Q: iOS 6.1 Battery Drain Problem

My phone (4S) is experiencing terrible battery life after upgrading to 6.1 also.  I can get maybe 1/2 day out of my phone since this.  Previously it would last (but be low) until I plugged it in at night.  This is ridiculous.

Please install an app called BatteryDoctor. In this app I have found that the iphones memory is used by

Apps 25 MB

System Memory 45 MB

The Others 140 MB ????????

So there is something which is nor system and Apps. Something else is causing this high memory usage and therfore resulting a bad battery time...

And btw my CPU usage is most of the time 95% idle. Sometimes it just drops to 50% and lasts there for 1 second.  like once every 30 seconds.

Please install the app and see if you can read anything unusual.

Can anyone confirm their service provider? I am just trying to see if there is a trend here... The LTE issues they presumably were correcting with 6.1 were Verizon LTE issues related to time/date errors (other carriers that use Verizon towers were also affected such as Sprint). AT +T clients did not have this problem. I read on another thread several AT +T clients stating their battery life is better with the new 6.1 update? Just wondering if we are all Verizon customers in this boat???

Nope. I'm on AT&T using a 4S and I had the same problem. A full reset via iTunes seemed to work for me.

Ryan-

I live in sweden and my phone is unlocked. Also there is no sim inserted.

I still have the same problem.

Thanks Ryan, When you say reset do you mean you did a restore from a back up or did you reset to factory settings and not restore from back up? I did a reset and restore from back up and it did not help.

Restoring from a previous backup may not clear out whatever is causing the issue which may be contained in the backup itself. Sometimes it's best to backup all music, apps, data, etc and then restore the device as new.

I am an AT&T subscriber and have been experiencing the drain for several weeks while on 6.0.2.   I updated to 6.1 on Tuesday via iTunes and the situation did not improve.   I did a restore (not from backup) last night and things seemed to be better, but my battery just seems to drain like crazy whenever I am on a call or using something to engage the cellular network.   I have wi-fi off, bluetooth off, location services off, and am using the 4G/LTE cellular network.   I intend to go ahead and drain the battery to 0% and then recharge it just for good measure, but I don't have much faith in that helping matters.

I was wondering what the standard battery drain should be for the following conditions:

• Using the phone
• Browsing the web (for mostly text pages, such as articles with minimal graphics)

I have been keeping a log since Tuesday of times and battery percentage along with what apps and features I was using during those times in case I have to plead my case at the Apple store. On Wednesday, I noticed a 5% battery drain during a 17 minute phone call.  That equates to roughly 20% drain per hour of talk time, which would give me 5 hours of phone usage - 3 hours less than the Apple-advertised amount.  I am also seeing about a 1% drain for every 5-6 minutes of browsing using Safari on pages that don't really have much graphics.  The strange thing that I noticed last night was that I stayed at 100% for about an hour after charging after the restore and then it would just start dropping much more rapidly after that.

I have been in my office on wifi for about an hour and a half and the rapid battery depletion seems to have stopped. I have only lost 1% in 90 minutes. This morning I lost 40% of my battery in 2 hours while on cellular service (driving around town). The cellular connection is obviously somehow causing the problem!

I may have spoke to soon... I sent a couple of text and lost 5% in less than 5 minutes.

I performed the process described on a previous post:

1. Backup of my iphone through iTunes

2. Restoration of factory configuration in iOS 6.1 (activate minimum things during configuration at restart)

3. 1st test: No full battery charge and wait 30 min, only 1% battery decreased instead of 10% with the issue (good point which seems confirm a corrupted data issue during iOS upgrade)

4. Restoration of the backup

5. 2nd test: full battery charge and wait 1h, still at 100% instead of 80% with the issue!!

I think the issue is solved for me but I will confirm in the next hours.

I can confirm now that running a restore in iTunes, essentially reinstalling iOS 6.1 then restoring backup has fixed this problem for me. I have been out since 7.30am, using the phone a lot. And am at 75% battery. That's pretty typical. Last 2 days, since the original OTA update to 6.1, I would have been near 0%.

I suspect that this is a bit of installation luck. The fact the issue affects some and not others. Those who have tried restore and it hasn't worked, might like to try again.

Further to my last post - I sent the post at 12.30 pm. My phone is an iPhone 4s.