iPhone 5 battery drops to 20% from around 40% suddenly

This happens to me as well. My iPhone 5 dropped from 100% to 24% within a matter of 5 seconds. Then, 2 seconds later, it died. The charging is a challenge too. When it died, I plugged it in for 45 minutes and it finally went to 1%. ON the other hand, the other day when it was at 18% it jumped to 84%! My point is, the battery is crap. Just crap. And I think I may know why. If you would like some VERY helpful pointers on how to save battery life, go to the link, http://www.tinyurl.com/lksjxnb (the 'I' can be a i or L). This amazing website tells you all you need to know to go through the whole day without having to charge your phone. :-)

This has been happening to me ever since I got the iPhone 5. This thread is from 2013 and for iOS 7! Its 2017 and iOS 10.3 is almost out! And its still happening!

Fix this apple or I'll get a Nokia! This was never an issue on Nokia

Same thing here.

As soon as my phone got a bit cold, colder than 15c and the battery was lower than 30% it just dropped 25-30% in a second and most of the times shut down.

When connected to charger and restarted the battery was back up at 30%.

Only saw this on 7,0,0

Add me to the mix. This happed to me twice over the weekend. Was at 50% then phone rebooted and came up with a indicator to charge. Once rebooted, phone was @ 50% and worked fine the rest of the day.

Again today with 30% the phone rebooted, had to plug it in and then the phone rebooted and came up with 30% battery indicated.

Another one here. Got exactly the same problem. Battery life is ALL OVER the place since the upgrade to iOS 7. It's been even worse with the subsequent point releases.

Do you think this is just a ploy to make us upgrade to a 5s or 5c? haha.

But seriously... fix this Apple.

Things I have done already:

Turned off and on again

Restarted

Reset

Restored

Optimised battery life (within reason): Turned off fancy animations, screen brightness, bluetooth, background refresh, push, and location services. I'm not using LTE, only 3G and Wi-Fi.

Basically, from full charge, the battery drops to 90% in standby after around 1.5 hours. That's when I'm not even touching the phone.

Fix please

This happens to me as well.

Today, my iPhone 5 running iOS 7.0.3, went from 35% battery to 1% battery in 3 minutes and then it trned itself off. When I plugged it in, the phone came back on with an initial battery level of 35%.

This is the 3rd time it's happened to me. I suspect it's a software problem because my battery is in great shape and this behavior only started with the 7.0.3 software update.

Same here, after the ios7 upgrade, my iphone 5 has the most erratic battery patterns.

1) With out much use the battery drops to about 50% in a few hours (2-3 hrs)

2) Then the battery suddenly drops to anywhere from 4-15% from 25-35% after a single call, or opening a single webpage.

3) Restarting the phone would show 20% for a few min or until the next call/use.

3) This is after following all the possible battery saving tricks that I could find on the internet!, basically everything fancy in the iphone disabled 😟 One would have thought the whole purpose of the phone over a basic model would be to use all these features. sad.

I was worried that it was a genuine battery malfunction until I came across this thread a few weeks ago, and now the problem has gotten so bad that I decided to post about it.

Apple, please respond, at the very least acknowlegde the problem.

Thank you.

Same issue here

Same issue, phone shuts down when around 20% of battery. When plugged in, the phone awakes with the 20% of battery displayed. I sent my phone for repair to my provider and they sent it back saying everything was fine ! This is very frustrating.

I have the exact same issue, my phone drops from 20% to 1%. But since I am running iOS 6.1 I can confirm that it is not a iOS 7 issue.

It's just a broken iPhone I guess... mine is about 11 months old.

My phone was just at 20%

Minute later it was at 1%

Plugged in the charger and it jumped back to 20%

Okay... so after much experimenting, I think I found a solution:

The other day, I decided to just let my battery run down to the end and my phone turn off.

As usual, it dropped from 40% to 20%... and then from 19% to 5%. I started to get a little worried.

Then... amazingly, it remained on 1% for over 3 hours of CONSTANT use. I had the screen on, internet working, sending What'sApp messages and checking emails.

It eventually turned off. I put it on a full charge, and now the battery meter is a lot more realistic. It still has sudden drops, but nowhere near as bad as before... and even when it gets down to the warning levels, it works fine (yesterday I had it at 16% for over an hour before it went down to a lower number).

So, in short - use the **** out of it... discharge it completely, recharge, and pray it worked like mine did.

Good luck

Glad it kind of worked for you, but I've had no such luck. It's hard to drain a battery all the way down when it shuts down with some percentage still in the tank, over and over. I got in the habbit of cycling the battery (draining it all the way down and then charging all the way up) a few times a month when the 3G came out. It is/was propper battery maintenance according to Apples site.

For the record, here's what I've tried and in order:

• ~Tried~ to completely cycle the battery a few times
• Deleted all apps that were loaded or updated within a few days of when the problem started
• also deleted Facebook since it's a known battery hog
• Hard restart while plugged in to an outlet
• Updated to iOS 7.0.4
• Did an iOS restore as the Apple support page suggests (https://getsupport.apple.com/Issues.action)
• Cycled the battery

After all this my battery meter is still not quite right. My phone has not unexpectedly shut down after all this though. If I don't touch my phone the meter shows what I, and Apples site, would consider normal battery drain. But the second I start using the phone for anything it drains quite fast, faster as it gets lower. The last 30% can drain in about 30 minutes by just texting, emails, browsing Safari or reading twitter.

Let me add myself to this list of people who have experienced this behavior with their iPhone 5. When the battery gets to about 41% it will shortly make a sudden drop to 20% and quickly go down into the single digits.

When I know I'm going to be out all day and using the phone heavily I use a UNU case so I can recharge my phone. The standard procedure is to wait until it reaches 20% and then start the battery on the case to recharge the phone. Today, I think I'll take the advice I've read here and let it drain completely before I start a recharge and see what happens.

Also, while I believe that Apple monitors these discussion boards, they will never respond to a post. Never. Ever. If a thread has enough participants, I believe the issue gets escalated to engineering for investigation, so let's hope that there are enough people who are experiencing this problem that this thread will get somone's attention.

Went in over the weekend and the Genius synced up using his iPad, pulled up some diagnostic tests and showed me that my 1 year old battery was in the red. I have Applecare+ so 10 minutes later I had a new battery installed and was out the door.