Is anyone else experiencing battery life issues due to iOS 8.1.3?

I agree with you LF. However, until this latest update I had no battery issues. I agree that often the problem lies with the update process and something gets out of whack. That's why I went the the full recovery road in order to delete everything and do a full fresh install. Which didn't work. I'm down to 60% by noon after this update and never had this happen before, that is until after this update. I am going to go through your article again and see what kind of improvement I can come up with. Thanks for the article.

When you did a fresh install did you restore your backup? If so, you restored whatever the problem was.

Sure did. But if I didn't have a problem before, how could I install a problem that didn't exist previously, hmmm? 😉

Because the corrupt data in the backup that causes the app to misbehave is restored by the backup.

This isn't something new; it's been discussed ad infinitum for 7 years, for every version that was ever released. You can go search the forum for more discussions. There's even one thread with 2.5 million views and 13,000 posts about it (although that one WAS a bug in the mail app that affected roughly 1% of iPhones).

I stand corrected, The back up I used was from earlier this week, prior to the update. Typically I back up using the cloud but about once a month I backup to my mac. I used the mac backup

Try restoring and setting up the phone as New. Test it before adding any email accounts or installing any apps. If it's OK try restoring a backup. If the problem comes back the problem is in the backup. BTW, did you try anything from my post in response to @melenga?

As I said before it was already turned off everything possible to save battery life, no push,no notification, no facebook,no background refresh..(I was thinking why I even need to have iphone 6 if turn everything off and dont use it ?:-)...it was rebooted multiple times....BUT...as you suggested, I deleted 8 apps,which I installed recently,(they wasnt causing any problem before upgrade to 8.1.3)...but seems they causing now, because after deleting them, the difference between usage and standby started showing correctly. I have to monitor more to see if it fix the problem, but at least now I can see improvement.

I guess new update wasnt compatible(?) with those apps? Very strange... Thanks for advice.

melenga wrote:

As I said before it was already turned off everything possible to save battery life, no push,no notification, no facebook,no background refresh..(I was thinking why I even need to have iphone 6 if turn everything off and dont use it ?:-)...it was rebooted multiple times....BUT...as you suggested, I deleted 8 apps,which I installed recently,(they wasnt causing any problem before upgrade to 8.1.3)...but seems they causing now, because after deleting them, the difference between usage and standby started showing correctly. I have to monitor more to see if it fix the problem, but at least now I can see improvement.

I guess new update wasnt compatible(?) with those apps? Very strange... Thanks for advice.

Try reinstalling those apps, one at a time. It's likely that you will be able to put back all of them and the problem will not come back.

BTW, I turn off NOTHING. I leave on Push with 4 email accounts (plus 2 POP3 accounts that don't push), all notifications on, I have background refresh on, WiFi on all the time, BlueTooth on all the time, all Location Services on, LTE on. I recharge overnight, every night, but I could go to every other night and still get through the 2 days on one charge. If your phone is working right you should be able to do this. The only exception may be FaceBook (I don't use it at all), which is a well-known battery hog. If your phone suddenly starts using more energy there's something wrong with an app, not with way you have features enabled or disabled.

Most of the tips to turn stuff off will have only marginal affect on battery life, and some of the tips are outright wrong. For example, it's a bad idea to turn off WiFi, because it uses less power than cellular, and it goes off anyway when the phone is asleep. And BlueTooth uses so little power you won't notice any difference between on and off. And killing apps in the Quick Launch screen can actually use more energy, because the apps have to be reloaded into RAM when they are again needed, either by you, or by received notifications.

Random iPhone 6 User - that's my problem too, as I DON'T want to start from a scratch with *three* mobiles all which started to show exactly same symptoms right after 8.1.2 -> 8.1.3 upgrade.

Best I could do is to do full encrypted backup update and do firmware restore + backup restore. That would be minimal work afterwards instead of configuring 3 x dozens of software again. Then again, as Lawrence hinted earlier, you might get the same bug from backup OR in case it's a faulty app you still need - all the work done for nothing.

What I did notice though is when I was away from home and started with 100% charge, the iPhone 6 Plus I carried with me actually started to behave normally e.g the Usage time again started to make sense and likewise the mobile went continuously to Standby when not actively used.

I'm thinking whether the latest version has some issues with be it iTunes wifi sync or e.g with Handoff, as e.g in my case I have had during the previous days three MacBooks running with iTunes on, and also the phones and computers mutually have Handoff enabled and e.g the iMessage is propagated to all the OS X/iOS devices. Maybe that's preventing now mobiles going to standby when at home...

I'll try to test today a bit more.

So far the battery drain since upgrade in practice:

iPhone 5:

16:04 100%, Usage 4min, Standby 5min

17:47 91%, Usage 1h 37min, Standby 1h 48min

20:24 71%, Usage 3h 56min, Standby 4h 25min

0:27 47%, Usage 7h 12min, Standby 8h 27min

9:08 dead, Usage 12h 58min, Standby 16h 57min

iPhone 5s:

16:04 100%, Usage 2min, Standby 5min

17:47 96%, Usage 1h 34min, Standby 1h 48min

20:24 82%, Usage 3h 53min, Standby 4h 25min

0:27 66%, Usage 7h 12min, Standby 8h 27min

8:53 37%, Usage 13h 4min, Standby 16h 53min

iPhone 6 Plus:

16:04 100%, Usage 5min, Standby 6min

17:47 98%, Usage 1h 35min, Standby 1h 49min

20:24 84%, Usage 3h 48min, Standby 4h 26min

0:27 61%, Usage 7h 6min, Standby 8h 28min

8:53 45%, Usage 12h 26min, Standby 16h 54min

-p

Ok, mobiles behaving again as normal here. I shut down my MacBooks. 🙂 I think the issue was either iTunes wifi sync or potentially the Handoff feature which prevented mobiles to enter standby - or they did something in the background much more often than otherwise. And whether this is by design and has been working like that always, or whether something works differently now with 8.1.3 vs 8.1.2 - don't know. What I do know is battery again looks like this some hours after finishing charging:

iPhone 5:

Similarly, iPhone 5s shows 100% after same hours since charging.

The background activity still eats some battery but that's fine given I purposefully have everything enabled be it wifi, bluetooth, background updates, location, .. whatever you can enable. 🙂

At least I didn't start the horrendous work of randomly restoring all the phones or deleting anything!