iOS 6.1 Battery Drain Problem

I also had this problem after upgrading OTA to 6.1.2.

I managed to fix the problem by doing a factory restore and then restoring from a backup I did before the restore.

I did the factory restore via iTunes.

Since doing this, my battery level is perfectly normal.

Hope this helps.

Hello! I just upgraded to 6.1.2 through iTunes last night thinking that it will solve my battery woes, but i dont think it worked. I dont have an exchange account, but I have two gmail accounts and icloud. The battery is just the same as before when I upgraded to 6.1. It usually last a day since I only use wifi, and dont get to play games anymore. My usage is usually 3 - 4 hrs of use, and 18 - 20hrs of standby. I am still not happy with it because before I can make the phone last for two days.

Will restore as new work? If i restored my old backup, wont the problem come back? I liked apple products since late 2011 when I bought my first macbook pro. Since then, i gave my wife an ipad, and this is my first iphone. The ipad did not encounter any problems after the update. I am thinking that this is an icloud problem since i sync my macbook pro and iphone5. Hopefully apple techs will look into this because it is causing a lot of people a whole lot of trouble.

Unfortunate that some people are still having problems. My phone is working fine after the 6.1.2 update, and I made a point of using the calendar extensively on the phone to test out the Exchange fix. The Exchange bug seems to be fixed, as far as I can tell. Perhaps people are seeing some other issue, like the iCloud bookmark syncing that someone mentioned. Or perhaps something else.

It would be a good idea to try to isolate the source of the problem, by disabling accounts or services until you know what in particular is causing your problem. You can use an app like SysStatsLite or Battery Doctor to see if you can figure out what is the major source of the power usage or at least monitor the CPU usage as you turn things off. Those are free, but there may be some paid apps that do a better job (although I didn't find one when I looked).

Debugging problems comes natural to me since I have an engineering background, but I realize it is new territory for many. If you are still stumped, at least take the phone into the Apple Store and have the genies check it out.

This is my last post on this subject - got to get on with my life. Hope everyone resolves their problems.

Updated to 6.1.2 using iTunes,battery life's not improving at all.I can't leave it at standby without airplane mode on or it'll drain the battery like ****...Battery dropping 1% every 3 minutes on 3G although there is 5 bars reception.Battery drops 3% after being on standby on airplane mode for about 8 hours.Is that normal?

exactly the same problem. Battery runs down in the standby mode for 6-8 hours. When using 3G discharged for 2-3 hours. How to fix it? Using the phone in this mode can not be!

I'd be very interested to know if people updating directly from 6.0.1 or 6.0.2 to 6.1.2 experience any troubles...

I'm pretty ****** off about updating to the latest update that came out this week. My phone is completely dead after 3 hrs now from being fully charged. when I first updated to ios 6.1.2 I didn't realize it was so bad and my phone completed drained over night and my alarm didn't go off in the morning. I was late for work on Tuesday and now I have to plug it in at night so that I can use the alarm feature in the morning. Does anybody know when they are releasing a fix to this problem?? Is there any way to uninstall the update from your phone if you didn't do a back up before updating the software?

Yes! This is my first issue with iPhone, from past 2 yrs there wasn't any such issues bothering me.

After i recently restored my iPhone 4 with iOS 6.1 i am facing a lot of battery drain, i wonder whether is it a battery percentage or a minute ticker.

I mean my phone is literally losing a single percentage every min or 2, even after closing all apps in background,

In 4 hrs it dropped from 99% to 23% with a usage for few calls, texts(5-6) and a 1 time mail sync over WiFi

This backup is very poor compared to iOS 5.1.1, which maintained better results .....please fix it ASAP.

For all of those who say that there is a rogue IOS process (or lets include 3rd party ones as well), then you can check that out pretty well at a lower level. This requires jailbreak, so if this is not allowed in here, my apologies. I had the battery problem in 6.1 and temporarily got rid of it by turning off my calendar sync everyplace you can do so under settings. I only use exchange if Google uses it as they are my only provider or any email services so I'm not sure if the exchange fix did anything for me.

Also: I'm using an iPad 3 with 16G, WiFi only. Here's what I did and observed and I used this because I'm familiar with Linux and BSD and all the things that the underpinnings of IOS seem 'similar' to:

1) installed 6.1 and saw I had a fairly large battery drain over 5.1.1 (~50% higher drain).

2) jailbreak it using evasion (takes a few minutes) and installed top from bsd-utils. Top monitors low level resourse Usage in a shell so I used MobileTerminal and top. You can monitor by CPU or IO or NET or anything you can think of. Things that are not in the 'switch applications conga line at the bottom of the screen will show up there'.

3) I saw that a process with 'mail' and 'sync' in it's name was using ~20% CPU or so and a bit of I/O on the network. If I killed (kill -9 {PID}) then it respawned. I sent this info off in an apple support email and never heard anything.

4) I then turned off all calendar sync since I'd read about that with exchange and that process stopped running at 20% and showed as 0% (well, that's as close as it gets for 'top')

5) Upgraded (and I use that term loosely) to 6.1.2 and restored apps and enabled calendars and did a jailbreak, installed a shell and top again.

6) top now shows nothing eating more than Springboard (which is now springboard and backboard for some reason), and they are only eating <2% which seems reasonable. That may also be because top is of course causing other things to have to support it so top does skew some results as does any investigative tool that runs on the thing you're investigating.

Result: for me, on iPad 3 , there isn't any greater battery usage now than there was in 5.1.1 or if there is it is small enough not to care about it. Doing a variety of things, I got about ~10-11 hours the day I got it, and get about the same today. Does anyone else have the problem at all on an iPad 3? Is this problem unique to iPhones (I don't have one)?

Apple doesn't give you many if any tools to troubleshoot so jailbreak might be the only way to look at the OS a bit. Warranty isn't affected since it is so easy to restore which wipes out any trace of a jailbreak in case of an RMA situation.

Message was edited by: Tuned101 - because I couldn't reply but my test reply worked, so I'm trying an actual reply.

I updated two nights ago via iTunes and my battery life seemed to be worse than it was with 6.1.1. I drained the battery and charged it completely. Still no improvement. I saw a 2% drop in battery within a two minute span and all I did was check my email - no data-heavy messages were in that push. I have two Gmail accounts and they are set to manually fetch...no automatic fetch of messages.

I will be doing a restore (not from backup) later today to see if there is any improvement. This is beyond ridiculous. I'm assuming that the stellar programmers who worked on Apple Maps were given this project.

I think this might be related to the iCloud syncing process.

Yesterday i did a full restore to factory with 6.1.2 and put my iCloud settings in the config steps so i could retrieve my contacts list. My iPhone went dead in just 12 hours with no use at all, probably 5 minutes of use, and only on standby. I've also noticed it was still heating up a lot.

I deleted my iCloud account information and turned everything off...at least its on 71% after 7 hours of being charged and stone cold which is good to the phone's hardware life. While being better than having the phone dead after only 12 hours, this is still, by all means, with almost no use, a laughable battery life.

I've always told, i didn't had an Exchange account, only two Gmail accounts in 6.1. Still the draining was occuring, and i think the main suspect is indeed iCloud.

Try to disable iCloud and report your findings to see if we are all on the same page.

Yes I think that LuisFAlves is totally correct. After trying a complete restore and re-install this afternoon (which does not work) I came across another thread that suggested (1) delete all mail accounts (2) reset network settings (3) reinstall all mail accounts. So I deleted icloud, gmail, hotmail and exchange, reset and reinstalled.

Now on standby my battery goes down 1% every 15 minutes. It could have been icloud but try removing them all. This morning before I did this I was losing 1% every 2 minutes, I couldn't get through the day without keeping it plugged into my macbook. I hope this is the solution to my phone problems. I'm also going to try draining and recalibrating my battery tonight.

Hope you have luck too!

I wish i am as lucky as you ... I am deleting the icloud acc now & do factory reset ... wish me luck

Btw, i posted a feedback on "IOS6.1.2 did not solve the problem" yesterday & i found the discussion was deleted this morning ..

Seem like APPLE is acting fast in hidden the problem but not solving the problem ....

well done APPLE!

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 2:54 AM, <communityhosts@apple.com> wrote:

Dear (ezobear),

Your post was removed from Apple Support Communities as it contained feedback or feature requests. These areas are intended to address technical issues about Apple products. Although your feedback is appreciated, unfortunately these forums are not designed for it and your thoughts/concerns will not get the attention they deserve.

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Best Regards, Apple Support Communities Staff

A copy of your message for reference:

I installed the latest software 6.1.2 this morning but the battery drain problem still persist!!

My fully charged battery is draining from 100% to 50% in less than 2.5 hours!!!!

Apple, you are not fixing the problem!!!

(1) delete all mail accounts

(2) reset network settings

(3) reinstall all mail accounts

All of above mentioned actions not working on my phone ...... ****!

This will be my last post to this thread because my battery is now totally restored to normal. I just wanted to fully document my experience in appreciation for all those who helped me out with their posts today while I was troubleshooting my phone -

1. After downloading ios 6.1.2 my battery was draining at 1% every 2 minutes

2. I tried to restore/reinstall as new phone through itunes and this did not do anything for me (however on other people's posts, this seemed ot help others).

3. I uninstalled all mail accounts, reset network settings, then reinstalled all mail accounts with all original config. and battery improved to draining 1% every 15-16 minutes.

4. After the phone was fully drained at the end of the day, I fully charged phone to calibrate battery and then restarted the phone. Now my battery is draining at 1% every 68 minutes, which means at standby it's now good for over 100 hrs. Yesterday my phone was good for about 2-3 hrs so I could not be more thrilled.

I love the Apple Support Communities, I can always find my answers here.