iPhone 5 shuts down with plenty of battery life left

fwiw, i did the full discharge yesterday to see if would be a remedy. i only had the unexpected shutdown once, so hard to establish a pattern.

during the intentional battery drain, i noticed it stopped decreasing near 40 percent for me. i powered off then on again and it showed about 20. so the monitoring or the discharge pattern of the battery itself seems wonky. it also stayed on the last 1% for about 10%'s worth of time -- way too long. so with these efforts i hope it has calibrated -- will try it again when i can and see if it discharges more linearly.

I am having the same issue and I did not see this until the last 7.03 update. It cut out right during Halloween pictures and could not use the phone till I plugged it in to charger for a minute or so. The phone then powered up and lasted the rest of the night, but some priceless moments were missed!

I am having the same issue and have had my phone already replaced once by apple and still same issue. I am not wondering if it is an IOS 7 issue somewhere. It didn't do that before as bad. I know all smartphones can be battery hogs if you have alot running.

I had everything that I don't need shut down and it still did it.

In response to the other posts, I have not had any issue with the battery until the update to IOS7 and I have been using the phone for over a year. I am not suprised that the store would say the battery was bad, the phone thinks it is and shuts down. I do not know what plugging it in does for the phone, but after I plugged it in for just a few minutes it lasted for several hours. it was not that the battery was dead, but how the camera works with the system on IOS7. I do not know if taking a picture and saving it while using the flash cause a large draw etc, but whatever it is the system then thinks the battery is dead when it isnt. The hard part is once you apply power it will go away and there is no way to verify the issue. Even if it is weaker battery it should not just shut off with 20% power and then not work until power is applied. The battery is not dead as it has worked for several hours afterward. I have not used the camera in those cases for fear of losing my phone until I could get to a power cord. I am not aware of it happening twice in a row, but I will test it next time I am near a power cord after it dies. I would also concur, that this is a quick failure for the battery also as the phone is just over a year old.

Just a follow-up to a earlier post in which my iphone 5 still on iOS6 had the battery drain to zero when the camera was briefly used even when battery was at 40%. I may be the minority here still on ios6 but today I experienced a different type of dramatic battery drain. I was at around 70% battery when I started to do some web searches on the phone and within 30 min of use I was under 35% and quickly to less than 20% after a few more minutes of use. I wanted to get the phone now to 0% so I could try and calibrated the battery by instructions previously provided on this post. Now after using the phone for over 90 minutes running different apps and web searches the phone has not decreased lower than 15%. Basically the battery is staying at 15% with no further decrease for 90 minutes when it lost 50% of battery within 60minutes of use. Certainly seems to be a battery calibration issue. Still working to compete multiple battery drain full charge cycles to see if recalibration helps.

OK as an update, I spent about an hour with Apple support who believed it was a software corruption issue, so have done a full restore.

Phone ran well all day yesterday after a single charge in the morning. woke up this morning with the 'phone at less than 20% warning' which is understandable and sure enough it was showing 20% (This does represent a 16% use overnight when the phone is not being used). I made 1 call of 1 minute maximum first thing and afterwards the phone showed at 13% (7% useage on a 1 minute call - I think not 🙂 ). So I plugged the phone in (using the apple supplied charge plug and cable) and at the instant I connected the cable the charge reading jumped to 25% charged!

After 45 minutes on charge its showing as 76% charged, but you know what.....I'm not confident it actually is?

I'm going to use the phone with some more power hungry app's (Golf GPS) this morning, so will see how that goes.

Like a lot of you I've owned the same 5 for just over a year and am currently updated to the newest iOS 7.0.3 -- scoured the web for ways to preserve battery life as well.

I too am having the issue of my battery telling me 15-20% charge life and then powering down of its own accord. Just happened to me recently about the moment before I stepped off for a run and it was a major buzzkill. I didn't personally notice anything funny with my "charge" until about a week or so ago coinciding more so with the iOS 7.0.3 update. (Not saying this is the culprit but I've noticed more significant problems since that update)

iOS 7 has brought much conveniences but at the same time lots of bugs & glitches that are constantly annoying my experience - iTunes Match nightmare more so than normal anyone...? May look for an alternative music cloud service if things don't shape up soon.

Get you stuff together, Apple, and stop ignoring us!

Has anyone did a complete hard reset to see if that helped anything?

I have done a complete train about 3 times and still occuring. I tried to do it more, but it is hard as the phone shuts down way before it gets to the 1%. Today it was at 35% and tried to make an outgoing call and it shut down.

After a week where all seemed OK, although I didn't really allow the battery life to get too low due to the essential nature of the phone (for business) I tried it again on the golf course with a GPS App (settings as low to medium battery use). Went out fully charged and after 3 hours and showing 41% it switched off and refused to turn back on showing the depleted battery image and that it should be connected and charged. To be clear, the phone display isn't permanently on for 3 hours, just switched on every 10 minutes or so to get a yardage and update a score. Worked flawlessly for months until the last month or so (and on the iPhone 4 before, previously finishing a 4 hour round with always over 25% battery life left).

Got back to my car an hour later, commected it to the USB socket and after the Apple icon appeared for a little while, the phone came back to life showing 60% charge. 😠

To repeat 1 year old Iphone 5 with latest IoS build. PITA!

To confirm, not only have I done hard resets, I've fully depleted the battery and fully charged (and repeated). No effect. I've also spent an hour with Apple support doing a full IoS restore and that hasn't helped.

My next years 2 year iphone upgrade cycle may just go elsewhere if it can't prove to be reliable.

I am having the same problem since 7.0.3 update. My IPhone 5 shuts itself off at 35%. I don't know if if the battery is really low and the % is wrong. But it is very troublesome, I hope Apple gets it fixed asap

Just to add to the list, since the iOS 7.0.3 update, my iPhone 5 also burns very quickly through the battery life, in spite of my having shut off several unnecessary sources of drain. It then often shuts down with as high as 30% battery life remaining. It does this unpredictably and then prevents me from restarting until I attach it to a power source. Not happy!

have an update on my issue.

A new phone!

Fortunately, we are close to an Apple store.

My husband ended up bringing my phone. I would say i'm a heavy user of my phone. Lot's of streaming, plugged in at work all day, plugged into a sounddock overnight.

The Genius said it was a hardware failure.

A replacement phone is given a 3mo warrenty.

BACK UP your device, as a precaution, would be the advice!

With my frequent shut down, the next step was a restore, i was able to connect to iTunes, and backed my phone up. The next day my phone would not come back to life.

the replacement phone was not able to be backed up, to the backed up version of the failed phone, due to the new software version.

I think it gave me an option to restore and maybe pick a version to back up to against, but, i gave up.

I just said it was a new phone and backed it up agains the August back up.

I lost information from August to November. (Think Memo's, new phone numbers, and photos).

I am also having serious battery issues since upgrading to iOS 7.03. Same sympton of phone shutting off with >15% battery left. Also sometimes when using the iPhone my battery will drop 10-15% within a matter of a minute. I really think the culprit is iOS 7.03. Hopefully Apple will provide an updated firmware soon to fix this (but i doubt they will ever publicly acknowlede that there is an issue).

As listed in previous posts, I am the minority here in that I have the iPhone 5 but have not updated to the new iOS7 but experiencing all the same issues. Therefore, I cannot say for sure it is not due to the iOS7 update, but since I am still on iOS6 there could be multiple reasons for the same behavior.

Regardless, I would be curious if any of this is tied to general battery age and not the iOS version. My phone is now going on 13 months. For those that post on this issue, could you also post the age of the phone to see if there is any common battery age that may be part of the root cause here. Thanks.