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 think I have fixed mine
i started having this issue as soon as I installed the 11.2.5 update this morning on my 6s. So have read this entire thread and found this post mentioning that turning off icloud Drive fixed the issue.
So I just turned iCloud Drive off, and my battery instantly stopped drawing and stayed at 10% for over 10 mins while using it.
please can people try this, and see if it works on everyone’s devices or if it’s just mine.
If many of you have an older iPhone, like iPhone 6/6S/6S Plus/7/7 Plus, then your iPhone battery may need replacing under Apple’s new reduced priced Apple iPhone Battery Replacement Program.
Here’s what to do here in these Apple website/webpage links.
https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/
https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/service
Good Luck to You!
Restarting my phone seemed to work for me. Did not disable anything. Maybe some service can accidentally get stuck when booting the phone? Not sure. You can check if the problem still exist using "Settings" -> "Battery". The "time since last full battery" the "usage" and "standby" times should differ more than a only few minutes. If the difference is only a few minutes try restarting you phone once more.
A little encouraging update from my side. iPhone 8, almost new. I tried to use all of solutions provided above, at once. So these are 8 steps that made my 8 back from the "batteries-not-included" toy world:
1) reinstalled 11.2.5. via iTunes using a recovery mode;
2) set up my phone as a new device (no restore from iCloud or iTunes);
3) manually downloaded all essential apps except youtube;
4) turned off/on iMessage;
5) turned background apps refresh off;
6) turned iCloud Drive off;
7) turned Siri off (completely, all toggles in "ask Siri' section are down);
8) force restart.
Since then no battery drain at all - after a small indexing period I've got about 6 hours of active usage and more than 70 hours of standby time according to battery stats. Still got 23% of battery left. Don't know which one in particular of the above listed is the one that helped, but thank God! I have a working phone again. Thank you all guys for all your advises!
I do not agree at all that this is not related to iOS itself for the following reasons:
1. The battery keeps draining even when the phone is in energy saving mode which disables background tasks of apps (according to apple).
2. I've used Intruments Activity Monitor to check what is happening in the background of my phone. What I can see it that the CPU usage stays high (> 30%) but there are no processes using that amount of the CPU (so I cannot relate the CPU usage of any of the processes with the total overal CPU usage).
3. I've used Instruments Energy Log and noticed that my phone just does not go into sleep mode when my battery is draining.
4. Killing apps that use most of my battery (as reported by the battery option of the settings app) does not solve this issue.
Anyway, my problem is solved by a restarting the phone. Whatever is causing the battery drain does not seem to happen at every boot.
Folks can verify if there phone is having this problem by checking if in the time since last battery charge the usage and stand-by times. If this times are almost equal (only differs a few minutes on hours) they are probably having this issue.
I was having this problem as well. I contacted Apple support; they ran diagnostics and said everything was fine. I found a reply that recommended going into SETTINGS / MESSAGE and disabling and re-enabling iMessage. I tried it and the battery life has been more stabile (i.e., like it was before the recent iOS 11.2.5 update). Hope this will resolve your problem as well
The cellular settings I was referring to has nothing to do with SIM card. Go to settings > cellular. Here you should see cellular data and it’s likely turned on. Toggle off, wait 10 sec and toggle back on. Right below this setting you’ll see cellular data options. Select that and you’ll see enable LTE voice / Data and roaming voice and data depending on what you had your phone set at. Go in to those switches and toggle off / on or on / off depending on how they were set originally. Hope that helps. The cellular settings + iMessage off / on seemed to work for me so far but who knows if it will last. This whole thing is total BS IMO. Apple needs to step up here and let people know what’s going on with this. 23 pages describing the same problem with battery drain directly after a specific update is not a mere coincidence.
Update: I have noticed an improvement after the iMessage toggle and turning off iCloud drive. Still not back to ios10 status but battery will now last all day.
Try setting Auto-Lock to a new value.
I found the latest system seemed to have set Auto-Lock to “never” so my IPhone was never timing out and turning power off to the screen.
My point was that the system treated It as if Auto-Lock was Never even though the setting said 5 minutes. Changed the value and the battery drain stopped.
About the battery usage on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touchCheck battery usage
Go to Settings > Battery.
To see how long each app has been open and running in the background, tap
. Under each app, you might see these usage types:
- Background Activity means that your battery is used while apps run in the background.
- Audio means that apps play audio while running in the background.
- No Cell Coverage and Low Signal means that your device is searching for a signal or being used with a low signal.
- Backup & Restore indicates that your device has been backing up to iCloud or restoring from an iCloud backup.
- Location and Background Location means that your battery was used when tracking your device.
Adjust settings to improve battery life
While viewing your battery usage, you might get a suggestion like Enable Auto-Brightness or Adjust Display Brightness. This is because iOS determined that changing these settings could improve your battery life. You can also see the usage times since the last full charge.
Learn more about maximizing the battery performance and lifespan of your iOS device.
iCloud in general wasn’t the fix to the problem. It was only with I specifically turned off the iCloud Drive switch from within the entire iCloud menu did the battery drain completely stop. Overnigh, battery standby was over 7 hours and usage was 10 minutes. With iCloud Drive on, both usage and standby were the same during the past week. Devices would drain in a couple hours. I was losing my mind. Now I just need to confirm that someone using 11.2.5 has the same result to fix this bug as I’m refusing to upgrade from 11.2.2 at this time.
Don’t know what I did but my battery is back to normal. I deleted YouTube and turned off iCloud. I then did a hard restart and turned iCloud back on. I had 100% this morning and as of 5:45 pm, I have 82%. Not sure if this will help everyone but it’s worth a try. I did not reload YouTube basically because I don’t use it on my phone. Good luck.
Your iPhone 6S could have been affected by Apple's inserted slowdown code in iOS 11 that affects performance of older iPhone with batteries that are degrading in performance due to age and charging wear and tear.
This would ONLY get worse with each update version of iOS 11, not better.
This is EXACTLY why Apple introduced the new reduced priced iPhone battery replacement program!
Older iPhones are running iOS and the phone hardware on less than ideally powered Li-ion batteries.
Here’s what to do here in these Apple website/webpage links.
https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/
https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/service
Good Luck to You!
I tried all the other suggestions in sequence of posting dates, except for removing the SIM card. I rebooted, and then shut the phone off and turned it on again. Nothing made a difference. Then, while poking around “Cellular” in “Settings,” I noticed I had not re-enabled LTE for voice (I had data only) so I changed that to voice and data. I also turned off data roaming because I did not need it active at this time. I did these things because I was there and they needed changing, not because I thought it would make a difference to the battery problem. Sorry to have muddied the waters.
My carrier is AT&T, so I take advantage of using WiFi to answer my phone from my other devices. The option in Settings...Cellular...AT&T is called “Calls on Other Devices” and I turned that off because I wondered if the phone was trying to constantly communicate with my iPad. When I got out of Settings, I watched the battery for a while and the drain seemed to have stopped. Today, the phone battery seems to be as healthy as it was pre-11.2.5. This “fix” (and turning off the iCloud Drive) feel like they are dependent on the random configuration of each phone, so it may not work for anyone else. Good Luck!
IOS 11.2.5 battery drain
