Is iOS 6 draining iPhone 4 battery faster?

I am not sure what happened recently, but where I thought it was OK, it has gone much worse now. I have not changed anything recently, upgraded to 6.0.1 a few weeks ago, but it seems that since 10 days or so I am back to the same draining as when ios6 was launched. Any same experiences ?

It's been weeks since finding a single switch that has stopped my overheating and rapid battery drain. Some of you may benefit as well.

First...I'm not using Facebook or Twitter "instant accessibility" features on my iPhone 4...I just don't use these Social Engineering things...frankly, I'm too busy in the physical world.

Second...I choose not to have data "pushed" to my device. I'm happy opening mail and letting it then retrieve mail from the server (as an example push activity). Otherwise, I might be walking into people while constantly reacting to the ping of a new email arriving.

OK...the fix.

Go to General...iCloud...Safari. Turn it off.

That's it. My problem with overheating and battery drain was (I suspect) an existing bug in the bookmark sync activity that Safari and iCloud perform. Happens under iOS 6 and 6.0.1. Now, it's been several weeks and my almost 2 year old iPhone 4 battery behaves just like it did before jumping up to iOS 6! I can go 3-4 days on a single overnight re-charge.

Real easy solution, w. keeping all apps etc.

My brother in law, an IT guy, said basically the problem was some item in the sync process got hung up. First, Back up your phone, on computer or iCloud just in case (sync is NOT backing up).

Delete all your mail, exchange, accounts, turn off phone or ipad for a few minutes, turn it on and add them back.

Wiping and restoring does not work. Wiping and reinstalling new iOS clean copy does not work. It's in an account so anything with restore adds the problem back. Delete the email accounts.

Took 15 min. Good as gold. No heat problems, battery life normal, all apps are there--as they never were changed.

I have a 4 iPhone and iPad 3. Did it on both.

Upgraded to iOS 6. iPhone 4S battery drained much faster. Did not need to do a restore. Turned off most iCloud items (only left Find My iPhone). Followed instructions above to turn off all unused location and other services. Removed the Facebook app. Podcasts app, and the Passbook app. Left my push business e-mail account alone. Recalibrated the battery (drain to zero and fully recharge). Seems to be back to normal.

Great! Turn off everything that makes a smart phone smart, experiment with every facet of iOS, and jump through burning hoops. Ridiculous, people. I haven't seen one solution that works even close to 100% of the time. We shouldn't have to do any of this. It's Apple's job to provide a product that works.

I have the same problem. My Iphone 4 worked fine with ios 5, when I got ios 6 the battery drains very very quick.

I'm very sad.

Please Apple make a solution for this. Or allows us back to ios 5.

Thanks for reading.

Come on Apple.. We should have a fix by now. And no, I'm not upgrading my phone.. This will be my last apple product I purchase if this software bug is not addressed. 29 pages of the same problem and complaints- it's obviously a software upgrade issue. Please put those brains together and fix your product. I don't feel turing off features that worked perfectly fine before the upgrade is a reasonable process. Smart phones should be smart. None of us bought an iPhone so we could turn everything off and use it as a paper weight.

My battery seems to drain at 2% per minute. Slower when connected to wifi. I've been powering down at night (which *****) but occasionally, it's been powering up by itself and I'm waking up to 60% (from 100%) when I go to use it. It might run to 30% (almost instantly) then shut itself off before I get any kind of warning. The extra kicker- when I plug it back in to charge, the meter reads 42%. ***?? I even have screenshots showing the alarming rate of battery depletion. Before iOS 6, this phone actually worked. No complaints on battery life. But after the upgrade, this phone is practically unusable. Any of us that have been long term Mac users know that upgrades eventually bog down older models to the point where eventually you'll need to upgrade to a current model but this is ridiculous.

I live off-grid. Don't have power all day long. Need a phone that I can charge nightly and it will perform the next day. We have horrible cell coverage too so even if I have battery, I rarely have coverage. Frustrating!!

Apple, please dig into those DEEP pockets of yours and fix this problem for your loyal users (that have made your pockets so deep)...

I see a new update 6.0.2.

Although it doesnt say anything about overheating, but you can still update to it.

Shame on Apple for not resolving this issue, this thread is open for more than 3 months.

Is this the start of end of Apple?

So I postponed updating my iPhone for a couple of months because of all the reports; but since I work in the high tech industry it's essential that I have the latest updates for all my gadgets. So I decided to take the risk and check this out for myself.

After updating my Verizon iPhone 4s from iOS 5.1.1 to 6.0.1, I have not encountered any battery issues:

• I can go 10 - 12 hours without a charge and battery life is at 70 - 80%
• Everything is enabled:
  • Push Notifications
  • MS Exchange
  • Calendars are synced
  • email accounts (Yahoo, Gmail, Exchange)
  • games, facebook, magazines, books, web, wi-fi, everything...

I have had iOS 6.1.1 on my iPhone 4s for more than a week and it has not impacted my battery at all; it's pretty cool that I get Panorama and Passbook too 🙂

Here was my update steps / experience:

1. Connected iPhone 4s (Verizon) to 2012 Mac Pro, 10.7.5 using iTunes 11.0.1
2. Backed up iPhone
3. Hit the update button (it took 5 minutes for the initial part of the update to complete on iTunes)
4. The phone then shut down and displayed the "Connect to iTunes" screen (if you haven't seen it, looks like this - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3860510?start=0&tstart=0)
5. Then a firmware progress bar appeared (the firmware upgrade took 5 minutes)
6. Phone then powered up and showed the lock screen
7. Unlocked phone and hoped for the best

Results:

Total update time - 10+ minutes; NO battery drainage after more than week

I also updated my iPad (3rd gen) and that took 20-25 minutes to update with the same steps above.

I'm wondering how many folks here updated their iPhone without a computer / iTunes connection? Maybe that has nothing to do with it; but thought I'd share that I'm not seeing any battery issues with the upgrade path I took.

Good luck!

FRanquito, I'm glad you are enjoying iOS 6 to the max it sounds like. I recently had to replace my original 4s because of some hardware/ software malfunctions and extreme battery drainage which I think was due to a faulty backup restore that I was trying to due to unlock my phone. Anyways my original 4s had a battery that ran like a champ. All day for at least 10 hours on a single charge. Started at 100% around 9am and by 2 am the next day it would finally be down to about 10%.

WHat I want to know on your post is when you say you can go 10+ hours on a single charge and be at 70% still. I am surprised you can go for that many hours and have only dropped 30%??! Do you mean you started with a 70% charge or that you actually still had 70% left after 10+ hours of use?

WOd like to know which of those it means. Tha is and enjoy iOS 6. It's got some neat stuff going on. Btw my new 4s drops about 10%/hour or more depending on what I am using the phone for. Not great in my opinion.

I had some problems with the battery, then I updated to iOS 6. We close all settings and drains faster than ever before. It is even possible to go back to iOS 5?

WHat I want to know on your post is when you say you can go 10+ hours on a single charge and be at 70% still. I am surprised you can go for that many hours and have only dropped 30%??! Do you mean you started with a 70% charge or that you actually still had 70% left after 10+ hours of use?

Indeed, when I leave for work in the morning and unplug the iPhone from the charger (which is at 100%), by the time I get home (8-10 hours) the battery dropped only 30% without charging it at work.

Of course, I probably don't use my iPhone as much as the average user does. I think I only use my phone about 1-2 hrs hours total time. That is, most of the time the iPhone is in sleep mode.

My iphone 4s is also draining and getting hotter ......just like that....its getting discharged completely really very very fast in about 8 hours while in stand by.....i can't use a mobile with that charging....

I have updated to ios6 before 2 months...

It worked fine...what I observed was recently my iphone got completely discharged to 0%...from then it's getting discharged very fastly..please help me I have tried deleting the calender entries,,,,mail accounts...nothing worked...

please help...

I had the same problem with iOS 6 on an iPhone 4. Battery drained in hours and phone very hot...

Went to Apple support who suggested resetting as a new phone and then rebuild the apps etc.

This worked ! Also, discharge the battery completely and then recharge overnight. This calibrates the battery.

I now only have to re-charge every third day ( not a particularly heavy user). Also the phone does not get hot anymore !!

Hi,

I had the same problem when I upgraded my I phone 4 to ios6 . Battery was draining power to 0 after 4 hours, and I need it for business. However, I am happy to say I have solved the problem current , not charged phone since 4 pm yesterday and it is sitting at 42 % charge . How?, I switched off automatic I - cloud backups , deleted the latest mobile facebook app, switched off find my phone app and now manually retrieve e-mails ie no longer request automatic push every 30 minutes, I also switched off automatic send of diagnostics and usage ...all thanks to ideas I found via this support community.

Not ideal as why launch products that cannot function properly . I will be moving to an alternative supplier when it is time to upgrade....windows android . Sad as I was a convert to the easy to use operating system that apple provides, but for my work, I have lost confidence and detest losing features on my phone....

Give these ideas a go