iPhone Battery Drain, 7.1.2, I Have A FIX!

Hello everyone! My name is Gabriel Chen and my iPhone has been having trouble with battery draining, and overheating. I'm here to tell you how to fix it. This is completely different from the rest of the posts because I've discovered something interesting and new.

Background (I'm a little long-winded, sorry. Just skip down to "What-to-Do" if you are pretty sure you've had the same problems as me):

I got my iPhone 5s when it first came out. It's battery life was amazing, then the fire nation attacked. Jokes aside, the battery became worthless about a month ago after I updated to 7.1.2. I thought the issue was 7.1.2, but now that I fixed it, I don't think it is. I took my phone into the apple store about a week ago because I was off to college and needed to fix this problem before I left. They ran diagnostics and found kbd and backboard errors. They immediately replaced it. I was happy because I had a brand new phone, but the battery issues came back, and this time even worse. My phone was burning up, even hotter and it even froze sometimes. I then took it to a store near my college–which was difficult because I have no car here–where they did a reset because that's what they always do. I sat there and played with the phone to make sure the problem wasn't there. Turns out it was still there. I love apple genius bar employees, but not all of them are very knowledgeable about the products and how they work. I don't blame them because: updates can always cause new problems, it's probably above their pay-grade to memorize what every single error code means, and they don't necessarily have knowledge that lets them troubleshoot any problems that involve hidden processes that their apple-issued easy-button diagnostic test doesn't tell them about.

I then approached another employee who helped me immensely. He knew something was wrong, which was awesome because most employees do tend to blow you off, so he decided he'd try to help me fix it. He had a lot more knowledge about the phone. This time he found kbd errors again so he replaced it. After that process, he disappeared into the back of the employee's only part of the store. I tried playing around with the phone, and it was clear that the problem persisted. I then went and got help again. This time, the new person who was helping me went to the back, and I waited around for about an hour and a half not knowing what was going on. The whole time, I was wondering where the first guy who helped me disappeared to. For the sake of convenience, the first person who helped me in this paragraph will be Ian, and the second will be Will. Will eventually came back out, this time bringing Ian along with him. Turns out Ian had been doing research for me in the back for the last 1.5 hours and found that the problem probably had to do with iCloud. My phone was draining and overheating due to its attempt to download some sort of data with no success. So each time it failed, it would retry over and over again. This explains the overheating and battery drainage. We deleted some stuff from iCloud and it got a lot better.

The next day though, the problem came back. I was so frustrated so I've been trouble shooting for the past 5 hours. Eventually, after 4 hours, I tried using different iTunes accounts. There was no battery drain when I used these. When I used my original account, there were still problems. So I tried turning off iCloud on my account. Still, I had no luck with it. I eventually tried something else which finally fixed it! My phone now no longer has problems with battery drain and overheating.

What-to-Do

1. Go to Settings —> iCloud —> Delete Account

Don’t worry, as long as you click “keep the stuff” or whatever it says, you won’t lose stuff

2. See if your batter still drains by leaving it on and watching the battery. Touch it and see if it’s heating up. If your battery is draining 1% every 2 minutes, it definitely is still having problems. It’s your own choice, but even if it does drain, I would follow the next step anyways. If it doesn’t drain, the issue definitely had to do with iCloud. Now, log in once again.

3. Make sure all of the iCloud data that you care about is stored some where other than iCloud. For example, make sure your Pages files are on your computer.

4. Go to Settings —> iCloud —> Storage & Backup —> Manage Storage. Then delete the stuff under Documents and Data. I REPEAT, DO NOT DELETE WITHOUT FIRST MAKING SURE THE DATA IS ON YOUR COMPUTER IN SOME SHAPE OR FORM

Why? What is probably happening is that there is probably data that is trying to get onto your phone. This data is failing to do so which is causing an infinite loop of effort and failure which drains your battery and makes your phone work really hard. Apple should code a fail-safe into this to stop the loop, but they haven’t yet.

5. You’re done with this part! For some of you, like me, your phone will stop draining. If so, you’re done! For some of you, it will start draining again! Here’s the part that took me 5 hours to figure out, mostly because I was just frustrated and venting.

6. If you’re still draining, go to Settings —> iTunes and App Store, and turn off SHOW ALL Music and Videos. What this feature does is it will display the purchased items that have not been downloaded, but are on your iTunes account, specifically Music and Videos, within the the corresponding apps. I understand that you probably like this feature and that you’re probably unhappy that I’m telling you to turn it off. This is a glitch or bug that Apple will probably come to fix if it comes to their attention eventually, so don’t worry. When they do fix it, you can turn these back on.

Why? For some reason, the battery drain was being caused either: by the phone failing to fetch data from your iTunes account, pertaining to purchased items such as songs and videos; or by the phone repeatedly fetching the data, instead of just holding it in place.

So, this fixed my phone completely. Please rate me up if that’s even possible. If you’re an Apple dude, I’d love to receive rewards if this was actually useful to you guys (haha, sorry I’m just a little proud of my accomplishment.) If it doesn’t work, try to trouble shoot and figure it out. If you would like clarification, feel free to comment or whatever it’s called. If this doesn't fix it, maybe try getting it replaced in an apple store because that might be the issue.