IOS 11.2.5 battery drain

Thank you @Lawrence! I don't like iCloud Photos because since I have over 50Gb of photos/video I don' want to pay the monthly fee for that. I take care of my backups...

The good thing is that over night the battery drain was just 4% in 7 hours. I did 2 things:

1. Turn wifi off: so that any major sync (like photos would stop). I made sure that any major cellular updates are turned off.

2. Turn off Siri & Search indexing in Photos - to minimize the "risk" of lots of background activity that might drain the battery.

I will debrief in a couple of days if it is ok, but as you said we need to identify the process/app(s) that are causing the drain (if the hardware is fully ok).

One more question: after a major update (ios 10 to 11) how long does ios take to reindex the files? Is it hours or days?

Thx!

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.

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.

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)!

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

GoshawkCreative wrote:

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

You are not addressing Apple here. This is a user-to-user forum. And, I disagree that Apple has made any sort of faux pas as comparatively few people seem to be complaining about battery issues with the most recent updates.

I don't actually care what phone you buy. I highly recommend you do your research and buy the one that best meets your needs.

I scoured the net for a solution to no avail. What worked for me was very simple. Run the phone completely dead, till it turns itself off. Then charge and see how it works. It ran down to 3% very quickly then took a long time to die. It seemed to recalibrate the battery meter and works like before.

Hi Lawrence!

Just a quick update/question regarding your comment: "PhotoStream images disappear after 30 days or 1000 photos, whichever comes first"

The correct one would be "whichever comes last", right? Meaning I can have 2-3-9 months old photos stored in Photostream as long as they are under 1000 photos. Because my wife doesn't take that many pictures and she still has pictures in Photostream from last December (2017).

The description of photo stream says that photos will be deleted after 30 days unless you copy them to a permanent location. As I don’t use it I’ve never test that. I use the newer iCloud Photos, which syncs across all logged in devices in real time and is permanent storage.

Lawrence Finch wrote:

There has not been a single reply from Apple. This is a user to user forum. Apple does not participate. To communicate with Apple use the Contact Support link at the top of this page.

sarah_s1 is a Community Specialist. One who gave perfectly appropriate troubleshooting advice, I might add.

I bought my 6 in 2015. The battery was running down quickly even with all the apps shut down. I have bought a new battery from apple £25 i was charged, but it doesn't seemed to have made much difference. some days it stays charged up, other days it runs out faster than a bucket full of holes. Don't know what the answer is, i do everything im told but it makes no difference.

Well, I can only confirm the about the same similar issue with an iPhone 6S and now a replacement iPhone 5.
– Secondary my iPhone 6S will not charge and that is not a battery issue.

After a Hard Reset about a week ago, the phone was running really well with several days of battery life and charging fast. Then 3 days ago, it stopped charging while I was on a video call with a client. I made the same type of Hard Reset, but it prompted a forced Update via iTunes, with no other options. That upgrade was quirky and I had to put in my phone access code 4 times before it registered it – Then resulting in the message that iTunes could connect with the Phone!. The phone then died from power and it will not charge.

I got an iPhone 5 as a temporary replacement but after a successful recovery, the iPhone 5 seems to get the same problem or at least a very rough battery drainage. I can not determine what causes this, but it is not the battery that is the problem, neither the cables and therefore it must be a software/app related issue.

😕

Seriously, just fix this or let us revert back to the previous iOS update. It’s ridiculous how quick my battery is draining from my usual daily activity. Nothing else has changed other than the iOS update. It can’t be a coincidence.

If you read this thread you can see that it wasn’t a iaoS issue but rather rogue apps missbehaving and overusing the phone after being messed up in the update process.

Also if you are still on version 11.2.5 (the suject of this thread) you are like 5 versions behind.

Update to latest iOS and if you have battery issues (that you didn’t before) then troubleshoot your rogue app(s) that got corrupted...

Cheers!

The Apple battery use indicator works maybe 40% of the time--sometimes it shows usage but most of the time it is blank. My phone after the latest upgrade drains faster than ever and it show phone usage almost equal to the time since last plugged in so basically it is always being used even when shut down. LAME