iPhone 5 shuts down with plenty of battery life left

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.

This an update to my earlier post of 3 days ago. My iPhone 5 is 13 months old running 7.0.3, and as I said it was shutting down at exactly 35% while I was using it showing a completely discharged battery which was not the case as it recharged to 100% in a short amount of time. I saw on another forum that shutting off Background App Refresh might improve the problem. I was suspect that this would help as none of those apps were even running in the background at the time but figured it couldn't hurt. Last night I used the phone for several hours downloading data files for an app. This time the battery drained right by 35%, got the 20% low battery warning, then got the 10% percent low battery, and finally I plugged it in at 7%. So I don't buy that it is a battery problem at all. It seems to me it is definitely a firmware problem in ios 7.0.3 that causes the shut down. I will update if I have more info to share, otherwise I hope Apple is working on the problem!

I am running IOS6 still on an iphone5 I have been having the same issues, so it isn't just an IOS7 issue. I also wondered what the lifespan of these batteries were - mine is almost 14 months. My battery drains quickly and I hought it was my bluetooth headset, but even with that off it's rediculous how fast it seems to drain. It has also been shutting down while using the camera when I have anywhere from 35-50% left. Once it did power up again a half hour later after showing the recharge symbol. I did not have to plug it in and when it did start it was back at the 45% mark. I have always tried to let my phone shut off before recharging, I would say about 80% of the time I try to zero it out, but now I am wondering if it was zeroed out or not. I am a heavy stream and picture/video taker and have always thought the battery drain was due to that, but it has gotten worse in the last couple of months as well as the shutdown issue starting more recently.

Well this is my 3 post on the issue and my one last night about the battery draining "normally" while I was home continued to lead me to believe it was not an battery issue. Well that changed today. Just to repeat from that posting, my iPhone is 13 months old. Well today is another day and I have learned more (I think).. On my very first post, I was out hiking and it was 40 degrees and I kept my iPhone in an outside pocket, an about an hour into the hike at 35% battery I tried to use the iPhone on Maps and it shut down as others have said. I just plugged it in when I got back to the car and drove home. Well today, I was hiking again and it was just around 40 degrees and the iPhone in the outside pocket again, an about an hour into the hike I tried to use maps at 43% and it just shut down as before and I got the battery DOA symbol again But now remembering last night in the house everything was fine (with a warm phone) and we all know lowering the temperature degrades battery performance, I did not plug the iPhone into the car charger when I got back to the car, instead I put it where the warm heater air blew on it as I drove 20 minutes back into town. Well amazing, with it warm-up'd the iPhone came back on when I pushed the switch and it read 45%! Now today's saga doesn't end here, when I got home, I immediately put the phone in my 39 degree refrigerator and left it there for about an hour to simulate the same conditions as hiking. Well you all have guessed the results, I took it out, it said 34% battery, I went to maps and it promptly shut down with the dead battery symbol... So my conclusion is that in my case an ageing battery does not perform when it gets abruptly cold and the Apple firmware battery level indicator has no why of detecting the impeding BATTERY "crash" when the Lithium Ions can not flow due to contracted electrode materials in the battery. My next Hike.... I will have a Garber Hand Warmer in my pocket with the iPhone keeping it nice and warm. I will update as I have information, and would be interested if anyone else might be have this problem because of iPhone cold ambient temperature conditions. But it is starting to look like it is a battery performance with age and temperature...

Ok, I would recommend anyone with this issue and a phone under warranty to call applecare asap. My phone was 13+ months old and it was diagnosed with a defective battery. My nephews phone which was 13 months old was also diagnosed as a defective battery. Last but not least my sisters phone was also diagnosed with a defective battery. You do not have to go into a store, they can walk you through running the diagnostics over the phone. If it is diagnosed as a defective battery and it is under warranty or applecare extended coverage they will replace the battery for free. My sister was still at IOS 6 and having battery issues also. Draining and reinstalling did not fix the issue for us. If you are under warranty I would call apple care asap before the warranty expires.

Hi Guys, i have been having the same issue as you guys on my iPhone 5, basically battery was draining alot without me really using it, and would drop suddenly from 60% to 40 % then down to 20% and then turn itself off within a matter of minutes, and i have been trying to find a solution to it since it started. I had re-installed IOS7 twice and this did nothing.

Yesterday i tried something different and so far it seems to have sorted my battery issue out. My battery was around 60% i was using it to look at twitter, it went down to 41% then down to 14% and then turned off after a couple of minutes, when i tried to restart it i got the connect charger flash up. So i thought i'll try to do a hard reset (hold down lock and home button at the same time), i tried a couple of times and the connect charger kept coming up, but the third time i did it, it restarted and i had 55% battery!! so i used for a bit and the same thing happened, dropped to 20% then 8% then turned off. I tried hard reset again a few times but nothing happened, so i waited about half an hour and tried it again, it came back on and was at 48% so then i tried to run the battery down by watching some tv over 3g and it lasted a very long time and the battery gradually went down, i stopped wathcing tv and just used it as normal until the battery was completely drained. Then i left it to charge up over night, and it is like my battery is back to normal, started using it this morning at about 8am, and i have been using it a fair bit, my daughter has watched a video on it and it is now 15:40 and i still have 68% left!! There is no way i could have done this before.

I had the IOS7 GM when it was first released and my battery was fine, so it seems like one of the releases after that has caused some kind of software problem where it doesn't use the battery's full capacity and it can't seem to work out how much battery is left or something. Doing the above worked for me so i thought i would share it with you guys incase it works for you?? And this also proves it is not a problem with the hardware.

Hope it works for you.

Same issue! A week ago my phone 5 started turning itself off when it was under heavy use but had 40-50% left of battery. Plugging it back in shoes it still has 50% left. It's an iOS update issue, there's nothing wrong with my battery. Hey, apple...are you listening? Fix this issue now or you're going to lose customers, I'm not paying $80 to replace a "faulty" battery! I'll just go get a different brand of phone.

Just a follow-up: in my case, I'm happy to report that the issue appears to have been corrected. Since my earlier post 10 days ago, I updated to iOS 7.0.4 and went through the full discharge/recharge cycle a few times. I didn't mention it in my previous post, but in my case the problem also seemed to occur more frequently when the phone was in a cooler environment. Since the discharge recycling and the iOS update, the battery life has again returned to "normal" and the cooler-temperature sensitivity seems to have gone too. My iPhone5 is almost 12 months old.

back again.

same exact thing happened again. 40% left on battery, listening to podcast, in camera mode walking, and the whole thing shut down.

i thought the recalibration (drain) had helped, but maybe not.

iphone 4s

ios 7.04

Iphone 5, started to experience the battery shut-off at 40% or so on ios6, upgraded to ios7 and still experienced the issue. Brought it into apple with 7 days left on the warranty and they determined it was defective and replaced the battery.

I'd suggest bringing it in if it's still under warranty.

Just an update to my previous post. I also made a genius appointment to have my phone examined. They ran a diagnostic and determined that the battery was defective. They replaced the battery under my Applecare+. Issue seems to have been resolved and my battery life is much improved. Perhaps the iPhone 5 had a bunch of defective batteries.

Not to repeat my previous posts outlining similar battery drain problems with iPhone 5 and ios6, I also had the Genius Bar confirm I had a defective battery two months out of warranty. Suggest anyone dealing with battery drain issues go and get it tested at an apple store instead of wasting time like I did with multiple battery drains and resets thinking it was helping.

I think you have hit the nail on the head. I started having issues with the battery when I started riding my motorcycle about a week ago. The phone shuts down at 30% and I can't turn it back on. I thought it was an issue with 7.0.3 but now that I think of it, it is probably a problem with having the phone in a colder place. This is very surprising since A. it's not that cold, min 60 degrees and B. the phone is close to my body. It seems like I wont be able to keep it in an external bag! good to know...

I'm running IOS 7.0.3 on an iPhone 5 and am having the same problems as many of the people here. The phone shuts down at 39%, then at 18%, then at 9%. I went to the Apple store this evening and they tested my battery and said there weren't any faults showing up with their diagnostic tool. They said it was likely to be a fault with the handset itself. They also said that since the phone was 12 days out of Warranty -- I'd have to pay £290 for a replacement handset.

I was obviously very unhappy with this. They suggested I try reinstalling the phone as a new phone in case it is a software issue. Specifically, they said that restoring it from a backup might "copy" a bug and not fix the problem so it would have to be a fresh install.

I'm a computer science lecturer and wasn't very convinced that a software bug would be causing this - if the OS were reading the battery level incorrectly, I'd expect different behaviour. I asked them to replace the battery. Had to pay £55 for it but so far the phone seems ok now with pop up alerts to indicate low battery levels at 20% and 10% with no unexpected shutdowns. Hoping this has fixed the problem.