IOS 9.2 Rapid Battery Drain Issue

Your solution helped. My iPhone 6 is back to "normal". Thank you

After I downgraded, I found that my wife had upgraded her identical iPhone 6 without the battery issue. She had not done the suggested Verizon carrier update as part of the upgrade, though. So I upgraded again and clicked "cancel" on the carrier update. It has been a couple days now with no battery problems.

If you're not on Verizon that obviously doesn't help much, and it's possible that the (third) restore just fixed some issue unrelated to the carrier update. But it might be worth a try to restore and ignore the carrier update if you're on Verizon.

I went online and figured out how to uninstalled the iOS 9.2. It was a hassle but I'm back to 9.1. The battery issue is gone and my phone responds much better than before. I had to pretty much erase everything and start from scratch but I saved what I could before I did it. It took more than an hour to complete but so far it was worth it. So you can listen to the only guy on here that keeps trying to tell everybody that it's an imaginary problem and that it happens every time you update your phone or you can believe your own eyes and make up your own mind. My issues started when I updated to iOS 9.2. I've owned apple products since the first iPhone And iPad. I've updated and used them with minor issues if any... Until this time. My phone is acting better now that I'm on iOS 9.1. I'm going to wait until the next update comes out and all the bugs are worked out before I update again. Good luck.

Lawrence has been extremely helpful and I greatly appreciated his efforts. He has indicated that every upgrade brings battery related issues but in this case, I am in a situation that makes my IPad essentially unusable. After verifying via Apple support that there are no known defects or problems with my IPad, I would like to revert back to the previous IOS firmware. I haven't done this before and didn't think it was possible, that being said I would like to do this ASAP. If anyone could show or indicate the steps, I would be very appreciative. My specs (if needed) IPad 4 32g currently running 9.2 with extreme battery drain issues. I feel with the number of complaints, Apple with address with an update soon but until then I am without an IPad.

thanks!

idigitaltimes was the site I used with instructions on how to downgrade from iOS 9.2. But there are multiple sites with the instructions. Type in "how to downgrade from iOS 9.2" in your search bar and it should come up. You will need a desk top to complete. it has instructions for all devices but I think you only have a certain amount of time before Apple shuts the door on the old IOS. My phone is faster and the battery life is significantly longer. Hope this helps.

As long as you save the .ipsw file locally it doesn't matter what Apple does. You can restore to iOS 9.1 forever. That's what I'm going to do in case they screw it up again with the next update. I've already got my local full iPhone backup on iTunes and I will revert rather than endure horrific battery life.

Paul, thanks for posting the solution right up front, below your initial post. I'm just prepping to follow your solution. I'll post an update once I've attempted it and have some substantial results for several days.

I too have done the 9.2 update on a 6 month old iPhone 6 only to find my stellar battery performance has been rapidly reduced. In my case, battery performance went down hill over a matter of days where prior to the update, I didn't need to charge for several days, then it seemed I had to charge every day and a half to the point last night where I had 100% to this morning where it was unresponsive at 2%. Checking the Settings -> Battery shows it's the Home & Lock screen that ate 98% of the battery over the past 24hours and the only other app that was active was solitaire. This is either a result of the OS update I did earlier this week or coincidentally my battery just bit it. Either way, it's not a good thing. I had an IPhone 3S on its original battery until June this year so I'm used to good battery life.

I Like the new CEO at Apple but it seems that QA has been lacking since Steve Jobs left us. I love the hardware but the OS's are taking a page from Windows as of late. My MBP retina and new 5k iMacs at work run El Capitan but my 2009 iMac running Mountain Lion is faster at everything except rebooting, especially anything network related. Hopefully, they'll do some soul searching, come to terms with the fact that things are slipping and make some improvements.

Thanks Lawrence. Your solution worked like charm and battery life is back to solid state.

Just some follow up info I've garnered over the past couple of days. I didn't have to resort to a complete reset but I have got my battery life back. It seems in the case of my phone, it has to do with Cellular usage of Maps, Safari, Mail or Weather. I turned off cellular for all apps except for Find Phone and Pay by Phone and the battery no longer looses power. In 24 hours, it's gone down to 88% and shows that it has 24 hours of standby left.

Initially when I saw that my battery was starting to rapidly deplete last week, I turned off all of the apps that had cellular access turned on. I alway have push notifications turned off but there were a few apps that had cellular access. I only left turned on Find my phone, Pay By Phone, Maps, Safari, Mail and Weather. On the weekend after finding this discussion, I backed up the phone and prepared to reset it but I had to go out so on a whim, I shut off Cellular for Maps, Safari, Mail and Weather. Since then it's held power just fine. I'll have to experiment by turing one on at a time to find out which one is leaky.

Good troubleshooting!

Hi Lawrence,

My iPhone 6S was experiencing all the symptoms as mentioned in this thread, battery went from using 60% per day to flat in 3 hours. Your reset/fix really did the trick, all back to normal - Cheers!!

Have a good Xmas.

Jason

My iPhone 6s battery started dying overnight, even with as much as a 70% charge. I am out of the country right now and didn't purchase an international plan so I have it on airplane mode, have bluetooth off, and only use the phone as a camera or while connected to wifi. Even with this minimal use, I was having to charge my phone twice a day. This morning, upon plugging my phone in and getting it to restart, I checked the battery usage and it said "Usage: 8hr 37 min -- Standby: 8hr47" which was clearly not accurate as I was asleep for about 6 of those hours. Before going to bed each night I make sure that all apps are closed. There should have been nothing going on in the background either, I make sure everything is shutdown except for the actual power. Like someone else mentioned, a few days ago that Carrier Settings (Verizon) notification popped up. I ignored it a few times and then out of annoyance just clicked yes. That's when the problems started.

Since resetting my phone as directed in the original post, my battery life has gone back to normal. My only warning is to NOT do this if you are out of the country as you can not reactivate the phone until you are back in the US. I can't even restore the backup from iTunes and I'm not sure why. So I've had the headache of trying to let people know they need to now text me using my email address or FaceBook messenger which is a pain when I depend on texts for work.

If anyone has any idea on how to restore my phone from iTunes, it would be greatly appreciated, as I would then have access to my contacts again. The notification I keep getting after plugging my phone is "The iPhone 'Marisa's iPhone' cannot be used because it requires a newer version of iTunes" but I know that my iTunes on my compter is fully up do date and after going to iTunes.com like the notification prompted, it offered no help in updating iTunes on my phone. Any help is appreciated.

I am having a similar problem with my iPad. There has to be a better way than this to fix a problem created the iOS software team. Not surprised by the reaction at the store. Apple's approach to problems they create is to not admit them and roll out another update before too many people catch on. 5 updates in three months demonstrates how far the ios software developers have fallen. When will this be fixed

What version of OS X are you running on your computer? In order to use the latest version of iTunes (12.3.2), you need to be running OS X version 10.8.5 or later.

http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

I have the same issue with my iPad Air after the update. Can I follow the same process to try to reset and get the battery life back?