iOS 8.1.3 - Battery draining very quickly

My battery is draining like crazy since the update! My usage patterns have not changed at all and nothing additional has been installed.

i used to be able to go about 1.5-2 days on a single charge, now I'm at single digit percent battery at the end of a day when starting at 100% in the morning.

jbal77 wrote:

These suggestions are all great, but I shouldn't have to change my use behavior after upgrading to 8.1.3. No question it changed something dramatically, and I hope Apple fixes it asap.

It's not changing your behavior. It is "kicking" whatever app is stuck draining your battery. With over a million possible apps, finding the one causing the problem is impossible. Apple isn't able to fix what they can't control.

I should also add I've had screen hangs in Outlook app and in iOS swapping between app screens starting from home screen. Can't interact with what is being displayed or responsiveness slows to a stutter.

Larry, has your battery life remained stable after the reset? I am having the battery issue but am not so sure its 8.1.3 that's causing it. I upgraded the day 8.1.3 was released in late January but just started noticing the drain last week. So I am guessing one of my apps updated and is doing something wonky to my battery, but I can't figure out which it is. Maybe the app doesn't play nice with 8.1.3. But I've gone from 100% at 7:15AM EST, to 41% now at 1:30PM EST. a 60% drop in six hours of very little use. I hate to do a full reset and set up from new, but i may have to try that to narrow this bugger down.

Thanks for any update on your battery situation.

After doing the factory restore, restore from backup, and the email/exchange reset - things have been staying great! Very little drain during idle vs. what had been 10% an hour or more doing nothing. Phone is nice and cool overnight when plugged in too as it's not spinning it's wheels as it had been sucking power non stop.

Shouldn't have to do that stuff... but it definitely corrected what was wrong.

Ok, thanks. Glad to hear you've got it solved. I did a general settings reset but that hasn't helped. I'm afraid I need to do a complete reset and set up as new. But thanks.

I did other, various interim 'fix' attempts - some helped a little... but ultimately the nuke and pave option fixed everything and without question.

Ha! Sounds like an NHL move, "nuke & pave"!! Thanks.

OWC Larry:

Did you have to do those three things in that particular order (factory reset > restore from backup > delete/re-add Exchange account) in order for the fix to work?

I've got a 5s on 8.1.3 and have been experiencing some nasty battery drain and overheating. Not to mention that nothing too suspicious shows up on system services or battery usage to account for the added power consumption. I followed the steps you outlined but it didn't work too well. So now I'm wondering if maybe I got the order of operations wrong?

(I've also done the Network Settings reset, all settings reset, decoupled Exchange calendar for awhile, etc., etc.)

So I loaded Battery Doctor onto my iPhone to see how much RAM is being used. With all apps closed (except Battery Doctor) my RAM usage is quite high around 70% or so. That seems like a lot. I only have 5 apps on my iPhone (Twitter, LinkedIn, banking, Battery Doctor, and BBM). Most of those closed a lot of the time, and they don't show up in SS or BU to any great extent.

Thoughts?

I did these things in that order.... You mention doing settings resets... that's all within the phone and doesn't do a firmware restore. if you look at my post earlier - the solution I ended up using returned my phone to 'fresh' just like it was out of the box - and then I did a restore from backup after that... Things we're MUCH better after that - had a lingering issue with my email, but battery was not draining like it had been... did the exchange account clear and reload - and all has been perfect since and I think my battery is lasting even longer.

before I went through this stuff... I did the settings resets and such that didn't require messing with a full wipe and restore and had limited benefit. Was not as bad - but was still terrible.

roscoe108 wrote:

So I loaded Battery Doctor onto my iPhone to see how much RAM is being used. With all apps closed (except Battery Doctor) my RAM usage is quite high around 70% or so. That seems like a lot. I only have 5 apps on my iPhone (Twitter, LinkedIn, banking, Battery Doctor, and BBM). Most of those closed a lot of the time, and they don't show up in SS or BU to any great extent.

RAM has absolutely nothing to do with battery usage, and Battery Doctor itself uses a huge amount of battery. RAM usage should be close to 100% for most efficient use of the phone's memory (not storage). The phone has 1 GB of RAM. As iOS is a Unix-based operating system, virtual memory management is an intrinsic feature. When an app runs or requests memory iOS first looks for an available free block. If there is none large enough it moves existing app data around to make a single block large enough. And if there still isn't enough it pages out the oldest app to storage to make room for the request. Having a lot of free memory means that either you aren't using many apps or memory management is not working properly.

The only problem with a restore from backup is if you have a bad or corrupted app that is part of the backup, you will have the same problem. I did a complete restore and used a recent backup to set the phone back up and the problem with the battery came back....one reason I think I have a bad app. I am going to do a restore but set the phone up as new and go thru the painful process of setting everything up again and manually adding my apps.

Fair enough. I only mentioned the RAM since I've had an iPhone 5 and 5c in the past, both of which ran Battery Doctor (mainly for the trickle charge feature), but on those phones (A6 chip) RAM usage never got higher than 45% or 50% even with lots of apps running. So 70% on a faster/better chip seemed like a lot to me.

Just trying to narrow down the problem here.

Can't disagree with that... but as my issues started immediately after the 8.1.3 update was installed - no prior issue with battery life or finding the phone really heated up after a night of charging (cause the **** thing never went idle) - seemed worth the shot and had read others successful with this strategy.

It is a major PITA. Was a last resort... but took care of the problem for me. Just note to have Encryption on for your backup if you are using the Health App for tracking data. That data isn't backed up otherwise.

Funny, but the biggest culprit for battery usage under the usage section of the settings it the Home & Lock screen and Settings. Weird.