IOS 11.2.5 battery drain

Unusually high battery drain is a symptom, not a problem. There are many possible causes for this symptom. In theory, as many as there are apps installed on the phone.

Sudden change in battery drain is caused by an app or apps that are using more energy than they should. It can happen at any time, but is slightly more likely after an update, because the update process interrupts apps in the middle of some activity, either foreground or background, and some apps do not recover cleanly and get stuck attempting to repeat a failed data update, essentially forever. Killing the app doesn't always resolve it, because the real problem is data that was corrupted by the interruption, and the app will continue trying to recover the corrupted data after it restarts.

MS Exchange email accounts will do this frequently, due to a bug in the Microsoft ActiveSync process which, unfortunately can never be fixed, because it would break millions (billions) of older MS Exchange clients that cannot be updated. If you have an MS Exchange account the only fix is to delete the account, restart the phone, and add it back. Or have your administrator restart the MS Exchange server (which most admins don't really want to do). If you are interested I can provide technical details on this bug, but I don't want to distract from solving the problem.

Other IMAP email accounts can exhibit a similar problem; again, the easiest solution is to delete the account, then add it back. As the email server is always the master for IMAP accounts no messages will be lost.

Accounts that sync data from a server (and this includes iCloud) can get out of sync between the server and the iPhone. Given enough time this can resolve itself (at least for iCloud), but it's easier to shut down the sync service, restart the phone, and start it up again. Yes, even for iCloud syncing. And I had to do this over the weekend when my iCloud Contacts stopped syncing correctly. It took about 14 hours for my contacts to again sync.

As many 3rd party apps sync with a server all can be suspect. That's why checking to see which apps are using the most energy in Settings/Battery is a good diagnostic step.

First, check the most common apps that cause problems. Facebook is at the top of the list, so delete it. Likewise, other similar apps; snapchat, twitter, linkedin, etc. But check battery life after each deletion. If none of this makes a difference, go to the next step.

Connect the phone to iTunes on your computer. Click on the iPhone icon near the top of the screen. Make an encrypted backup (and don't forget the backup password, or the backup will be worthless). If you want to be extra careful, make an iCloud backup on the phone also. It doesn't need a password other than your iCloud password to restore it. Go to Settings on the phone, tap on your name, then iCloud, then Backup. After the backup completes, turn off Find my iPhone on the same screen (necessary for the next step).

Once you have backups, click Restore iPhone. When prompted after the Restore completes choose to set up as a new phone. Do not restore your backup (either one). Do not enable iCloud. Do not add any email accounts. Do not add any apps. Now use it for a day and check your battery life. Most likely you will find that it is back to normal, indicating that something that was on your phone, an app or app data, was the problem. Next try turning on iCloud in Settings, and check it for another day. If the problem returns you have corrupt data in one of your synced iCloud features. Try turning them all off, then turn them on one at a time to identify the culprit.

If this works and your battery is OK, connect the phone to your computer again, and Restore the backup you made. There's a good chance the problem will not return, but if it does, start over, and this time add apps back manually rather than restoring the backup.

SOLUTION

ANSWER

Very simple. My IPhone wasn’t timing out. It was always on so biggest battery user was “Home and Lock Screen”.

I think a system update might have set Auto-Lock to Never so the screen never turned off.

I reset Auto-Lock to another value and... lo and behold, the battery ain’t draining.

Next project... is the fridge light really turning off when I close the door?

Update: after disabling Photo Stream sync the battery drain ended :-) I now have 21:38 hours Standby and 1:27 hours of Usage and still have 71% battery. I think this is great!!! I will wait another 1-2 charging cycles and will reactivate Photo Stream to check if everything comes back to normal. I suspect it should...

To summarize my findings regarding battery drain:

1. Be sure the hardware is ok (meaning battery health is ok and the battery doesn't need to be changed).

2. Be patient and monitor which app/apps drain the battery.

3. Disable their sync and/or uninstall the app, restart and monitor if drain is off. Repeat until you find the app/apps that were corrupted by the update process.

Thank you again Lawrence for all the detailed explanations especially since a lot of people initially tend to blame the iOS update (myself included)!

Ok, just went through this. BTW, its Harvard the town, not Harvard U.

Ignore the advice from Apple below, or as I call it, the iFinger.

What worked was doing a complete reinstall and treating it as a new phone. Do not restore from backup (which I tried and did not work). So back up your photos or anything else you really care about using iTunes, do a clean install to 11.2.5, and treat it as a new phone. That means you have to reinstall your aps one at a time.

Very ugly, but it worked.

It's not iCloud itself - leave that on - but with iCloud enable on your device, only turn off iCloud DRIVE if you have it on. Then see if the battery drain stops. That's the test I was asking others to try this past weekend. I upgraded to 11.2.5, went nuts for 2 days and downgraded from my iCloud backup back to 11.2.2, but the drain was still happening on an iPad mini2, iPhone 5S AND iPhone 6S Plus. This was the only solution where I was able to make the battery drain stop completely.

Bird6645 wrote:

Surely this is not the point.

Apple provided an IOS update - battery life before was fine, battery life after was rubbish.

A new battery won't fix this problem. As owners of expensive iPhones, we shouldn't be scrabbling around trying to fix it.

Suggestions are always helpful, but it looks like this isn't a one-size-fits-all issue.

Apple are NOT testing their updates prior to release!

Apple has already stated that iPhones with older Li-ion batteries results in degraded performance and if the batteries are old enough, can cause freezes or slowdowns and regularly occurring shutdowns.

If you keep updating an older iPhone with an original, older degrading Li-ion battery, your older iPhone performance is only going to get worse and not better.

If you have an iPhone 5/5S 6/6S/6S Plus/7/7S, then you need to get your battery check for performance AND,if necessary, pay to get a new, replacement battery! Period!

A new battery WILL return an older iPhone to its former, normal performance state!

Cheaper to purchase a replacement battery to restore your iPhone performance than to purchase a new iPhone which, I think, Apple has been hiding from users for years.

They wanted users to purchase a new phone when their old phone was slowing down RATHER THAN restoring the phone’s former performance with a much simpler and cheaper Li-ion battery replacement.

I have an iPhone 6 and experienced the same battery drain. My phone went from staying charged for over 24 hours with normal use to having the battery drain to zero in only a few hours after the last update. ( and that's with all apps closed except for mail and messages )

I tried the the fix mentioned in previous posts of turning off iCloud Drive - it seems to work! My battery percentage has gone down 5% in an hour compared to about 1% a minute before the fix.

I tested the solution to switch off iCloud and the battery level was stable afterwards. Charged the unit evening time to 100 percent afterwards. Next morning I turned iCloud back on and within less than five minutes the battery dropped from 99 percent to 94 percent.

I experienced the same extreme battery drain problem on my iPhone 6. I got two hours standby time yesterday, so I tried the suggestions I found here. Toggling, turning off iCloud Drive, rebooting, and a hard boot made no difference. I lost 10% in less than 15 minutes. For what it is worth, this is what worked for me:

I poked around the settings looking for something else to try...I enabled LTE for voice and turned off data roaming, and then I turned off Calls on Other Devices. The phone immediately stabilized. I recharged it to 100% overnight and took it off the charge this morning. It stayed at 100% for 50 minutes and is now (1 1/2 hours later) at 96%, which includes a 40-minute phone call.

Hi!

I was experiencing pretty significant battery drain on my ipad pro after updating to IOS 11.2.5 . I tried all the usual things, to no avail. I then remembered that one of the big items of the update was Siri’s ability to tell me the news. I then decided to go to my settings and shut Siri down completely (I rarely use her anyway). Now, the battery drain problem is gone, no more, everything is back to normal. Siri has become too costly to keep! Apple will need to trouble shoot this one.

As I’ve mentioned earlier i’ve got a brand new iPhone 8, bought from an authorized reseller in Russia. The problem with a battery drain on this phone started immediately after unboxing (11.2.5 was offered to instal during the first setup). The suspicious battery behavior was also confirmed by apple support, despite they said that the battery itself is in proper condition according to remote tests. They recommended to restore firmware via iTunes. The problem didn’t went away. Considering the above mentioned I have a really huge doubts that this might happen due to any third party app activity (because I set up my device as a new) and from any kind of settings it that I’ve made, because it was only a connection to gmail servers for sync of calendars and mail. On the other side, shutting down Siri and ICloud Drive was the solution for me. How could the battery drain be caused by anything else in my case if not by 11.2.5 internal issues?

Had the exact same problem on my iPhone 7. Battery performance was perfect until the update. Directly after the update battery life was dropping like 10% every 5 min while using the phone.

After reading through all 22 pages here I tried several of the easy mentioned fixes and so far it seems to have helped dramatically. Here’s what I did.

I cleared safari history. I turned IMessage off for about 10 seconds then back on. I went to cellular settings and toggled ALL settings either off then on or on then off again depending on how they were originally set. Then I turned the phone off then on again. So far after 10 hrs battery performance seems much better. Hopefully this may help others here.

Good luck!

I had the same problem recently. I got on a live chat with Apple support and after a long and tedious troubleshooting session we decided to do a complete restore on my iPhone by hooking my phone up to my MacBook Pro. The battery seems to be working properly again. Apparently, there was a bug in iOS that was causing the problem and I needed to start over by restoring. Just remember to back up your data if you do a restore. Good luck.

xman_ghio wrote:

Update: after charging my phone over night I noticed that 3.5 hours later my Usage time and Standby time are exactly the same (3:42 hours) and Photos still being at 42% of battery usage. I disabled Photo Stream and charged the phone to 100% again (to reinitialize the usage/standby counter).

After 10 minutes voila: Usage time=0 minutes and Standby time=10. After 25 minutes and some usage it showed Usage time=2 minutes (the time I actually used the phone) and Standby time=25.

@Lawrence: in my case I think that Photos was the problem... Will see in the next days. Mail is also with 15% right after Photos, but with 5 mail accounts set up to Fetch every 30 minutes I think that should be about right. By far Photos was using the most (40%-47%) of battery. If this is the case I will reactivate Photo Stream after 1 week or so to see if it will be ok again.

Good detective work!

One thing to note: the % shown for an app is the percentage of the battery discharge actually used by that app, not the total battery usage used by that app. This is explained poorly on the battery screen (and also by me here). As an example, suppose your phone has used 50% of battery (it's at 50%) in the past 24 hours and mail shows 10%. That's 10% of the 50% used, or 5% of the total battery discharge during those 24 hours.