kbd process draining battery, solved.

Just wanted to share my solution.

My wifes iPhone5, soon after upgrade to iOS7, suddenly went down to 3-4 hours battery time. Getting warm while not in use.

Installing one of many system tools showed that the cpu was permanently on about 50-60%

Unfortunately those tools cannot show you which process is using the cpu, or how much memory they use.

Installed Apples developer tool XCODE on the MacBook, and connected the phone.

Now I could look at all processes, similar to Windows Activity Monitor.

There I found the kbd process using the cpu and a couple of hundred megs of memory.

This now started to make sense, since another symptom was the inability to use keyboard shortcuts.

Google showed me many threads in communities where this topic was discussed, but no suggestions really worked.

Ok, I tried many things in different orders, but I think I can conclude it like this:

(Before you do anything, back up your phone first!)

- Delete iCloud account from the phone (but keep data). This seems to be a problem with corrupt data trying to sync.

- Delete all keyboard shortcuts. This process took about 1 min for each shortcut, the phone completely froze while deleting.

- Enable iCloud again.

A couple of restarts here and there won't harm.

You might also need to reset your keyboard dictionary. I did, but I don't know if it was part of the solution.

The 'bug' here was obviously corrupt, or bad in some other way, keyboard shortcuts, that also tried to sync with iCloud.

We are Swedes, hence using Swedish settings. I don't know if that made things worse 😉

If you have the same problem but this didn't help, try Google again! There's always an answer!