Q: Is iOS 6 draining iPhone 4 battery faster?

I downloaded IOS 6.1 this week. Biggest mistake I have ever made.  My battery life is almost nil.  It lasts for not more than 3 hours, with me barely using the phone or any apps.  I called Apple Tech support today and after several hours of backing up and restoring, my battery went from 92% to 58% in about 2 hours.  In fact, it went from 62% to 58% while I was reading your post.  I didn't make a single phone call during the time I was rapidlly losing battery.  As far as I can surmise from reading all of these posts, and  talking to friends is that the solution is to RESTORE the phone to an earlier operating system.  FORGET about IOS 6.1!  This is absurd.  Apple has said they'll replace the battery if the problem persists, but I don't believe that's the solution.    I have everything that could run in the background turned off - no location based iApps, no messaging, no traffic.... DISASTER.

I too an a fool and trusted Apple.  I downloaded IOS 6.1 on my 3 week old iphone 4 this past Friday.  My battery was lasting about a day and a half up to that point.  It now lasts about 6 hours from 100% to 0% and I am a light user.  My data usage sky-rocketed.  I have a 300 meg data plan.  By Friday I had used 200 meg mostly from my itunes download when I first got the phone.  By today (Sunday) I went over my plan to 368 meg.  I have not used my phone at all today, left it home connected to my computer.  What the **** Apple?  You just cost me another $20 on my data plan for something I don't even know what for.  Fix this or this is my last Apple product.

I am trying it. I think Apple owes everyone here an appoogy and me $20 for driving my data usage over the limit.  Fingers crossed.

My iphone 4battrey problem is physical...battrey goes fat...i replaced and he gave me 2days and a half with data and icloud on and upgraded to 6.1 and incresed to 3days...and don't use data alone...

It made my battery so much better on my Iphone5. Not a mistake for me

Perhaps the 6.1 IOS is designed to work on the iPhone 5.  However, it doesn't work on the iPhone 4 without killing the battery.  I followed some of this online advice, like turning off all sorts of notifications, and I'm charging the battery to 100% again.  If it doesn't make it through the day tomorrow with light usage, I am going to downgrade to the prior IOS.  I wasn't having any problems with that.

I am happy to report that the suggestion to delete all email accounts, shut down the iphone, then restart has worked.  I let it run for 25 minutes with 0 degrade in the battery, whereas just early today that would have been a 5% decrease in battery life.  I added my hotmail account and 20 minutes later it is still at 100%.  I have two more email accounts to add but my initial results are promissing.  So, it looks like IOS 6.1 causes a bug in the email programs to keep retrieving email or keep sending email or something that drained the battery and added over 170 meg to my usage in just 2 days. 

Good luck.  Also, I had all icloud options turned off.

Hi every one i toke my iphone to apple store they restore my iphone but still the same. My  suggestion is go and buy another phone. Thank you

Same pb.

since ios 6, I installed a few weeks ago and now with 6.01,  my 4S energy is consummed almost twice as fast as before.

Even with 40% remaining at 11pm, it shuts off before the morning.

I always used it (and a 3gs before) as alarm clock, but now this is quite impossible if I don't load it 100% at evening...

I'm affraid this would lead to battery tiring phenomena.

My old 3gs wich is 5 y old still has its original battery and works right (my son), so I'm expecting the same for the  4S....

Since IO6.1 upgrade battery life DETERIORATED SUBSTANTIALLY. Does have latest iphone and operating system. Never had any issues till now.

Phone is new and was working fine, now after 100% chage dead couple hours later with little/no use

Several work colleagues of mine are also having the same issue

Who else has IO6.1 battery issue after upgrading ?

I don't know what I did that is different, but I am getting better battery life with iOS 6.1 on my iPhone 4S (32 GB model) than I did with 6.0.1 which wasn't that bad.

I did the update through iTunes because most of the reports I have read from people who are having problems did their update OTA.

I did a full sync to make sure all apps were downloaded to iTunes. I followed this up with a full manual back up to iTunes.

I then shut down all apps in the multitasking tray and restarted my phone, Home button and Power button held down simultaneously until the Apple logo appeared and the phone restarted.  I double checked the multitasking drawer and shut down the apps that reappeared here and restarted my phone again.  This time the apps were gone from the drawer.

I plugged my phone into my computer and connected it to iTunes and ran the update.  It took about 20 minutes to finish but I had no problems during the process.  I also always leave my PC alone to do nothing but update my phone, I just go get coffee and watch TV while waiting. 

Once it was done I went through the start up process and once that was done my phone was updated and all my apps, photos, media, etc. was still there, none of my home screens had been rearranged.  It was just my phone with iOS 6.1 running.

I watch the battery percentage and it stayed at 100% for about an hour.  I really didn't do anything with my phone during that hour other than tap the Home button to see what the percentage was  just to see if anything was going on with the battery life.

After an hour of this the percentage dropped to 99%.  I then started using my phone normally and the battery was fine.  In fact it seems to work better than ever.  I surf a lot, check mail about every hour or so, play games, look up lots of stuf on IMDB, and listen to lots of music. 

So far I am very pleased with my phone on iOS 6.1.  I may try turing on some of the things I had off in the past to see what happens. 

I was comfortable enough with iOS 6.1 on my phone that I also updated my iPad 2, 32 GB WiFi + 3G and it also is running fine and gets great battery life.  I followed the same routine with my iPad update that I did with my phone.

Hey all--I am reporting back after the fixes I posted in my other message. <<SEE BELOW>>

1) I turned Limit Ad Tracking on (Settings>About>Advertising> Turn it to ON)

2) I disabled Safari in the Restrictions menu in settings, and in iCloud backup.

3) I turned off Auto iCLoud Backup as well

4) I still have on Location Services > Find my iPhone turned on

I have had much success over the last few days and my battery actually lasted several days without a charge.

So the suggestions I posted seem to be working.

All,

I am not sure this will help or not, but for those who still have the issue, can you do the following and report back if this helps or not? Thanks...

1. double press the home botton. You should get at the bottom of your screen the programs that are currently running on the iphone.

2. Start deleting all that you don't need. put your finger on any icon for 2 seconds and you will then see the minus sign inside a circle on those icons and the icons start dancing! Delete all icons you don't need, especially the ones that require the iphone to communicate with the internet. My experience says this will not impact the functionality of the iphone. Having the applications in the memory make it faster to bring up. for example, if you delete the mail from the phone's memory, you will still get email notification once new email arrives, but when you try to see that email, it will take longer to load the email client into memory.

3. once done, hit the home botton again and you are good to go.

4. Please report back if this helps or not.

Ahmed

Problem Solved !!!!

I have an iphone 4 and a ipad 2, I just recently loaded ios 6 and started experiencing major battery drain.  I'm an average user of my phone, text and  internet.  I use to go all day from 7am to 8 pm and still have 30-40 % left.  After ios 6  was loaded I went from 7 am to 11 am and was down to 0%.  I quickly updated to 6.1 to no avail.  I called support and the only suggestion was to do a factory reset back to a new phone. Oh yea, they also did a diagnostic via text message and said my bettery was fine.  I did not want to do a factory restore so I did lots of research and here is what I found. 

http://snnyc.com/2012/12/iphone-data-leak/

It was my exchange account depleting my battery.  I took my exchange account off my iphone and my ipad then set it back up.  Presto!!! Problem resolved, it's 5 pm and I still have about 70% left. 

Now, before I found this website I did all the battery saving tricks which I believe actually helped extend my battery life.  You might want to do all these like turning off things you are NOT USING like push accounts, notifications, apps running or anything and everything you don't need or use.

Hope this works for you.

Thanks for the tip--BTW, I have Exchange for work as well but I only use the calendaring and NOT e-mail.

Do you think the data leak would affect it this way as well (as opposed to using mail and cal)?