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iOS 8.1.3 - Battery draining very quickly

Since installing iOS 8.1.3 on my iPhone 6 the battery has started to drain very quickly with little to no use. Anybody else having the same problem

iPhone 6, iOS 8.1.3

Posted on Jan 30, 2015 6:44 AM

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Posted on Jan 30, 2015 3:51 PM

Hi, same issue here with iPhone5 after update to 8.1.3 battery consume of device is not normal, safari also takes much more battery..

269 replies

Feb 8, 2015 6:26 PM in response to OWC Larry

Seriously, try this.


I my wife's iPhone 5 was suddenly experience excessive data communication and consequential battery drain. I replicated the problem on my 5s.


Try this as it stopped the drain.


go to the http://appleid.apple.com

click on 'Manage my Apple ID'

Sign in using your Apple ID that your are using in iCloud settings

If you are then prompted to update your password, then I'll bet your problem is solved.


iOS is not handling the demand to update the password. The website does. This puts iOS in an endless background loop that depletes the battery very quickly.


Otherwise, there is something going on that I have yet to uncover.

Feb 9, 2015 8:13 AM in response to bjmcmurry

Alright - seems things may be okay now. Going to watch it a little longer.


I didn't have any iCloud issue. But did a full settings reset this morning after the phone was warm again after being on the charger all night and was clearly up to no good / didn't standby, etc.


So far this morning, battery use looks like it is back to normal. After 3 hours off the charger, it's still at 93% with light use vs. dropping about 10% per hour even doing nothing.


The setting reset mean have to reselect your wall paper and wireless network - do some other things just like when you first set up a new phone, redo fingerprints - reset up Apple Pay... but passwords and even the web pages you had open in safari all hold and stay.. not data destructive and, at least in my case, appears to have fully solved the problem. I left all those location services I had on before on now as well.


I hate doing resets like this - but glad it seems to have nailed it.


Settings > General > Reset > Reset All Settings

Feb 9, 2015 8:26 AM in response to OWC Larry

I'm sorry that some users are face with battery drainage, but an article that seems quite helpful. Take a peek


1. Turn on Auto-Brightness

Adjust that setting by tapping:

  1. The Settings app
  2. Display & Brightness (it's called Brightness & Wallpaper in iOS 7)
  3. Move the Auto-Brightness slider to On/green

2. Reduce Screen Brightness

You can control the default brightness of your iPhone screen with this slider. Needless to say, the brighter the default setting for the screen, the more power it requires. Keep the screen dimmer to conserve more of your battery by tapping:

  1. The Settings app
  2. Display & Brightness (it's called Brightness & Wallpaper in iOS 7)
  3. Move the slider as needed


3. Stop Motion & Animations (iOS 7)

One of the coolest features of iOS 7 is called Background Motion. It's subtle, but if you move your iPhone and watch the app icons and background image, you'll see them move slightly independently of each other, as if they're on different planes. This is called a parallax effect. It's really cool, but it also drains battery. You may want to leave it on to enjoy the effect, but if not, turn it off by tapping:

  1. The Settings app
  2. General
  3. Accessibility
  4. Reduce Motion
  5. Move slider to green/On

4. Disable Dynamic Backgrounds (iOS 7)

Another neat feature introduced in iOS 7is animated wallpapers that move underneath your app icons. These dynamic backgrounds offer a cool interface flourish, but they also use more power than a simple static background image. Dynamic Backgrounds aren't a feature you have to turn on or off, just don't select the Dynamic Backgrounds in the Wallpapers & Backgrounds menu.

5. Turn Bluetooth Off

Bluetooth wireless networking is especially useful for cell phone users with wireless headsets or earpieces. But transmitting data wirelessly takes battery and leaving Bluetooth on to accept incoming data at all times requires even more juice. Turn off Bluetooth except when you’re using it to squeeze more power from your battery.Find it in:

  1. The Settings app
  2. Bluetooth
  3. Move slider to Off/white

You can also access the Bluetooth setting through Control Center. To do that, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and tap the Bluetooth icon (the center one) so that it is grayed out.


6. Turn Off LTE or Cellular Data

The nearly perpetual connectivity offered by the iPhone means connecting to 3G and speedy 4G LTE cellular phone networks. Not surprisingly, using 3G, and especially 4G LTE, requires more energy to get the quicker data speeds and higher-quality calls. It’s tough to go slower, but if you need more power, turn off LTE and just use the older, slower networks. Your battery will last longer (though you’ll need it when you’re downloading websites more slowly!) or turn off all cellular data and either just use Wi-Fi or no connectivity at all.To do this:

  1. Tap Settings
  2. Cellular
  3. Slide Enable LTE to Off/white to use slower cellular data networks while still allowing yourself to use cellular data
  4. To limit yourself just to Wi-Fi, slide Cellular Data to Off/white


7. Keep Wi-Fi Off

The other kind of high-speed network that the iPhone can connect to is Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is even faster than 3G or 4G, though it’s only available where there’s a hotspot (not virtually everywhere like 3G or 4G). Keeping Wi-Fi turned on at all times in hopes that an open hotspot will appear is a sure way to drain your battery life. So, unless you’re using it right this second, keep Wi-Fi turned off by tapping:

  1. The Settings app
  2. Wi-Fi
  3. Slide to Off/white

You can also turn off Wi-Fi via Control Center. To access that setting, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and tap the Wi-Fi

8. Turn Off Location Services

One of the coolest features of the iPhone is its built-in GPS. This allows your phone to know where you are and give you exact driving directions, give that information to apps that help you find restaurants, and more. But, like any service that sends data over a network, it needs battery power to work. If you’re not using Location Services, and don’t plan to right away, turn them off and save some power.Turn off Location Services by tapping:

  1. The Settings app
  2. Privacy
  3. Location Services
  4. Slide to Off/white


9. Turn Off Other Location Settings

The iPhone can perform a lot of useful tasks in the background, but the more background activity there is, especially activity that connects to the Internet or uses GPS, can drain battery quickly. Some of these features in particular are not required by most iPhone users and can be safely turned off to regain some battery life.Find them in:

  1. The Settings app
  2. Privacy
  3. Location Services
  4. System Services
  5. Turn off Diagnostics & Usage, Location-Based iAds, Popular Near Me, and Setting Time Zone.



10. Prevent Background App Refresh (iOS 7)

There are a number of new features in iOS 7 designed to make your iPhone smarter and ready for you whenever you need it. One of these features is Background App Refresh. This feature looks at the apps you use most often, the time of day that you use them, and then automatically updates them for you so that the next time you open the app, the latest information is waiting for you. For instance, if you always check social media at 7:30 am, iOS 7 learns that and automatically updates your social apps before 7:30 am. Needless to say, this useful feature drains battery.To turn it off, tap:

  1. The Settings app
  2. General
  3. Background App Refresh
  4. Either disable the feature entirely or just for for specific apps that you want to use it with



11. Don't Automatically Update Apps (iOS 7)

If you've got iOS 7, you can forget needing to update your apps by hand. There's now a feature that automatically updates them for you when new versions are released. Convenient, but also a drain on your battery. To only update apps when you want to, and thus manage your power better:

  1. Tap the Settings app
  2. iTunes & App Store
  3. In the Automatic Downloads section, find Updates
  4. Move slider to Off/white


12. Turn Data Push Off

The iPhone can be set to automatically suck email and other data down to it or, for some kinds of accounts, have data pushed out to it whenever new data becomes available. You’re probably realized by now that accessing wireless networks costs you energy, so turning data push off, and thus reducing the number of times your phone connects to the network, will extend your battery’s life. With push off, you’ll need to set your email to check periodically or do it manually (see the next tip for more on this).Find it in:

  1. The Settings app
  2. Mail, Contacts, Calendar
  3. Fetch New Data
  4. Push
  5. Slide to Off/white


13. Fetch Email Less Often

The less often your phone accesses a network, the less battery it uses. Save battery life by setting your phone to check your email accounts less often. Try checking every hour or, if you’re really serious about saving battery, manually. Manual checks means you’ll never have email waiting for you on your phone, but you’ll also stave off the red battery icon.Change your Fetch settings by tapping:

  1. The Settings app
  2. Mail, Contacts, Calendar
  3. Fetch
  4. Select your preference (the longer between checks, the better for your battery)

14. Auto-Lock Sooner

You can set your iPhone to automatically go to sleep – a feature known as Auto-Lock - after a certain amount of time. The sooner it sleeps, the less power is used to run the screen or other services. Try setting Auto-Lock to 1 or 2 minutes.Change the setting in:

  1. The Settings app
  2. General
  3. Auto-Lock
  4. Tap your preference (the shorter, the better)


15. Turn off Equalizer

The Music app on the iPhone has an Equalizer feature that can adjust music to increase bass, decrease treble, etc. Because these adjustments are made on the fly, they require extra battery. Turn the equalizer off to conserve battery. This means you'll have a slightly modified listening experience - the power savings might not be worth it to true audiophiles - but for those hoarding battery power, it's a good deal.Find it in:

  1. The Settings app
  2. Music
  3. EQ
  4. Tap off

16. Make Sure Personal Hotspot Is Off

This only applies if you use the iPhone's Personal Hotspot feature to share your wireless data connection with other devices. But if you do that, this tip is key.Personal Hotspot turns your iPhone into a wireless hotspot that broadcasts its cellular data to other devices within in range. This is a tremendously useful feature, but as you may have guessed if you've read this far, it also really drains your battery. That's an acceptable trade when you're using it, but if you forget to turn it off when you're done, you'll be surprised at how quickly your battery drains.To make sure you turn off Personal Hotspot when you're done using it:

  1. Tap the Settings app
  2. Personal Hotspot
  3. Move slider to off/white


17. Find the Battery Killers (iOS 8)

Most of the suggestions on this list are about turning things off or not doing certain things. This one helps you discover which apps are killing your battery. In iOS 8, there's a new feature called Battery Usage that shows which apps have been sucking the most power over the last 24 hours and the last 7 days. If you start seeing an app showing up there consistently, you'll know that running the app is costing you battery life.Access Battery Usage by tapping:

  1. The Settings app
  2. General
  3. Usage
  4. Battery Usage

On that screen, you'll sometimes see notes beneath each item (for instance, in the screenshot, notice "Low Signal" under Personal Hotspot). This note provides more detail on why the app drained so much battery and can suggest ways for you to fix it.


18. Don't Take App Suggestions (iOS 8)

Suggested Apps is another new feature of iOS 8 that uses your location information to figure out where you are, what you're near, and what apps—both installed on your phone and available in the App Store—might come in handy based on that information. It can be neat, but needless to say, it uses extra battery life by checking for your location, communicating with the App Store, etc.To turn off suggested apps:

  1. Tap the Settings app
  2. Tap General
  3. Tap Handoff & Suggested Apps
  4. Move the My Apps and App Storesliders to Off




19. One Common Mistake: Quitting Apps Doesn't Save Battery

When you talk about tips for saving battery life on your iPhone, perhaps the most common one that comes up is quitting your apps when you're done with them, rather than letting them run in the background.

This is wrong. In fact, regularly quitting your apps in that way can actually make your battery drain faster. So, if saving battery life is important to you, don't follow this bad tip.

For more about why this can do the opposite of what you want, read this.



20. Run Down Your Battery As Much As Possible

Believe it or not, but the more often you charge a battery, the less energy it can hold. Counter-intuitive, I know, but it's one of the quirks of modern batteries.

Over time, the battery remembers the point in its drain at which you recharge it and starts to treat that as its limit. For example, if you always charge your iPhone when it's still got 75% of its battery left, eventually the battery will start to behave as if it's total capacity is 75%, not the original 100%.

The way to get around your battery losing capacity in this way is to use your phone as long as possible before charging it. Try waiting until your phone is down to 20% (or even less!) battery before charging. Just make sure not to wait too long.


21. Buy an Extended Life Battery

If all else fails, just get more battery. A few accessory makers like mophie and Kensington offer extended life batteries for the iPhone. If you need so much battery life that none of these tips help you enough, an extended life battery is your best bet. With one, you’ll get days more standby time and many hours more use.

22. Do Less-Battery-Intensive Things

Not all ways to save battery life involve settings. Some of them involve the way you use the phone. Things that require the phone be on for long periods of time, or use a lot of system resources, suck the most battery. These things include movies, games, and browsing the web. If you need to conserve battery, limit your use of battery-intensive apps.

Feb 9, 2015 1:29 PM in response to Zahir Ahmad

OK, I am not convinced that there is a user-solvable action for this problem (other than just turning your phone off). I have tried the tweaks suggested by jfialkowski also the (rather inconvenient) resetting of my iCloud password. I even downgraded back to 8.1.2 but still by 5 pm my iPhone 5 is shot. I have asked all my friends and acquaintances with iPhones and the answer is always the same- BAD BATTERY LIFE WITH IOS8. I have been an Apple fanboy all my life but, you know, times change. Being beautiful just isn't enough- it has to work. My contract is up, and the Samsung S5 has a replaceable battery.... just sayin'

Feb 9, 2015 1:30 PM in response to jlfunder

I have to agree... and while doing the full reset seems to have had a positive benefit for whatever reason... Still seeing far higher drain rate than before this update hosed things up. More manageable now, but far from acceptable.


Shouldn't have issues like this and I regret updating to 8.1.3... and sounds hit or miss if the 8.1.2 downgrade will solve.

Feb 12, 2015 2:27 PM in response to pbm871

Well - yep... that seems to have done it for me as well.


Using Apple iTunes

Step#1 - connected and confirmed a full, complete current backup.


Step #2 - 'Restore iPhone'

option that is under the iOS 8.1.3 / phone is up to date info in the iPhone pane of iTunes with phone connected


This wipes out everything, restores/reloads firmware, returns to all factory fresh status


Step#3 - under 'manually Back up and Restore'

Selected the Restore Backup

and let it restore that latest backup.


Now the thing seems to be working fine. It's doing standby mode as it's supposed to and battery drain is much lower than it was before all this hassle began.

Feb 16, 2015 5:15 PM in response to jfialkowski

I too have been experiencing awful battery life on my iPhone 5s running 8.1.3. I tried everything (shutting off/on Exchange calendar, reset network settings, shut off this and that, full restore, etc.) but nothing was really working. But two clues helped me narrow it down. In Settings > Cellular > System Services, I noticed that "Exchange Accounts" was way up at 50+ MB over just the course of a day or two, while Mail showed up in Battery Usage around 30%. Plus, I kept getting these weird notifications in my Exchange calendar on my iPhone that I couldn't erase for some reason.


After some digging around, I found out that sometimes your calendar invites can be corrupted, which is problematic for Exchange ActiveSync and causes it to go into this neverending feedback push loop that uses up mad memory and battery. So you have to:


1. Erase the Exchange account from your iPhone

2. Reboot your iPhone

3. Go into your actual Outlook account on your workstation or laptop or whatever

4. Collect all replies from invitations you've sent out (especially those that involve booking resources like meeting rooms, etc.)

5. Delete those invite replies en masse

6. Delete them again out of your Deleted folder

7. Go back to your iPhone and re-add your Exchange account

8. Just to be safe, reset your network settings too

9. Allow iPhone to reboot


This worked for me because after I did all these steps, I went back to System Services and found that "Exchange Accounts" was in the kilobytes, not megabytes, range after a day or so. Also, my email's Battery Usage was down to about 10%. Oh yeah, and my phone lasted about twice as long.


I found this fix on some dude's blog, a help site for Windows IT administrators of all things. Here's the link: http://dan-israel.com/blog/it/iphone-suddenly-drains-battery-due-to-constant-pus h-polling/

Feb 17, 2015 6:58 AM in response to jfialkowski

I too had been experiencing awful battery life on my iPhone 5s running 8.1.3. I tried everything (shutting off/on Exchange calendar, reset network settings, shut off this and that, full restore, etc.) but nothing was really working. But a few clues helped me narrow it down:

  • In Settings > Cellular > System Services, I noticed that "Exchange Accounts" was way up at 50+ MB over the course of just a day or two, while Mail showed up in Battery Usage around 30%.
  • I also kept getting these weird calendar notifications on my iPhone that I couldn't erase for some reason. They were replies to meeting invitations that I had sent out, some were from people, some replies were from meeting rooms on Exchange that I had booked as resources.
  • After some digging around, I found out that sometimes your calendar invitations can become corrupted, which is problematic for Exchange ActiveSync and causes it to go into this neverending push loop that uses up memory and battery like mad. So you have to:
  1. Erase the Exchange account from your iPhone.
  2. Reboot your iPhone.
  3. Go into your actual Outlook account on your workstation or laptop or whatever.
  4. Collect all replies from invitations you've sent out (especially those that involve booking resources like meeting rooms, etc.). Just the replies, mind you, not the actual calendar events themselves.
  5. Collect invitations you've sent out from your Sent folder. Delete these too, since you'll never really know which invitation is the corrupted one.
  6. Delete all of the invitation replies and sent invitations en masse.
  7. Delete all of them again out of your Deleted folder.
  8. Go back to your iPhone and re-add your Exchange account.

This worked for me because after I did all these steps, I went back to System Services and found that "Exchange Accounts" was in the kilobytes range, not megabytes, after a day or so. Also, my Mail's Battery Usage was down to about 20%. Oh yeah, and a charge lasted about twice as long.


I found this fix on some dude's blog, a help site for Windows administrators of all things. Here's the original URL if anyone's interested. I'm not saying this will work for everyone, obviously, since not everyone gets work email on their iPhone. Even if you do, you may not be experiencing quite the same symptoms that I was (e.g. the mysterious undeletable calendar notifications, etc.). But this is a legitimate, if lesser-known, issue that does kill memory and battery life on iPhones.

This fix worked for me, hopefully it will help others too.

Feb 18, 2015 7:23 AM in response to Zahir Ahmad

Same issue, never had a battery problem until updating to iOS 8.1.3. I turned off all my iCould and sharing and it still has a battery life issue.


I believe it's the new Operating System 8.1.3.


There could be a new setting in the iOS that was automatically turned on which uses a lot of battery, but I can't find it to shut it off.


If anyone finds a solution please let me know.


The only fix at this point is to go backwards and re-install 8.1.2 again.

Feb 18, 2015 7:31 AM in response to coreyfromminneapolis

Since doing these things I noted above - my iPhone returned to nearly normal operation. NOTE - if you are using the Health app, make sure to turn encryption on for your backup, otherwise you lose your health data/it doesn't get backed up.


Also after I did the resets - my email was still wonky. Deleting my Zimbra/exchange account and re-adding it to the phone fixed some revisiting issue our IT advised was happening.


And now everything is great again - no battery issues at all. Not sure why 8.1.3 brought about these headaches, but back to smooth sailing.

===

Using Apple iTunes

Step#1 - connected and confirmed a full, complete current backup.


Step #2 - 'Restore iPhone'

option that is under the iOS 8.1.3 / phone is up to date info in the iPhone pane of iTunes with phone connected


This wipes out everything, restores/reloads firmware, returns to all factory fresh status


Step#3 - under 'manually Back up and Restore'

Selected the Restore Backup

and let it restore that latest backup.

====

Feb 18, 2015 12:13 PM in response to jbal77

I said as much earlier in the thread and couldn't agree more. In all the years since having the very first iPhone, this is the first time I've had a battery drain issue... and as I do like my device - glad to be able to focus on a solution to keep me liking it. Frustrating to have issue in the first place, not what I expect from an Apple product. But with that bridge crossed - all about the solution. That it now runs great again without battery life issue and with the normal services on - suggests something just worked out with the update and needed that fresh start. Annoying - but with the 'crisis' resolved, I can no longer complain. 🙂

iOS 8.1.3 - Battery draining very quickly

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