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.
I have owned a 3G, 4, 5S, and now a 7.
Everything was great until IOS 11 Vista came out.
It has been such an absolutely godawful experience that I am done with Apple.
I was lucky and got my phone back to 10.3.3 October 2017 when it was offered, but those ******* at Apple snuck the update on my phone a week ago in the middle of the night....like thief they stole my life away from me.
Now my battery drains 20% an hour and I have to charge the phone on average three times a day.
My home button doesn't even work anymore and I called customer service about it....mother F*&^&rs said I have to pay to get it fixed. $319!
I'm done. You guys make Windows Vista and Microsoft circa 2005 seem enjoyable.
I have 2 questions for you:
You have mentioned some additional troubleshooting ideas, which i have also tested but forgot to mention. But the result is like yours, so no difference! I expect from a smartphone operating system that it reduces CPU load drastically if I disable all your mentioned settings. Especially if I combine them together! IOS should do more or less nothing in terms of executing processes if I use all the settings in off mode and display is off too. But the real world situation is that it still consumes too much energy and gets warm, not hot but warm. And I can differentiate between cold and warm. Cold is what you feel when you shutdown IOS and wait a couple of minutes.
Hello Wanda, my phone is like yours, draining like crazy. Have you heard that a new IOS is coming out to hopefully solve this massive bug? I feel really bad because I’ve just bought a new iPhone SE for my son, exactly like mine because it was such a great phone. And now this...totally disappointed with Apple, to say the least. I wish I had never updated our phones. They had amazing battery life before!
My son and I updated on the same iPhone SE we both have, at the same time and, completely overnight, both our phones started draining like crazy. How to you explain this? I had my SE for nearly a year and loved it. Battery used to last absolutely ages. My son only had his phone for a week. We are thinking of returning it!
Don't worry about Finch, he thinks that because this thread is not that big compared to all the millions of iphones out there in the world "there is no bug" and that we are all paranoied slightly re..tarded who come here just to do some "whining".. You'll learn how to ignore him soon too..
Don't waste your time, I've tried every single advice, trick, shutting down loads of "useful" features resetting etc etc to try helping the battery draining and at first it kind of seem the battery last a bit longer but nothing really works effectively as I need charging my phone 3 to 4 times a day compared to (once a day on ios 11.2.2).
So yeah we are all waiting and hoping that ios 11.3 which should be available this coming spring will help the battery issue but I personally doubt it..
Thanks, Lawrence. I’m trying this once more. I set up as a new phone and didn’t restore anything from iCloud. One question though, do I sign into my iPhone on Settings with my Apple ID? Would this automatically start a restore from iCloud?
Gotta love all the apple responses of check your settings, etc. hey apple, my settings didn’t change. The only thing that changed is the garbage update that’s all of a sudden caused my battery to drain at least 5x faster than ever before. RIP Steve. Look what they did to your company.
mattshu wrote:
RIP Steve. Look what they did to your company.
It's heartbreaking, isn't it? Mr. Jobs would have been so sad to see the company he helped found become one of the richest in the world.
For the second time. It happened last time when they fired him. Apple wasn’t perfect when Steve was running the show, but there was a wholistic theme to the company and all of their products were reliable and trusted. What it’s become is unbelievable. Now it seems like a convoluted mess of decisions that don’t make sense.
Inhave updated to 11.2.6 version but that too didnot solved the problem...
Something really fishy happening in apple..How could they release such
faulty patches? And asking people to replace battery .. Shame on Apple..
On Wed, 21 Feb 2018 at 3:17 PM, Apple Support Communities Updates <
I have the exact same phone 7Plus and the exact same problem with the software update draining the battery. I have nothing running in background, don’t back to iCloud and my phone is slower and drains doing nothing.
I also tried changing the auto-lock setting but to no avail. This setting never changed anyway. Also tried to toggle imessages on and off. no difference.
Could someone explain what it meant by 'cellular settings'? I am in the UK. Do you mean taking SIM card in and out?
Also, went into Apple store this afternoon and young guy tested my SE's battery (less than a year old) and it's fine at 102%. So, he advised to do a hard restore next. I will try that when I have a minute.
If this does not work, I would have to have a new battery fitted. Surely that's got to be wrong. My batter is perfectly good, what a lot of waste! What are they even doing with these old batteries? Anyway, what's happening is really bad.
OK, I am trying to change the setting for auto-lock and restarting my phone right now.
The thing is, if the power is draining away while I am just messing around with the general settings, so how could the lock being 'invisibly' set on 'Never' affect it then? My phone is losing power all the time, not just when it's either locked or not.
While I was at the Apple store this afternoon, the young look at it for 10 mins and it had drained by 3% in that time!!
I run a business, this battery drain on software update is unacceptable along with the official line of reply, do you take us for idiots? it is obvious you have made a huge phopah! and unless it is sorted extremely fast it's bye bye Apple and Hello Competitiors!! Ridiculous nonsense! We rely on our phones and if they become non reliable they will go straight in the bin, I give you 24 hours then I'm OUT
IOS 11.2.5 battery drain
