iPhone 5 iOS6 Battery Drain Experience
iPhone 5 iOS6 Battery Drain Experience
Initial when I first got my iPhone 5 I was pretty happy with the battery life on it, I thought nice it lasts a decent amount of time. Typical usage was surfing the net, listen to some music and check my email.
My trouble began is when I changed my contract to a new supplier with LTE and an unlimited data plan, this is when I went into my settings and turned on iCloud and LTE. The following morning I unplugged my phone and went to work, normally my battery would easily last all day with 40% ish left, within 5 hours I was down to 12%. Not good luckily I had ordered another power cable from Apple and it had arrived just in time!
Anyway through trial /error and spendings a lot of time on the web I have finally solved my battery drain issue, below is a summary of the troubles with my previous setup!
NOTE: Within “Settings / General / About / Diagnostics & Usage / Diagnostics & Usage Data” contains your crash logs, if you are experiencing battery issues then you should have some crash logs in here! This was the key to fixing my battery issues.
TIP: Crash logs can also be found on your computer:
Okay the:
1.Big Battery Drainers -
dataaccessd process – My crash log contained about multiple “dataaccessd” There are numerous threads on this issue on the web and numerous fixes. It’s basically linked to the Exchange server calendar:
- I performed a full reset.
- Switched my exchange account from “push” to “manual”, I haven’t seen a crash log on this anymore (7 days now).
MobileMail process – Additional to my work exchanger server email I also have yahoo and gmail mail on my iPhone, I never really found out what this was exactly related to but my fix was to have some common sense:
- I turned off “Contacts / Calenders / Reminders / Notes” on my yahoo / gmail accounts and only used the iCloud ones, I believe there was some interference/clash of some sort and only using “Contacts / Calenders / Reminders / Notes” from one source helped me resolve the MobileMail process issue.
- Switched my yahoo / gmail accounts “push” to “manual” also, I believe “Fetch” causes no issue either.
iCloud Issues – Swtiching on iCloud on its own wasn’t really the issue, I have all the options on and with push settings without much battery drain. But when I reviewed my crash logs I found another two crash processes “PocketPlanes” / “Toshl”, these are two of the apps have backup to iCloud options enabled automatically and it seems they were trying to backup all day!
- I simply disabled there iCloud backup or limited the backup to occur when wi-fi was available.
2. Medium Battery Drainer –
LTE – Super fast connection but my office seems to be in an area that causes my iPhone to continuously switch between LTE and 3G networks, this I noticed was causing a drain on my battery.
- Switch LTE off if you note the switching issue, it’s not really needed when your phone is in standby. Switch it back on if you want to use the full speed.
3. Other Battery Drainers –
These are further tweaks I found useful and have made some difference to battery life:
Settings / Wi-Fi – Some noticeable gains with this turned off while no Wi-Fi is around.
Settings / Bluetooth – This was switched on automatically on my iPhone from factory, switch on only when you need it.
Settings / General / About / Diagnostics & Usage / Diagnostics & Usage Data – “Don’t Send” ticked, this would save you data and power.
Settings / Location Services – I have most of these ticked “On”, only one I have “Off” is passbook. I don’t have many passbook items and the ones I have self-generated seems to keep triggering the location services program to keep pinging my location every time I unlock the phone. This is not needed so I’ve turned it to “Off”.
Settings / Location Services / System Services – I’ve turned most of the options to “Off”, I found that each process had ran at least once in the last 24 hours and they are all basically collecting information for apple and not really enriching the experience for the user. Once you’ve gone through the list you will see the location services arrow a lot less! If you want to found out more I would suggest search the web for each option, it was interesting reading.
After resolving all the above issues and doing some minor tweaks I have an iPhone that has very good battery life and does not have itsmain features (iCloud / Location Services) disabled to a point where its not really a smart phone anymore! The key to resolving your battery issues revolve around your crash logs!
Hope this helps people resolve their battery issues!
iPhone 5, iOS 6