraded, when I had to recharge every other day. At this rate I may only have to recharge every 3 days (depending, of course, on usage.

I know that when one gets a new iOS one plays around a bit to get to know it, but yesterday the drainage was happening in standby, really fast. Hopefully the present state of affairs will last.

This helped me:

- Full reset of the iPhone.

- Do not update OTA, connect it to your PC/Mac and update via iTunes.

In my case I am guessing that the culprit was the Exchange work account that syncs contacts/mail/calendar/reminders. I have still not activate the account again. It is the last thing I will do.

Almost all my apps have been installed without problems. Downloaded them all again from the Apple Store

I have now only 3-9% CPU use in standby. Before the reset it was 90-100%

This iPhone 4 was needing a full reset anyways, I got it when they came out for something like 2 years ago and had never reseted it.

I only did this an hour and half ago so it could be coincidence. My phone when Idle hasn't drained at all but using it still drains rapidly. Earlier it was draining fast idle or in use.

Settings - Privacy - Location Services - System Services (very bottom) - Setting Time Zone. Turn that off.

Good luck

iPhone 4GS iOS 6 installed on Thursday but the battery drain only started today around 12:30CST.

I turned off traffic in maps then i did a soft reset yesterday (hold down power and home button) battery life was back to normal. This morning it was fine then used find friend and maps for about 5 mins and lost about 10% of battery life just done a soft reset again will let you know if it works later today.

I have noticed the same thing. Primarily, when I leave the phone idle with no apps running in background I get fairly good battery life. However, the moment I use it it starts to drain rapidly. I hate this because it makes me feel like not using my phone.

I have gone through all the tips here and shut down anything that could drain the battery. Most of these things were turned off in iOS5 already, iOS 6 turned some back on and more..

I have done the reboots, no apps running and my battery goes down to 65% in 4 hours with no usage. Just sitting in my pocket. I have an iPhone 4S that was in perfect working order with OK battery drain before the update to iOS6.

Apple - please come with a patch? How hard is it to spot these problems before rolling out an update...