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 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.
I fixed my issue by disabling iMessage in the settings. Since that I've re-enabled iMessage again and things still work fine. I've logged the energy consumption again and I now notice that my phone goes into sleep mode which it did not do before disabling and re-enabling iMessage.
Hi Dive 1082, I don't have a SIM card in my phone- had to go another route. So, after changing setting on 6 items, my battery life is actually better than before even🙂...today anyway. I haven't changed any of these setting back one at a time to try to pinpoint the problem. I'll leave that for another day. But here is what I did.
I just had a feeling that something was hung up and constantly running even though it didn't show in the Battery Usage, to drain the battery.
I hope this will help someone else with the issue.
1-Personal Hot Spot- toggled ON/-OFF
2-Messages>iMessage- toggled OFF/On
3-General>Handoff- I turned that OFF
4-Safari> Clear History and Website Data
5-Music>Cellular Data - turned OFF
6-iBooks>Cellular Data- turned OFF
Maybe some of these setting I changed wouldn't make a difference, but right now all I care about is that I can use my phone again, and figures, I ordered a battery pack that got delivered today.
3 devices. IPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 5s and iPad mini 2. All were upgraded to 11.2.5 within 24 hours last weekend. Noticed the 6s plus was dead after 6 hours with no usage on Sat afternoon. Over the next 4 days I tried everything. Went back to 11.2.2 with iCloud restores from previous Tues. Still had battery drain rest of the week. Finally figured out that they all run normal again with the master iCloud switch turned off. After taking the time to turn iCloud back on again and test what is draining the battery, I discovered that iCloud Drive itself was the main culprit. 6s plus is now running like it was previously with everything other than iCloud Drive enabled (still on 11.2.2). Testing other 2 devices this weekend to confirm the fix. I’m refusing to update all my devices and my family’s devices to 11.2.5 in case it breaks again. If anyone else that has updated to 11.2.5 and has iCloud Drive turned off with minimal battery drain, please confirm this is the fix by turning on iCloud Drive and seeing if it begins to drain again.
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: 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.
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.
IOS 11.2.5 battery drain
