iPhone 5/ipad rapid battery discharge - solution

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iPhone 5/ipad rapid battery discharge - solution

A couple of days ago I noticed the battery discharge rate on my iPhone 5 and iPad (3) was all of the sudden really fast. I was dropping almost 20% per hour with no activity on my iPhone. I did the usual stuff, disabled location services, stopped push emails, and even removed some of the apps that were new or updated in the last few days. None of the modifications I had made made an impact...same battery drain, same constantly warm phone.

When I checked the error logs, there were many for dataaccessd. I loaded a system monitor app and the top processes were: dataaccessd and reportcrash. Then my wife told me her iPhone 4S was also discharging quickly the last couple of days. So I deleted my iCloud account and had it delete all it's info from my phone. Rebooted and set up iCloud again. Those two processes are not at the top of the list anymore, and after 2.5 hours of minimal use, my iPhone has dropped from 100% to 99% battery level...and it's cool to the touch.

It must have been a corrupted iCloud file, maybe in the Calendar, that was constantly trying to synch?

Posted on Oct 21, 2012 1:21 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 15, 2013 7:57 AM in response to Z42

I had a similar problem with my iPhone 5. After functioning normally for several months since purchase, yesterday it began demonstrating rapid battery depletion, around 20% per hour despite being asleep in my pocket. It was pretty warm, too. Turning off all apps did not help. Placing it in airplane mode stopped the depletion but obviously was not a good long term solution. Multiple resets had no effect. I tried disabling cloud services but that did not impact the battery drain in my case. I'm not sure how to check error logs, but that might have been helpful. Eventually, I found Mail was attempting to send two emails I had written the night before and appeared to be stuck in the process. The little circle in the top bar on the screen indicating activity was constant and a progress bar at the bottom appeared stuck. This was only evident when I had the Mail app open and 2 resets did not appear to correct this (I didn't discover this issue until after 2 resets).

I turned off Mail in the Settings and later turned it back on. Mail then functioned normally, no more constant spinning activity circle and the progress bar was gone and the out box was empty. More importantly, the rapid battery drain was completely fixed and the phone cooled down.

After my experience and reading your post and others, I suspect this rapid battery depletion can occur when the device gets stuck in a process (forgive my layman's terms). Unfortunately, it appears that a system reset does not always resolve the issue. iCloud and Mail are good places to look for the issue. If you can pull up the device's error log, that may help as well..

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