5s battery usage after update to 11.0.3

Dear fellow sufferers-

If Apple iOS updates have ruined your phone's battery life, you might try the procedure I used to rescue mine.

This is just a description of how I managed to solve my iPhone 5s battery problem. The update to 11.0.3 killed my battery life. The phone would run itself down to zero on standby (no usage, no apps running) in a day or less. Resetting the phone (holding "home" and power) didn't do anything. Turning off Siri, location service, search, cell phone data, and everything else I could think of for all the apps didn't do anything, either.

Updating to 11.1 didn't fix it, either. Looking at "battery usage" revealed that in 9 hours of standby, something was running for about 3 hours. It would be nice to know what, but Apple bugs have disabled the battery usage app from telling me what apps are using the battery.

Finally, I backed up the phone on iTunes to my iMac and did a "reset to factory settings". With this, you start from scratch, which I did. I then declined to restore my data from backup. After running in this "reborn" mode for a day or so, and seeing that my battery life was back to normal, I then restored my data and apps from my iTunes backup. Certain things were never restored, btw, most annoyingly my ringtone selections, but this indeed confirms that starting from scratch blows away certain files and creates new ones. In my case, I think this is the key to why my iPhone now works again.

The battery life is still good, i.e. the phone can make it 4+ days sitting on standby.

I still have a whole bunch of annoying bugs complements of the Apple Children now writing their software; apparently, the current view inside Apple is that software testing is so last-century. But I digress...

If iOS updates have turned your phone into a useless paperweight, you might try backing up using iTunes and then doing a "reset to factory settings". Note that in my case I made like a new user and stayed away from by backup, so there was a bunch of stuff that then was newly created. Only after verifying that your iPhone is "cured", then do a data restore.

All these software bugs are very hardware-dependent. I have an iPad which is just happy as a pig in slop with all these updates, but my iPhone 5s was door-stopped by the same updates. Along those lines my older iMac has had severe problems with Sierra updates while my wife's newer IMac is happy.

Good luck, fellow sufferers.