Why is my iPhone5 battery draining so fast, worse than my iphone4?

update: under the iCloud settings I have turned the Passbook to off and my battery is now lasting under 30% for a long time for a slow % drop. Try that and see if that makes a difference! good luck!

Charged last evening to 100%. Left by bedside unplugged. Woke up, 99%. Not too bad. Was connected to wi-fi overnight. Left house to drive girlfriend to work. In 20 minutes driving, NO PHONE USE WHATSOEVER other than normal email push and stuff, it lost 6%...

How is that possible

Same for me. Started the day at 100%, and now am at 58%. Have used some browsing, siri, texting, emails for <1.5 hours. Where is the 8 hours of promised time on LTE usage?!?!

I'm sure there is just a SW problem like with the past few releases but so annoying!

Okay here's some stats for everyone:

Time Since Last Full Charge:

Usage: 2 Hours, 21 Minutes

Standby: 8 Hours, 0 Minutes

My battery % meter is on 76%. I'd say not bad, especially considering my usage has been heavy web browsing, texting, and emailing.

I've cycled my battery 3 times (completely dead to completely charged). My battery usage since last full charge is blank. It shows no information at all. I'm sitting at 41%, I mean 40%, wait its 39%...... And now 38%.... Just from typing this. Hopefully Apple figures out something soon. This is ridiculous. 37%.....

^^^I'd almost recommend you to just do a full reset and restore from scratch, just to test if it may be something with a previous backup. Naturally, back it up, first. ;)

OK - I have figured out "my" issue - and this may be yours too. With the advent of iCloud backups many of us no longer plug in to itunes to sync, back up and even restore. I realized it would take forever to move over a huge photo library but other than that thought everything else would restore overnight. I used iTunes to sync just my photo library and then iCloud to restore the rest of the phone. Last night I happened to be looking at my iCloud preferances and saw that the phone was still "restoring" (2 days after purchase) - as best as I could tell, everything that mattered had already been restored so I killed the process, unplugged the phone and went to bed.

Battery was still at 100% (7 hours later) and is currently 98% - so for now it appears I am on normal usage.

>Settings

>iCloud

>Storage & Backup

Scroll to the bottom - where "Back up Now" normally is listed . . . see if it says "resstoring"

I just replied to a different post on the same subject but thought it might be useful to cross pollenate.

Previously posted in

Poor Battery Life iPhone 5 9/24/2012:

----------------------

I have some interesting observations to share with everyone.

First, my wife and I purchased 2 iPhone 5's. But because she had to go on a knitting retreat all she had was a factory iPhone 5 to use. I on the other hand had an entire weekend to restore my almost 700 apps on my iPhone 5 from an iPhone 4 backup. All went fine on the restore.

I too began to notice the terrible battery lasting conditions. But when my wife came home last night I asked her if she saw any battery issues. She replied no. Hmmm

Some time ago I obtained a memory utility called PKiller. It basically is a "process killer" which kills apps while keeping required software intact in memory. To my amazement I discovered there were a ton of open applications running in the background. AND because the iPhone 5 has doubled the amount of available RAM (1 gig) there were way more apps running than with my iPhone 4. I used the "feature" of killing the background apps from within the PKiller app and then monitored the battery.

Well, what do you know boys and girls...... The level of battery usage dropped dramatically. After charging the iPhone 5 all night (with no apps running in the background) I then disconnected the charging cable at 7 am this morning and rechecked the battery level at 9am. It had only dropped "ONE" percent. This was a vast improvement from yesterday.

So, I am now starting to conclude that it is the sheer number of multi-tasking applications running in the background which is causing the battery problem we are all observing. If you were not lucky enough to get PKiller when it was in the App store when it first came out you will notice it is not there anymore. It was itself killed by Apple soon after it was put up in the store. Why? because of that "feature" which kills apps. Apple wants you to do this manually by double clicking the home button to show the list of apps running in the background and then double clicking on an app to get them to wiggle. You can then kill all of them one at a time.

Granted, this is a safer way of doing it but Apple could be nicer (much nicer) if there was an option just to kill all background apps with one stroke of a slider or something. I had something over a hundred apps running when I had the battery problem. One thing for those who still have PKiller, even if you do kill the apps from within PKiller you would still see a fantom list still there when you double click the home button. That also could have been the reason why Apple withdrew the PKiller app from the app store.

SO.......... it might be useful if a number of people use the manual approach to killing those apps which access the Internet or do other background intensive activities and see if your battery life increases dramatically like mine did. It does make sense. But understand, by killing those apps will also stop the usefulness of those apps with no notifications etc. (which is the reason they were still running in the background)

Sorry for the long post, but wanted to be fully clear about what my observations were and the results I was having. I am looking forward to responses to this idea. Also, has anyone actually found a battery management program which actually does something useful? None I have seen really do.

Apple, you people have done a fantastic, no ultra fantastic job with the iPhone 5 and with iOS 6. I bow to thee (as usual) and I understand there will be things that will come up after both a hardware and system software upgrade. But this problem has been with us for many years. Please look into the multi-tasking / manual killing of apps situation. With the sheer doubling of RAM on the iPhone 5 we now, more than ever, need some tools to manage our running apps. They take more battery to run especially if they are Internet/bluetooth/gps intensive in the background. We all truly appreciate what you do but I believe it is time to focus on this.

Once we have some level of consensus and agreement that this helps, maybe a bunch of people would take the time to share this info with Apple. My fingers are hurting. (giggle)

Cheers

Rees Roberts

Racine, WI

smanchester wrote:

OK - I have figured out "my" issue - and this may be yours too. With the advent of iCloud backups many of us no longer plug in to itunes to sync, back up and even restore.

Seems like the iCloud Backup should not affect battery run time.

Just below where you turn on "iCloud Backup", it states in text:

Automatically back up your camera roll, accounts, documents, and setting when the iPhone is plugged in, locked, and connected to Wi-Fi.

So the backup should NOT run when on battery.

Actually, iCloud backup will run on battery if you manual activate it, OR restore from a backup via the setup process.

I have 4S and ever since upgrading my battery level has degraded badly ... wasn't so bad on ios 5...now on ios 6 i dont have wi-fi and my battery is toast!

Steve Jobs ... you are being missed!!! 😟

beeswax84, do a "Reset Network Settings", and I that don't work do a "Reset All Settings".

Yeah... After I manually turned off iCloud auto updating - it's on by default, battery usage now seems reasonable.

Yes - but the original "Restore from iCloud" will run regardless of whether or not the phone is plugged in and it appears that mine was attempting to complete the initial Restore for two days...

Sounds like a software bug for sure - iOS 6.1 is needed!