iPhone 5 short battery life?

iOS 6.1.2

Battery goes from 100% to 20% in 2.5 hours.

NOT cool!!

I would agree. Time since my last full charge notes:

Usage: 2 Hours, 4 Minutes

Standby: 7 Hours, 35 Minutes

And I am down to 57%. Never ate up the battery this fast. So basically if I used my phone for 4 hours it would be dead. Not the 8 hours that is noted by apple [1].

[1] http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html

It is the app called, aptly, Battery Life by Kdan Mobile Software. This is one of the only apps I've see display a time series of information which gives me at least a moderately better understanding of the rate of change of battery life, especially if I change the conditions on the iPhone which can affect this.

At our company, apparently they want to block all iOS versions prior to 6.1.2 as it created some high usage and havoc with the Exchange Server. I don't know if this is a great idea as this could cause more user grief. I don't think that Apple's latest patch has solved the root problem. The poster who suggested perhaps another effect of the patch affecting the IR sensor might be important as well - I dunno, but am interested in checking this out.

So in light of the upgrade, here is an update to my original post. As previously mentioned, it was thought that the 6.1.2 upgrade might fix those battery draining problems from the 6.1.1 problem. I've noticed a spectrum of symptoms from the latest patch which can be categorized as follows:

1. No previous battery drain issues after the 6.1.1 upgrade, experienced issue in 6.1.2.
2. Previous battery drain issues after 6.1.1, the 6.1.2 patch had no effect in resolving the battery drain.
3. Previous battery drain issues after 6.1.1, users rolled back properly to factory setting, helped the battery issue, and upgraded to 6.1.2 directly with no ill effects on battery drain.

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It's obvious that a number of components relating to how the iPhone sends/listens to a number of devices or environments may be part of the problem. AFAIK, the genius folks don't have a comprehensive and robust diagnostic tool that can tell when the usage of a particular component is abnormal (i.e. software inducing super frequent calls to an exchange server, or perhaps an IR sensor that is misbehaving) causing battery drainage.

As a matter of quality control and streamlining the diagnostic process, it would seem to me that Apple, allegedly a tech company trying to plow the frontier of innovation, would have this capability and leverage the simple compute power of what it already produces to deploy more robust diagnostic software. Yet it has not. And frankly, I don't get that.

Have they not collected sufficient data on product issues to drive something actionable? Or do they just not know how to effectively use it to provide sound interpretations that translate into solutions, and even better, a proactive strategy in QC of their rather pricey products? While I think they (Apple) do a pretty good job in general, they could indeed do far better.

WIth Google now jumping into play with things like the Pixel - the playing field may be a bit more crowded. So serious and thoughtful QC (particularly in the analytic space) will be essential.

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As Alphamike583 mentioned I noticed that my proximity sensor is always on as soon as the iPhone isn't sleeping (check the if the infared sensor is on in a webcam). This will definitely drain battery. I'll definitely have to look at the proximity sensor issue.

Last Friday night I got a new iPhone 5 replacement from Apple and the battery drain issue was there on a brand new phone(over 10% in the first hour barely using the phone). This is why you shouldn't waste time restoring your iPhone as new and losing all your data as the problem seems random.

The genius at the Apple store also mentioned something about the LTE radio not turning off even if you turn it off in settings. If you're between cell towers and it's constantly switching between the two, this drains heaps of battery. This may make sense as when I'm at home my battery usage is a lot better then when I travel to work through the city. I can use my phone more at home then when I'm out and about switching through towers. If you live/work in between towers this would suck for you..

iPhone 5 was fully charged when unplugged from the wall charger at 8:45 am, it is now 12:14 pm and I am at 10% with VERY minimal use.

This seems to happen every 3 or 4 days. I only notice it when I have to go out to the car and get the USB cable out of the car charger and bring it back in to the office to charge the phone. I notice because its Canada and its cold out.

Running 6.1.2. I live in an area where there is no LTE available, only 3G and I have wifi on.

I only remember this problem happening in the last 2 or 3 weeks. Before that I was quite happy with batter life.

Ok so it seems everyone is having different experiences with how messed up their battery is. Does anyone be know what's considered normal battery drainage for an iPhone 5? I've had battery issues as well (probably still do) and I've done a bunch of "fixes" like turn off Bluetooth, reset all the settings, and even did a factory restore as a new iphone using iTunes. I would lose one percent bout every 3 or 4 mins using wifi and one percent every few hrs. I took my phone to apple an they said there was not wrong with the battery, but that still seems like unusually fast battery drainage. I guess I still don't know how fast the battery SHOULD be draining. With minimal use it would last for about 2 days. Does that sound right? Oh and I'm running iOS 6.1.2 maybe if we all say how long before we need to charge our batteries with X amount of usage we can get an idea of the most common problem and work from there.

And I meant to say I would lose one percent every 3 to 4 mins using wifi and one percent every couple of hrs on standby

I have a iPhone 5 gsm 64gb and after the 6.1.2 update, my battery was draining like crazy. I'm talking 20% per hour. The phone would die before 1pm. Ridiculous.

So I took it to the apple store this past Saturday and they ran a diagnostics on it and the battery came up as healthy. However they could also observe the excessive drain while they ran the test. They advised I could either get the battery replaced or replace the whole phone.

I chose to go with a new phone and saw that it was still on ios v.6.0.2. Woohoo!! I've been installing all my apps since I got it and the battery's still going strong. I think it's definitely the update that caused this issue and apple is trying to be hush hush about it. They are numerous threads on the AppleCare support communities webpage about this exact issue.

I know for sure that I won't be updating until they come out with a very stable update. No more jumping the trigger when apple tries to spoon feed me their "fixes".

Interesting...I tried doing a factory reset and it stayed on iOS 6.1.2

iOS 6.1.2 NOT JB

This is my result for Battery with ( WIFI ON and CELLULAR DATA OFF, SIRI OFF, LOCATION SERVICES ON except some of them like in system services and find my iphone etc and iCLOUD obviously ON and all other options default)

NOTE: My iPHone 5 is not jailbroken when it was jailbroken i lasts for i think 9 hours in total and now i get more than that 🙂 kudos to apple for such a good battery life

Maintain your Li-ion battery understand ur iPhone

do you work for Apple?

try and be honest...

incredible BAD battery life on iPhone 5 iOS 6.1.2

with ALL te services OFF, brithness all the way down it lasts for about 5 hours, what a piece of CHIT

Three Mobile from UK sells a lot of "Refurbished" iPhones, easy to guess, many people are returning them, unhappy with these devices i myself got the 3rd one in the last couple of weeks.

Apple doesn`t give a f..k, looks like it`s time to get back to Nokia

The battery life on the IPhone 5 is unacceptable. I kept it on standby and it didn't even last a day. On top of that it has died 3 times in a week from when I bought it. Apple needs to find a way to run retina without sapping up so much energy. What's the point of retina when the battery doesn't last? The battery life is even worse than the IPad. Please fix this apple. The IPhone 5 has been nothing but trouble so far.

Hello all.

I have an iphone 5 with ios 6.1.2, wifi, icloud and location settings always on, all the time. i only had about 3 - 4 apps running today and sporadicly replied to a few texts, did a 15 phone call and checked email a few times. From this morning at 7.30 AM till this afternoon 2.30 PM the battery went from 100% to 75%.

now at 73% and TIME SINCE LAST FULL CAHRGE says, 7 hours and 14 minutes for both "usage" and "standby", does that sound right? and i can't really make sense how both could possibly be the same, how can you use and be on standby at the same time???

Is that all normal or does sound weak to you guys? for some reason i feel like when i got the phone in mid january, i got to the same battery life point as today even if i used the phone much more. I hope I'm not just trippion', and wanted to get other people's thoughts about this. thanks!

As per apple (http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html) (thanks ag0000):

Usage: Amount of time iPhone has been awake and in use since the last full charge. The phone is awake when you’re on a call, using email, listening to music, browsing the web, or sending and receiving text messages, or during certain background tasks such as auto-checking email.

Standby: Amount of time iPhone has been powered on since its last full charge, including the time the phone has been asleep. (emphasis added by me).

So, if you have 2h of "Usage" and 3h of "Standby", it DOES NOT mean that your phone has been powered on for 2+3=5h; it means that you unplugged the phone after a full charge 3h ago, and of those 3h, 2h have been of "Usage" and 1h has been the phone doing nothing.

thanks for the reply.

mmmmmm. so why does it say 3 hours of standby when in reality it should say 1 hour (since out of three total hours 2 was usage)?

also how can usage and stanby be the same exact time as in my case? 7 hours of use and 7 hours of standby....

finally, doest the usage i posted sound normal to you or not?

thanks!