iOS 10.1 Battery drain

"The battery draining issue is widespread though, no doubt. Apple's luck is that most of the people think it's their fault, eating up the frustration and just hold out till they are going to buy a new phone."

I cannot say how widespread the issue is. Of the people I know of personally there seem to be a lot with spontaneous shutdowns after upgrading to 10.1.1, but ultimately I couldn't say how many people are experiencing this issue.

This seems more like an OS glitch than an actual Battery issue. I'm not even sure that peoples batteries are actually "draining". Only the indicator would suggest so, but is the indicator functioning accurately even? And why the shutdowns when battery indicator seems to show a decent level of power left?

It seems more likely there is a problem with the OS properly interacting with the hardware responsible for sensing the power in the battery. A glitch of some sort.

Most of the people I have run into with this issue just think that their phones are crappy. The longer the issue is unresolved with such people, the more likely they will try and find another phone/solution for their lives.

That is why I think this issue can affect Apples bottom line if the problem is widespread and remains un-addressed for a long time.

But like I said, this isn't the first time such things have happened and Apple will be working diligently to fix the issue as they always do.

Ever had a brake, or brakes fail? Did you go blame the car manufacturer? Were they brand new or 1/2 years? Would you blame the manufacturer? Am fairly sure not.. A battery to phones is what tires and brakes are to car: a consumable that can end life based upon a miriad of variables.

Your community example: In Ottawa, the very rare cold January/February, a bunch of car owners all show up with electrical problems. Culprit: insufficient driving distance (less than 40 kms weekly for so many taking an awesome public system). Batteries fail.. And in spring, many canadian experience brake failure. Salt, insufficient driving etc. Point is, manufacturer has nothing to do with any of it. Be it some higher end cars do not rot, true.

Same for your iPhone concerns. Am here to point out that the issue does not exist except within very tiny statistic. Deductive logic BTW. Apple has 488 retail stores in 20 countries, been in two last two days, no phone battery issue going on. yes, some technicians have heard of it, but most had not troubleshot one. But that happens EVERY DAY SINCE IOS DEVICES EXCEEDED 1 BILLION OWNERSHIP. The only factual thing I am fairly sure of is that a battery issue you experienced developed, coincidentally, at the same time as the iOS10 rollout. One in 50 000 iPhone owners. statistics? yes they exist: Apple RMA and repair costs, published in their financial worksheet. As are the RMA parts numbers. So if you read those numbers you would understand that if 100 000 people have battery issues, it is an amazing low figure versus hundreds of millions of iPhones in circulation.

therefore am doing yourself a service by guiding you to productive time expenditure these holidays: have the battery replaced, as if it were car brakes; you have 100% repair warranty with Apple, then enjoy Happy New Year. Am not going to sit here dishing sympathetic negative pleas, which are not productive.

therefore ATM the issue is your handling of the situation, not Apple. Were you to replace the battery and STILL have an issue, that is another situation- be it extremely unlikely.

Seems to me you do not understand how batteries are supposed to work. pass a few months of usage, and year+, it is a different reliability chart than your SSD, NAND screen etc. Batteries are the single most vulnerable component of any electronic- the same CD or DVDs were a while back, when they could burn but not read, or read but only for months..

you answer is built upon a very limited understanding of batteries, and I recommend you google and read all the Battery University links.

A Li Ion battery is fairly unstable piece of kit, and to control its reliability, manufacturers add very sophisticated controllers to them, the exact way SSD or RAM controllers are added. A bad controller cause poor behaviour, as much as a poorly working battery. A cheap battery without a controller costs 1/3 price (think OWC products) but die in days or weeks. At the extreme of the spectrum you also have Li Ion batteries in aeronautics. As the Boeing fire incidents proved, even at that level they can be troublesome.

Depending how these batteries were built, whom manufactured the controller chips etc, miriad of variables pop over 230 millions iPhone sold a year. And, because the 99.9999999% of users out there have no issues (or Apple's 488 worldwide stores would be flooded) it means that few unlucky people will discover, one day, their battery not working.

To put things in perspective, Apple replaces a lot of batteries per year- I forgot their numbers- and all for similar numbers, every working day. Then, people like yourself gets the issue following new OS which re-sets all controllers and firmware, and draw a correlation between the OS installation and your battery issue. but are oblivious that hundreds of iPhone users replaced their batteries every week throughout iOS 9's existence. But, 10 is released and OMG ITS THE IOS. NOPE.

Quite likely even a factory reset would have revealed your issue.

So Apple already has a replacement program for iPhones 6 affected by a known physical flaw (BATTERY DEFECT), just batteries not the phone. Outside this small group, there is no indication of high battery failure rates.

Also, a previous poster mentioning his community being affected. All this says is likely they shared and bought the same batch of iPhones, and, possibly, exact same battery manufacturer. But I know people with iPhones 5, 5s, 6 6s without any issues whatsoever. However, each time i do a genius bar appointment, someone s there for an iPhone battery issue. As it happened yesterday in Montreal. Yet the person next to me had battery issues before installing iOS10 and finally found time to show up. Same issues erratic numbers and shutdown, etc. She hoped iOS 10 would fix it, when it did not, she came and paid for a new battery.

if your sample is some small community in Iowa, all you are doing is proving a common source origin and manufacturing batch. E.G. hardware.

No one I know in Montreal has the issue. And, yesterday, at the genius bar, a lady showed up with similar battery issues as yours. Catch: when i asked her, she told me her issues commenced weeks before iOS 10. Then installed iOS 10 hoping it solves it, did not, then had her battery replaced.

but the point is, Apple replaces tens of thousands of defective batteries a year, and has specific RMA batches for that. Every week of iOS 9 life, some owners experienced sudden issues. When the issues overlap the new IOS release, people draw the wrong correlation.

Also people forget that an IOS install is as brutal for the hardware as BIOS flashing was for motherboards 2000-2010. That firmware reset is the first to expose a faulty or irregular controller that finally can no longer count battery cells properly. Sae things used to happen with Windows released new Windows: people flocked to Microsoft accusing them of destroying the HDDs. But out of billions of HDDs and hundreds of millions of windows updates, tens of thousands of HDDs would die the week before and after, leading to believe that the new windows destroyed the hardware. Turns out, HDDs just had a normal failure rate of 10%, every year so about 50-100 million per year/52 weeks.

"This latest IOS update is UNACCEPTABLE to battery life. Both my wife and I are having to charge our phones (6s & 6+) twice a day! Have supported Apple for over 8 years starting with the Iphone3...will seriously consider our next phone purchase."

I am sure Samsung users think the same. Ever had a tire explode on the HWY? I did once, most people I know, never. Just happens. So yes, yourself and your wife just happens to have similar issues. Many people do not. I had two defective batteries, both iPhone 5s. In one case I kept using the flashlight and that thing will destroy through heat a Li Ion battery faster than anything. The second one, I exposed to car heat. No other issues these past 10 years.

In truth, Li Ion technology is poor and unreliable, and it is time technology moves on to all those amazing patents which are just kept for some future commercial reality.

Well, Belisarius, love that Apple Fan and Tech intel moment, but lets face some facts:

First: The battery sudden death, unexpected shutdown, whatever you wanna call it, got triggered by na iOS update. Particulary iOS 10.1.1 for most of the users;

Second: It has nothing to do with temperature issues whatsover. I live in Portugal, and even during wintertime, we have 10-15ºC. No negative temperatures of anykind.

Third: I know people from all over the world (Portugal, Spain, US, Canada, Sweden, Italy, Brazil, for instance) who's facing this issue. So it's not "local". It seems pretty random to me, since not even the manufacturing date might be the same.

Fourth: The number of affected users is hard to define because, as said before, some guys change their phone or think it's normal because the phone is 1 or 2 years old. That's why not everyone is rushing to an Apple store. In my family and professional network the number of affected iphones is around 8 out of 10.

Fifth: If it's a battery issue, it's pretty massive. If so, Apple should recall the affected iphones (identifing them by the diagnostics tool introduced in iOS 10.2, if so).

Sixth: most of us had done the "twitter Apple support diagnostics" and our batteries passed. So... for most of us, no hardware issue at all.

My conclusion is that this is a software issue for most of people. Some batteries might cracked with this problem, but the core is software. Something is terribly wrong with iOS 10 and Apple must correct it pronto.

At this time I'd be happy with at least an Apple statement acknowloging the issue and preparing a solution..

Let's see if I can reply to this one:

I have good knowledge on 5 iPhones, mine (6s), my son's (6s), my wife's (6), my daughter's (5) and my business partner's (6s Plus).

My business partner has subsequently moved to an Android OnePlus 3.

My 6s, the 6s Plus, the 6 and the 5 were upgraded to IOS 10 at the same time, pretty much as soon as it came out.

The battery life on all of them plummeted. My son remains to this day on 9.3.5 and he has excellent battery life.

And he keeps rubbing it in 🙂

Both 6s's and the 6s Plus are the same age, give or take a month or two.

The only common denominator is that all the phones upgraded to IOS 10 have a poor battery life.

The 6s on 9.3.5 is fine.

Adrian.

"A battery to phones is what tires and brakes are to car: a consumable that can end life based upon a miriad of variables."

Never had a brake that was working and stopping the car as it always has at say 80 feet... all of the sudden after a maintenance spontaneously not be able to stop the car at all.

Certainly batteries in phones fail, get old and worn out and go bad.

That is not the issue.

The issue is that this has happened right after an update.

As you point out this could be coincidence, but when lots of people are experiencing the same sudden drop after a particular update I begin to suspect it has something to do with the update itself.

These are complicated devices with complicated software and therefore with each update there are things which go wrong for a certain subset of people. That is why Apple and every other company is in a perpetual cycle of updating and re-updating. This is necessary to address the problems introduced each time an update happens.

"therefore ATM the issue is your handling of the situation, not Apple."

I would have to disagree with your statement. As buyers of any product it is not the users handling of problems which is the most important thing. Any problem which arises is de facto an Apple problem and a user problem for those affected. And Apples handling or not of issues is key to maintaining happy customers and future sales aside from simply addressing any issue which develops with their devices.

"Were you to replace the battery and STILL have an issue, that is another situation- be it extremely unlikely.""

Having to replace a battery when it has been working fine is not something I plan on doing especially since for enough of the people who I have read about with this rapid drain and shutdown issue have not had the issue fixed by replacing the battery. I am not inclined to replace a battery that is still good to possibly fix an issue that seems to me to not be the battery. I will wait for the fix by Apple. This has happened before. Apple has fixed things before.

Now it is interesting that you say that replacing the battery and still having the issue would be extremely unlikely. On what do you base this statement? Do you have any inside information on this? Because if not, it seems that you are saying something with little foundation. You simply don't know if those with the issue in this thread are replacing the battery and getting a fully functional phone back or if they are replacing the battery and not. I can't possibly seeing how calling something "extremely unlikely" helps anyone on this thread when you negate that there really is much of an issue and then saying it is the handling of this issue essentially mostly rests with the people having trouble and not with Apple.

Your assumptions seem largely speculative about this issue.

Those seeking answers for their real and tangible sudden phone drain and shutoff issue will certainly have to decide what they are willing to do. I suspect some will replace the battery with varying degrees of success. Some may eventually regain the function of their phone with a future update as has happened many times before.

Hello. Happy to help.

There is a bug and Apple will be releasing an update to figure out what's causing it. For now, go here to see if you're eligible for a free battery replacement.

https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/

Not really a fair comparison using a simplistic car brake pad example to compare with batteries. As the car brake and brake pad system my dear friend is not subjected to system upgraded. If we were to use your example, a similar scenarios would be sending your car to an official service center and after which you collect your car back and the brakes failed where it worked perfectly fine before you sent it in. In this scenarios, would you accept the excuse from then service center that your brake pads has to be replaced?

I have an iPhone 5 (five), not a 6s. My iPhone 5 battery has already been replaced once (I didn’t ask for it, Apple did it automatically when they fixed the Home button that stopped working — a defect on some iPhone 5 series).

With iOS 9, most of the time, i still used to have around 80% of battery left at the end of a day, my usage is _most of the time_ very light. Of course some (rarer) days i would use it more and be left with less battery at the end of the day, but I never had to worry about running out of battery.

Came the (mostly forced, some vulnerabilities weren't fixed in iOS 9) update to iOS 10.1.1, and then...

i would run out of battery way before the end of any day, at... around half a day, still with the same usual use of my phone.. (and before that i used to only charge my phone once during the night).

Once (and one or two similar times) i saw my iPhone was at ~30% of battery left when taking a look at it and saw the battery dropping at 1% suddenly in a fraction of a second, the phone shut itself down of course. I plugged it and the battery jumped back to 30% a few seconds later (after booting).

Ok, so, well... I feel like re-initialising/wiping the device and re-installing Windows 95, erm... i mean iOS 10 on it via iTunes should fix the problem... I just need to find a few more hours to lose to do this, re-installing apps and setting everything things up again. Sigh.

(It's not like i already often lose many hours to fix my Macs given the new versions of OSX these last few years. — And yes, i do wait the most i can before upgrading to a new OS as long as the current version works fine... Especially when i don't want/need any feature of the new OS. Like, for instance, Sierra or iOS 10.)

"A Li Ion battery is fairly unstable piece of kit, and to control its reliability, manufacturers add very sophisticated controllers to them, the exact way SSD or RAM controllers are added. A bad controller cause poor behaviour, as much as a poorly working battery. A cheap battery without a controller costs 1/3 price (think OWC products) but die in days or weeks. At the extreme of the spectrum you also have Li Ion batteries in aeronautics. As the Boeing fire incidents proved, even at that level they can be troublesome.

Depending how these batteries were built, whom manufactured the controller chips etc, miriad of variables pop over 230 millions iPhone sold a year. And, because the 99.9999999% of users out there have no issues (or Apple's 488 worldwide stores would be flooded) it means that few unlucky people will discover, one day, their battery not working."

All good info to think about, but not necessarily playing a role in this current issue being experienced by posters on this thread.

As you say batteries are complicated things these days, however the issue being experienced may or may not have anything to do with the actual battery at all.

Phones are complicated pieces hardware. OS's are complicated pieces of code. There is a myriad of things which could be going on.

The issue of this thread also may or may not have anything to do with iOS. It may or may not have to do with some other component.

"Quite likely even a factory reset would have revealed your issue."

Actually this phone I have has been factory reset 3 times before as it filtered through different people.

No problem until the iOS 10.1.1 upgrade.

Therefore, what revealed the issue was the iOS 10.1.1 upgrade in our case and the case of many others I personally know as I have previously mentioned. I feel that many experiencing the issue who are savvy enough to understand that something dramatic changed for them and bothered to seek out any info on their issue are a tiny number of the people experiencing this issue.

"So Apple already has a replacement program for iPhones 6 affected by a known physical flaw (BATTERY DEFECT), just batteries not the phone. Outside this small group, there is no indication of high battery failure rates."

But the battery replacement was for 6S's with a known defect in the Battery which affected all iPhones manufactured during a specific date from Sept-Oct 2015. What this thread is about is phones demonstrating similar behavior after a specific upgrade to 10.1.1 and has also spread upwards with those who wished to remediate the issue with by upgrading to 10.2 only to find the problem to be worse.

"All this says is likely they shared and bought the same batch of iPhones, and, possibly, exact same battery manufacturer."

And yet those visiting me over the holidays with the issue are from all over the country and have different models which are affected exactly in time with the 10.1.1 upgrade.

This was a step off that was suddenly noticeable.

Anyhow... what caused it?

Bad controller as you assert. Glitch in iOS. or some other hardware issue may or may not be determined.

For some they will never know. Some will have a useless phone. Some will upgrade their battery and be fine. Some will upgrade their battery and still have a useless phone. Some will wait for an iOS upgrade in hopes that this somehow will fix things. Some will just get another phone.

But this thread will continue on until there is or isn't a solution and over time nobody will care except those affected.

Some will still buy Apple phones. Some will buy other phones.

"In truth, Li Ion technology is poor and unreliable, and it is time technology moves on to all those amazing patents which are just kept for some future commercial reality."

You just got done saying that a minute amount of people actually have any problems.

Anyhow... I have a couple of 3gs's and 4's that the kids use all of the time with their friends. These are really old phones and never had a battery issue and they still run all day with some fairly heavy Minecraft use. Never had the batteries changed either.

Now that is an anecdote and doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme, but where are you proposing the technology move on to exactly?

You just said that 99.99999999% of people have none of the problems people on this thread are talking about. Their batteries must be functioning optimally.

So which is it?

Poor and Unreliable or Reliable?

And where is this new miracle battery technology coming from exactly?

Anyhow, going with your poor and unreliable statement, I suppose this is why Apple has started their own internal Battery division... to bring us the future and control the present in a better way.

Sorry for your troubles losdelrock.

We have experienced a similar issue on multiple phone among family and friends all relating to the 10.1.1 upgrade.

I have tried a full factory reinstall that seemed to allow the phone to completely reset and the phone lasted for 36 hours for 1 time.

Then I cycled it to off by running it until the power ran out using more intensive apps.

then fully charged it and ran power out completely to recondition the battery as recommended.

But the last time it went back to quick drain and shutdown behavior.

So I charged it again for a day and then just shut the phone off.

A couple hours have gone by with the screen on the entire time. It has gone down to 22%, but has not shut down.

It seems to me that the battery % is not accurate.

The first time I discharged the phone after the factory reinstall, the phone slowly went down and then sat on 1% with the screen on for almost 2 hours.

Something is not right with how it is set up.

I will keep attempting to cycle the battery to see if recalibration will take the phone back to lasting for 36+ hours as it did before the update to 10.1.1

At least now the phone is not shutting itself off at 30% or even 50%.

It just runs out of power.

All BS. The phones are fine until the OS caused massive power drains. Apple fix the OS.