iOS 11.4 battery drain

My iPhone 6 was working perfectly fine until I updated to iOS 11.4 and ever since I did that my battery is draining rapidly even without me using it at all. I used to go a full day without charging it now it may last half a day. I am just wondering if something got turned on with this new update that I have to turn off to save battery life. It is just weird I have not done anything other than update the iOS and now this happening. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Posted on Jun 1, 2018 6:33 AM

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Posted on Jun 12, 2018 12:13 PM

To everyone having battery issues on iOS 11.4.

What has everyone tried?


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.


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 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 also, severely impact battery life.



In addition to all of the possible fixes and solutions presented, another iPhone 6S user, in another single posting in the iPhone support communities, suggested to go into Settings, General, Accessibility, Increase Contrast and turn ON Reduce Transparency.

Your iPhone 6/6S won’t look as pretty, but that user reported that his iPhone 6/6S speed improved considerably.



If none of this, so far, has helped your iPhone 6,/6S,


What about doing a complete backup to iCloud or iTunes on a computer, then do a complete erase and reset as new in the Settings app under General, Reset then restore your backup from iCloud or iTunes?



If still no joy after the erase and restore, hammer Apple with constant feedback about the iPhone 6/6S issues here.


iPhone Feedback


http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html


This is THE ONLY avenue to get Apple’s DIRECT attention to any and all iPhone 6 issues!

IF no one continues to post regular feedback about iPhone 6/6S issues, Apple will NEVER know there is an issue and will never correct it!


Cognizant Apple employees read ALL feedback generated from all of the various feedback pages and transfers the data to the appropriate Apple personnel , but NO Apple employees will ever respond with any type of direct, individual replies from the feedback you post.



Good Luck to You All!

802 replies

Jun 5, 2018 8:29 AM in response to Zide99

I am having the exact same problem on my iPhone 6S. Last 3 nights in a row, I went to sleep with iphone at 70-80% charged and by morning (in 7-8 hours) my phone was dead, down to 0% battery. I did contact Apple support, they ran diagnostics and said all looks good. My battery health is at 100%, I have recently upgraded the battery.

This started exactly after the iOS upgrade to 11.4, it's already been 4-5 days and issue still continues. Keeping location services off can't be a solution to this.

Jun 6, 2018 4:25 AM in response to phil_anthropist

I have that same experience on iPhone 6S plus. When WIFI is ON, battery is draining 32% per 4,5 hours. When WIFI is OFF, battery is draining 1% per 4,5 hours.

Before upgrade to iOS 11.4 iPhone working 3 days on battery. Now I must rechable 2 times per day.

It is crazy! Apple please fix it ASAP. Iphone is now unusable.

Or allow easy downgrade (from iPhone without PC or mac) to version iOS 11.3.1

Jun 6, 2018 10:37 AM in response to Zide99

I have the same issue with my iPhone X. Before upgrading to iOS 11.4 I needed to charge my phone every 2nd day, with normal usage. Now with 11.4, I experience a faster discharging of about 40%. This is very annoying. Turning off WiFi is not an option for me, because I am using WiFi at Office, when travelling on train and at home.


I hope Apple will fix this very soon.

Jun 9, 2018 4:46 AM in response to michaeljf11

I know. My point is basically there is no way around that issue. Apple must fix it ASAP. But the iOS 11.4.1 beta 1 that came out for developers the day after the release of 11.4 hasn't been followed up by a beta 2, which is worrying.


It seems Apple doesn't seem to working on a fix for the battery issue and people will have to wait until iOS 12. Which is BS if you ask me!

Jun 10, 2018 3:27 AM in response to Zide99

It is suspicious when Apple shows a new way of improving UI performance during the WWDC Keynote which basically works by raising CPU frequency and power much quicker and releasing it also quicker and Apple devices around the world having huge problems with a significant battery drain "over night".


If I would be a Aluhat wearing guy I would come to the conclusion that Apple has a "covered beta program" which tests new code and tweaks at time periods where they guess that users recharge their device while sleeping.


Yet there's no evidence for that. On the other hand has Apple introduced vulnerable features more than once in covered ways - like the new filesystem or (more harmful) the throttling on devices with older batteries.


For me there's little chance that a minor step in the OS passes all quality gates, all stress testing, all beta testing without showing up what we see right now. Therefore it must be some kind of a super weird bug, a wrong compiler switch or it might be a covered test program by Apple to collect telemetry and play with different flavours or configurations of the new code base...


Yet I'm in doubt that the observed effects are normal or random... There's a clear pattern...


I'm also very disgusted. Having an iPhone 6S Plus which works almost fine get's rendered to useless electro waste after the update. Over night it loses 60% to 80% of battery charge (before the update it was between 2% and 3%). Over day I have to replug it latest after 4 to 5 hours. Before the update it survived up to 2 days.


Based on this experience and the observable "getting worse" trend in iOS from a UX perspective and yet from treatment of existing customers, it will be really hard for Apple to convince me once more to pay for a new iPhone. Yet Android seems to become a bit less annoying compared to experiences since the last few iOS updates. Really. And this makes me sad...


This battery drain issue is once more a cherry on top of the cream topping of annoyances... I'm really disappointed... :-(


It's yet time for Apple to explain users what happens and to fix the problem quickest possible...

Jun 10, 2018 9:28 AM in response to Zide99

I'd like to point out that it's not just a iPhone 6S/6S Plus problem. The iPhone X seems also to be affecetd. Today I tested the battery drain on my X:


8:30 AM: 100%

6:30 PM: 57%


My phone was on stand by all the time and was connected to my WiFi hat home (5 GHz). The only thing I did was to open the Contol Center 3-4 times to check battery drain by swiping from the top of the display.


Befor updating to 11.4 there was not such a massive battery drain within a few hours.

Jun 11, 2018 4:54 AM in response to Zide99

This is really not acceptable! I need my device each day. After 5 hours of idle and 1 hour usage, it reached 10%! ***? Are you kidding me Apple? You should hire some software developer from Samsung, maybe they do a better job than you!

What the **** is wrong with this ****** iOS 11? We have never seen so many bugs since Apple released iOS 11. That's a shame for such a big company! I can not go outside with my battery case anymore.

By the way: i'm using a iPhone 6s. Battery health status is 80%. It will be replaced next week at the Apple Store. Whether it is a software issue, it will not fix the battery drain problem. 😢

Trying the workaround with the 2.4Ghz Wifi Network now... As many people did before: restore did not solve the problem... so do not waste your time.

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iOS 11.4 battery drain

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