Battery drain on iPhone 5s after iOS 7.1 OTA Update

I was able to fix my battery problem with the upgrade fairly easily today. I closed any open apps and then powered down the iPhone by holding down the top button and swiping the power off icon. I powered up the phone after 30 seconds and now my battery is no longer draining. I have had to do this on other upgrades. Folks may try this first before they go through a restore operation. Sometimes simple works.

I have noticed that if you put the iphone in airplane mode the drain stops. So then I did some tests. I turned off celluar data and 3g and started with celluar data turned on.Very little drain(normal) Then I turned on 3G...The iphone felt warm and the battery started to drain rapidly! So I don't know if it's the IOS 7.1 or something completely different. Cause I didn't noticed a major battery drain till yesturday.(a week after i installed IOS7.1) My iphone 4s was at 97% when I started my shift last night and 3 hr's later I checked it and it was shockenly down to 23%!! Nothing different running. So that's when i did the tests with the 3g.

This morning I did a back up and full restore of the IOS 7.1 Did a test again. wifi on there was very little drain. Again switch to 3G in sleep mode with nothing running in the background. And within 45mins(Was watching the lastest episode of the walking dead) check the phone. Down to 90%. So that leaves me to believe the 3G is sucking too much energy. For what I don't know. Maybe push notification or locational services. I don't know.

Everyone else try that test and see if it's happening to you aswell.

Hope this gets resolved soon.

Thanks,

Mike

Here is an update to my previous problem with 3G and battery drain. Found out there was a program that was(spinning it's wheels) in the background that was killing my battery.I was advised by some friends to look for a program that does memory and file clean up. I use to have a program called Battery Doctor before. So I redownloaded it and tried it out. And forsome reason it worked! What ever program that was trying to update or redownload in the background was stopped. I even did a reboot and everything is still good! Battery drain is back to normal for now. Will update if anything changes. So give it a shot and see if it helps you.

Good luck!

beijng kingsoft internet security. Hope it helps! Good luck!

Lawrence, with respect, stating your opinion as fact does nothing to help anyone. For the record I have both a 5S and Retina Mini that are each less than 4 months old, and my battery life with 7.1 has halved on both compared to 7.0.6 and below with the same usage pattern.

I've reset all settings, restored from backups and restored both devices as new, and nothing has helped. Are you suggesting I have two separate batteries that both magically failed around the time I upgraded to 7.1? Please.

For me at least, none of the purported fixes has helped in the slightest. My partner's iPhone 4 does however seem fine, although her first gen iPad mini (new at Xmas) also now drains faster. These devices were a mix of iTunes and OTA updates, so no pattern there either.

There is definitely an issue with 7.1 and some Apple hardware that results in significantly reduced battery life.

blackhawk2479 wrote:

Lawrence, with respect, stating your opinion as fact does nothing to help anyone. For the record I have both a 5S and Retina Mini that are each less than 4 months old, and my battery life with 7.1 has halved on both compared to 7.0.6 and below with the same usage pattern.

Going back the 6 years that I have been following the forums there have been posts identical to yours after every release that has ever come out, just substituting the then current version number for 7.1. Unless 7.1 is a completely different animal, or that every one of the thousands of posters from earlier versions were lying, the most logical explanation is that it has nothing to do with the specific version number, but is an artifact of the upgrade process rather than the version. For the record I have noticed no difference between 7.1 and 7.0.x, and 7.0 gave me significantly better battery life than 6.x on my 4S, and my 5S has noticeably better battery life than the 4S. You can believe it is specifically 7.1 if you desire, but that won't help fix it. Doing some of the standard troubleshooting steps most likely will resolve it.

Have you Restored as New, added no apps, no email accounts or any other content and still observed decreased battery life? I very much doubt that you have.

atchyut wrote:

Thanks Lawrence, the problem seemed to be resolved. But, there is a new thing that i noticed today. I am one of the few prople use voice guided navigation in apple maps, i notticed today that the words were being chopped. Example if i needed to take exit onto I-10 south, I am hearing it say "take exit onto I-10 Sa"

I recently had the misfortune to use Apple Maps. I won't make that mistake again. Yes, I've noticed the voice clippling. But that is the least of the problems. I recently used Apple Maps in Austin, TX. The instructions said "Keep right to Route 71 East" and the little map showed a right exit. Except the right exit was to Route 71 WEST, and East was a LEFT exit. However, the map and the exit were correct; I needed to go West. The next instruction told me to take route 183 SOUTH, again a right exit, that went to 183 NORTH. And again the exit direction and map were correct, the verbal instructions were wrong. Finally, it told me I had arrived at my destination. It wasn't visible. So I switched to Google maps and found that Apple maps had left me 2 miles from my destination, and not even on the right road. Never again!

That is where you are wrong, because I have, and observed a drop of 12% overnight as a fresh phone with nothing installed (except iCloud which I turned on during the set up), versus half that prior to 7.1 with 5 email accounts and hundreds of apps. Is it that inconceivable to you that there could be a bug with location services - maybe carrier specific, or a system service - maybe hardware specific?

I've had previous updates reduce battery life, and as you rightly point out a combination of resetting settings, removing and re-adding emails, or restoring has fixed it every time in the past, I've never previously had to resort to restoring as new.

But that is irrelevant - I should be able to have the same email accounts and apps as I did in ios 7, without such a noticeable change in battery life. I did not buy a brand new 5S just to text, call and observe the time - phones costing 1/100th as much can do that.

If you haven't tried restoring as new with no email accounts you haven't demonstrated anything. Yes, the mail app could have been corrupted during the upgrade because it was interrupted in mid-process. This has happened commonly with every other upgrade. Especially with Push email accounts such as MS Exchange, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo. While it is conceivable that 7.1 has a different problem than every other version that has ever come out, this is unlikely. And if it is 7.1, why do I net see the problem with 7 email accounts and 200 apps?

Try my suggestion - or not. Alternatively, for your IMAP, Exchange, Yahoo and Hotmail accounts that can sync back to the server (and thus not lose any data) try deleting the acccounts, rebooting the phone, and added them back. This has fixed suddenly appearing battery problems for the past 6 years. I would be very surprised if it doesn't for 7.1.

When a problem is tied to a specific version update there are (literally, and I mean literally) tens of thousands of posts about it. I haven't seen any voluume like this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3391947 on 7.1.

"If you haven't tried restoring as new with no email accounts you haven't demonstrated anything."

That's exactly what I did, as stated in my previous post - I set the phone up as new, enabled only iCloud as part of the set up procedure, but did not add anything else (no emails, no apps) and I lost more charge overnight that night than previous nights on 7.1 with 5 email accounts and hundreds of apps.

I agree that previous battery issues that have arisen post-update were all almost certainly non version-specific, but in my case, with 7.1 that is simply not true - something else is afoot. A blank phone with nothing except iCloud enabled loses more battery on 7.1, than fully loaded with apps and email accounts on 7.0, on standby.

Moreover, I have lost 3% charge on my restored iPad mini, literally just typing this response.

"previous nights on 7.0.x with 5 email accounts and hundreds of apps" that should say, sorry!

I have tried several times to get the app for the iphone but it will not get it. It is not in the US Apple App Store. It switches over to a UK or Chinese APP Store but then it doesn't show the app to download to the iPhone. I however got the app for the iPad but now it is impossible to get the app for the iPhone. How do I go about getting the app for the iPhone now

I could not get for the Life of Me the Battery Doctor that is for iPad that is mae by Beijin Kingsoft Internet Security however I found one thas a exact replica looks exactly like it but made developed by KS Mobile Inc. Everything looks the same not one thing looks different about it and it is called Battery Saver - Improve the Battery Life that is what I found as the other I could not get for the life of me as I tried numerous times and nothing come up on the App Store for me to Download install into iTunes then to iPhone unlike that of the one for the iPad.

I figured out how to get it. You got to go into your iTunes account and change the country to China and put a zip code to it and then you follow what iTunes needs you to do then you can download and install the app. Just to let you all know what I did to get the app on my iPhone unlike the iPad did not need to do all that.