ios 9.2 battery drain (iPhone 6)

So I updated this evening to ios 9.2 on my iPhone 6 (from 8.4.2). I notice a significant decrease in battery life dropping 10% in 30 mins with very little use. It was totally fine before upgrade. The ironic thing was that I only upgraded because people were noting improved battery life with the new ios. I had been waiting for 9.2 to allow apple to get the bugs out.


I have tried reset with no change in behavior.


Oh well.


Any thoughts?


Thanks in advance.

Posted on Dec 10, 2015 5:24 PM

Reply
43 replies

Dec 22, 2015 4:42 AM in response to JasonKiddy

I did a "Reset All Settings" and for the last couple of days- things seem to have returned to normal. I couldn't find any music downloads (as reported by others) or anything else that pointed to the cause of the problem. I'm not going to get excited yet- as I know this has only worked temporarily for some others. I'm just glad I can get through a day without plugging in again.


My iPad Air 2 is still rapidly draining. The other two seem to have stabilized (without a reset, which is very strange). I'm going to reset it today to see if it makes a difference. I checked app updates on the phone to see if there was anything there. Nothing that updated was anywhere near the top of the battery meter.

Dec 26, 2015 2:01 AM in response to Ozdolphingirl

Unfortunately that was one of the first things I did, so no that's not the fix we (at least I) am looking for.


I tried again - completely wiped phone - no restore from backup. Background takss turned off. iCloud stuff all turned off. Not using battery save mode...

Phone sat unused = brilliant battery life. Almost no drain.


Added Gmail account for email and contacts and calendars = great battery life. Dropped 10% (down to 90%) over 11-ish hours.

So not being caused by Google.


I'm currently messing with the icloud settings/services like Lawrence has advised. Will advise when I have any conclusions.

Dec 28, 2015 10:12 AM in response to juvander

Seems that I did not manage to fix the whole issue with this backup, only part of it 😟

I was looking at device statistics with dev tools and saw that my device managed to get into sleep mode and then almost immediately after this woke up again.

Once I disabled wlan, I noticed that Calendar is using quite a lot of network bandwidth (saw this under mobile data statistics) even I had disabled and deleted all calendars except the one on phone which cannot be disabled. So it should not really have any reason to consume any network bandwidth at all.

After I disabled mobile data from Calendar, phone was able to get into sleep for 3/4 of the time so much better than before, but still not where it was with earlier version.

So with current 9.2 version I can get more usage time from my phone when wlan is disabled, this used to be opposite...

I've stopped my investigations now, can get two days of usage now with this setup so I can wait for Apple to fix this issue in next version 🙂

There seems to be - at least Calendar - forcing phone to stay awake, and also other system services consume quite a lot of network bandwidth without any good reason so something is trying to do something with network pretty much all the time and consuming battery at the same time.

Jan 7, 2016 12:41 PM in response to Boating Dave

Same issue here. iOS 9.2 on iPhone 6. Battery just started getting very warm and then dropping at roughly a percent a minute even when not in use.... Looks like 25% of battery usage was mail and 24% was calendar when I haven't even used those 2 applications. I tried turning off icloud sync for calendar and mail to see if that fixes the issue... Very frustrating to have to go through such headaches to figure out Apple's problem.

Jan 11, 2016 10:10 AM in response to juvander

Found even more issues:

  1. iCloud Backup, disabled this and got more juice
  2. Calendar sync, not just iCloud but also Office365 was giving issues
  3. Safari history. Even when I cleared Safari history, it did not sync anything to/from iCloud history. This *fixed* somehow during the past few days, not sure if it had anything to do with this issue.
  4. Google e-mail account. Deleting this gave a lot more battery life and after I had it off for a while I recreated account and this is now also working just fine
  5. Bluetooth. This is still an issue. I have one device that keeps connected to my iPhone (that was not the case before 9.2 update). Now that I keep this device in airplane mode and switch bluetooth on only when needed phone gets into standby.
  6. Noticed also lots of push notifications using network bandwidth and that dropped dramatically when I uninstalled Skype and Google Hangouts. Skype I have not yet reinstalled 🙂 to see what happens, Hangouts is back.


Now I have Standby time 24 hrs and Usage 2 hrs. Battery left still 79%. I would say that it is now even better than before 9.2 update.


And I have since enabled iCloud backup, both iCloud and Office365 calendar, Google e-mail account and Hangouts. Skype I will try one day.

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ios 9.2 battery drain (iPhone 6)

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