iOS 11.4 battery drain

I've been having the same battery drain issue with my iPhone 6s and posted here a few days ago. A few articles I've found online say that the 11.4 update causes a glitch with some phones when connected to wifi. One site suggested going to Settings>General>Reset>Reset Network Settings. That makes the phone forget all of your wifi connections and passwords but doesn't affect anything else. I did that and my battery issue improved substantially. It wasn't back to the way it was before 11.4 but I was able to make it through the entire day without having to charge.

Today is the second day since I reset and I only made it 12 hours so it's starting to run down again. I will reset the network settings again and hopefully they'll have an update out soon for 11.4 that patches this issue.

I faced the same battery draining problem after updating to 11.4. I tried many of the online suggestions like changing certain settings but didn't work.

Eventually I tried doing a soft rest by holding the sleep/wake button and the home button until the apple logo appeared and it worked! Battery life is back to normal before update.

This battery drain issue on iOS 11.4 is NOT across the board for every compatible iPhone model.

My wife's iPhone SE is running very well on iOS 11.4 with no battery draining issues.

What have YOU done to improve your battery life on your iPhone.

Here is what I routinely do with ALL of my iDevices to optimise battery life and improve iDevice performance.

Have any of you tried a hard reset of your iPhone 6/6S by holding down both the Home and sleep/wake buttons until your iPhone goes to black and restarts with Apple logo, then release the buttons?

How much free data storage space is left on your iPhone?

iDevices need to always maintain, at the very least, between 2-3 GBs, OR GREATER, of free data storage space.

Try re-adjusting your iPhone’s screen brightness to a lower, but still comfortable intensity.

In Settings app, under General settings, Reset panel, at the right bottom of the list, Reset All Settings.

In Settings App, Battery, check to see if any apps/processes are eating up your battery.

In Settings App, General,Reset, Reset Network Settings, try resetting your network settings.

In Settings app, General settings panel, turn OFF Background App Refresh for any apps you feel do not need constant data updating/Internet updating in the background when not using the an app OR turn OFF Background App Refresh entirely/globally for the entire device.

Do the same in the Settings app under Notifications.Turn off notifications for apps you do not think you need notifications for and/or edit the different ways you receive notifications to help with performance by not always using all the notification methods together.

In Settings app under Mail, you may want to set a longer fetch time or set your iOS Mail app to only manually fetch your mail ONLY when you launch the iOS Mail app.

In Settings app (NOT from the iOS Control Panel) turn OFF Bluetooth when not using any Bluetooth devices.

Also, in general, if you want a faster IDevice, on all of my iDevices, I turn off most of the iOS motion graphics eye candy, by simply turning ON Reduce Motion in Settings app, General, Accessibilty settings.

Make sure you aren't running 30 -50 OR EVEN MORE background apps in the iOS 11 Control Panel/App Switcher.

If you are, you need to quit the bulk of these background running apps by tap and hold a finger on an app window in the switcher and slide your finger upwards to quit an app. You should be able to use more than one finger to quit more than one app window simultaneously.

Also, make sure you don’t have 20-50 OR A WHOLE LOT MORE of active website tabs running in the web browser.

If you do, greatly reduce the amount of active website tabs your web browser.

Some minority of user have been turning ON and leaving ON iCloud backups continuously backing up on a constant and daily basis.

If you are one of these users, in Settings App, tap your Apple ID, then tap iCloud, then find iCloud backup and turn off iCloud backup and only turn this on to do daily backups either when you are not using your iPhone for a prolonged period of time (like when you are sleeping), then turn iCloud backups OFF when actually using your iPhone.

OR

Only perform your backups on a lesser time schedule.( like twice a week, once a week, once every two weeks, once a month, etc.).

Any large amount of background running apps or active processes that have to constantly go out to the Web to fetch data ALL THE TIME is going to slow down ANY iDevice and can, also, negatively impact battery life.

Good Luck to You!

a band aid, not a fix, that's getting me by: turn off wifi fully in settings, AND then switch all wifi dependent behaviors over to cellular - make sure to turn ON cellular data. also change all apps that might refresh often, like email or podcasts, to manually refresh only when opened. i also uninstalled facebook and facebook's messenger app just in case - on my pc facebook tends to refresh often, so i worry the phone might do the same. btw, i dont use bluetooth so i always have that turned off. after changing the above settings, i turned phone off then back on (settings/general/shutdown). i am now getting much stabler battery behavior and massively less drain as a result. wifi is the culprit for me, when turned off (after changing the dependent settings to cellular), i am getting less than 5% drain overnight in standby, when previously it was losing 70-80% - particularly from night til morn.

I managed to solve the issue on my SE. It was necessary to disable "Calls on other devices" option.

It constantly communicates with other Apple devices on your local network.

That's why some people note that the problem exists only when connected to their home WiFi network.

I had the same issue with my Iphone 6s. I called 1-800-myapple and we did fix it.

You need to back up your phone, either to icloud or your computor. Then you restore the phone. ( as if it was a new phone). What 24 hours. If the battery does not drain like before,(it can be used over this 24 hour period.)

Then you go back into Itunes and hit restore backup. This worked for me.

Hope this helped. But if not sure call the 1- 800 number.

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Excuse me for my english, I am french and I have the same problem since I install the version 11,4. On my iPhone 6s, if I close the wifi, the battery is ok. Then I have a network wifi with 2 bands 2,4 and 5 ghz since a long time. I shut the 5ghz band on my network wifi and now it works only with the 2,4ghz band. Since my iPhone works correctly and thé battery is ok during 2 or 3 days. My iPad works also correctly now. I Don't open the 5 ghz band before a bew ios version.

I've been involved in this thread for a good week or so now, and here's some advice to anyone new to it:

DON'T contact Apple support. They're no help on this issue at all. Some techs admit the problem and some don't. NONE of them can fix it.

DON'T replace your battery unless your Battery Health function indicates that it's no longer able to hold at least 80% of it's original capacity - regardless of what an Apple tech might tell you.

There are several things that others in this thread have tried with some success.

1. Disable the 'Allow Calls on Other Devices' function.

2. Disable the 'Background App Refresh' function.

3. Disable the 'Location Services' function.

4. Try changing your wifi settings. There have been all sorts of advice on people trying various things with their wifi with some success.

5. If you feel brave enough, upgrade your iOS from 11.4 to the Beta 12.0 version. WARNING: using a Beta version of software is somewhat risky. If you do go this route, make sure you back up your phone completely so that if you encounter problems with the Beta, you can always restore your phone to the previous settings. Personally, I've not had a single issue on either of our phones after installing Beta 12.0, but that's not to say you will have the same story.

I've solved the problem for both of our phones - an SE and a 6s. I installed Beta 12.0 and disabled the Background App Refresh function. Everything else I left as is, and both of our phones are operating perfectly fine now. Our batteries last as long as they did before Apple inflicted this problem on it's customers.

However, from all that I've read in here over the past week, it seems that this is a real quirky problem, and no single solution works for everybody. Some people have had complete success coming up with ideas other than my own. My advice is to take the time and skim through this thread, picking out ideas that have worked for others and trying them.

The ultimate fix will be for Apple to acknowledge the problem and after apologizing to their customers, release a new iOS version that actually works.

I've had this same issue as well. I am currently operating on ios 11.4 and after updating I noticed a massive battery drain on my phone every couple of minutes 2-3% drains. Take note I have turned off location services, notifications for other apps, background app refresh and reduce motion is also on. And the only apps I use is facebook, messenger, whatsapp, email and music only. Even on standy mode the battery drains pretty fast.

Till I updated to ios 11.4.1 it seems to have solved the battery drain issues, I have been using my phone going 3hrs now and just 1% battery decrease compared to the 10% decrease every minute of the previous version.

Currently using ios 11.4.1 with iPhone 7+ hope this helps guys.

I'm curious if you checked the "Battery" section in settings to see if any app (or system services) stood out with excessive battery usage (I know this has been asked, but I have not read all 39 pages to see who answered).

The only reason I ask is that my wife had a similar issue and it turned out to be The Weather Channel app in the background, apparently constantly downloading either ads or weather data. She also had a spike in cell data usage. She no longer uses The Weather Channel app.

Perhaps there is an app (or system service!) that is trying to use the Wi-Fi constantly, but if it isn't there it gives up. So it may not directly be the wifi.

I was having the battery drain issue and took it to the Genius Bar. The tech looked at my battery usage and 53% of the usage was the Settings App! He said that meant it was the operating system that drained it. He did a firmware update thinking it might fix it, but it didn’t. The iOS 11.4.1 update seemed to have fixed it as of yesterday when it only dropped to 96% all day sitting on a shelf. Prior to that it would drop to red in 1/2 day sitting on a shelf with airplane mode turned on and no app running. This is a 6s only a few months old with battery health showing 97%. Problem started after installing iOS 11.4

This seemed to work for me: settings —> privacy —> location services —> system services. After I unchecked all of the system services (except find my iPhone), the battery drain stopped.

Had the same problems on my iPhone 6S with battery health at 97%. Battery would drop before my eyes. Finally reverted to 11.3.1.

I don't use location services very much - most system ones are off and apps are set to only 'while using'.

I did notice battery usage by mail was much higher than normal.

Is it possible that exchange email with push is a culprit? Perhaps in conjunction with WIFI?

I do have two email accounts - one Exchange, one Outlook.com that are set up with push.

lowbatterylog:

UserEventAgent: com.apple.siri.xpc_activity.language_fetch BackgroundTask == 255, held for 29:50:53

Screen Brightness: 0.000000

Hardware Model: N71AP

Awake Time: 01:04:13 (3853)

Standby Time: 09:23:08 (33788)

Partial Charge: 0

Capacity: 0

Voltage: 3402 mV

Voltage Droop Time: 64178952

Voltage Droop Transitions: 1

Update after a few days :

My iPhone 6S Plus and my iPad Air 2 recovered their battery capacity since I connected them to a 2.4 Ghz WiFi network. As soon as I pass them on my 5 Ghz network, the battery drain come back. I hope it helps.