iOS 11.4 battery drain

Hello MichelPM, I've posted this on other threads and people seem to be having success with it:

Try resetting your network settings under Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings.

This appears to be a network connection issue and this could help a lot of folks out there.

Believe this drain is 11.4 big: 1) reported with phones 6a to X, , 2) in my case battery had just been replaced 3) massive drain occurred while attached to charger, 4) my phone had 3/4 hour checkout by Apple support complete with running diagnostics 5) when I followed advice to switch from 5 ghz WiFi to 2.4 at price of 4 fold drop in speed battery behavior much more normal. Does anyone have influence to get Apple to fix bug???

I only updated my iPhone 6SE with 11.4 two days ago. I noticed yesterday I had to plug it in all day. I took it off charge in the evening and did not use it all night, this morning it was completely drained. I never have to charge my phone more than twice a week (I am only an occasional user). I don't know if this will help narrow this down, but I noticed two things.

1) In Battery, it suggests that the Message app had used 96% of my battery. I checked its settings and noticed iMessage was turned on. I never have that turned on so I turned it off again.

2) My wife had a similar experience for some time with an older iPhone 5. She discovered that after an iOS update her battery was draining by almost 100% in 12 hours when the phone was at home, but not always. When she was out and about the battery never drained more than 5% over 8hrs. She discovered that by turning off 3G data (its an older phone) it solved her problem. The point ism we may have a weaker 3G/4G signal indoors than outdoors and I wonder if changes in iOS is increasing 3G/4G connection attempts that are draining the battery. Since my 11.4 update I noticed that my phone, when at home, keeps swapping between 3G and 4G thus suggesting it is having trouble maintaining a connection and this is draining the battery, even when not in use all night. Prior to the update I always had at least 2 bars of 4G, and the battery would last several days.

I have been through all the usual settings i.e. background app refresh, etc.

Do a soft reset by holding the sleep/wake button and the home button. The apple logo should appear after 10 secs or so. After rebooting should be back to normal. I had the same problem and it is now solved. (:

Hey everyone,

since my phone was almost useless due to this issue I decided to install 11.4.1 beta 3. For anyone else who, like me, had never installed a public beta before, it's no big deal, you just need to download a profile and then update from "Settings" as any other normal release.

Being idle, the draining has completely stopped, back to normal as in 11.3 or even better. In use (screen on), however, the unusual draining remains (1% every 20 secs or so, sometimes dropping 2% or 3% at once). An improvement nonetheless - now I can leave home without the charger 🙂

Hope it helps

Hi,

i've done yesterday a factory reset and installed a selected installation of my favorite apps (iPhone SE 64G). Over 8 hours at WLAN there where no mignificant changes. Battery runs well, no drain.

Over the period of about 8 hours, no problems were seen. Then when I configured my two Google Mailaccouts in the Mail app did the battery begin to lose its capacity. In 30 minutes that was about 30%. Now i've deleted my two accouts and the battery is doing well again. I'm confused about that, using now GMails app...

But i have this since iOS 11.3.x

Regards - machnetz

Same issue here. For several days i just used 4G only and turned the Wi-Fi off. This helped and my battery was back to normal. Following other peoples comments on here - i have now reset my network settings, turned off Location Services and gone back onto Wi-Fi. So far my battery has been okay and is back to normal.

Prior to this my battery would drain 70% over night and there defintely seems an issue with the Wi-Fi.

Still early days after the network reset - but the battery does seem a lot better.

I have seen the same. Turning off WiFi has made a market difference.

I have seen earlier posts where people have observed the iPhone dropping and restarting connections to their 5g Wifi.

To be fair to Apple, I have also seen that behavior with my Kindle from Amazon. With both devices I had them "Forget" the 5g network and the battery life has been better on both.

I have no idea how or why. This is just an observation.

It is a NetGear WAP with both 5g and 2.4g.

my wife an i had same bad battery drain issue after installing 11.4. both have 6s bought new when 6s first came out. both batteries condition at 90+%. we fixed wife's by setting wifi home connection to 2.5 from 5. this did not fix mine. with mine i went to control center and turned wifi off in the morning. phone now easily goes all day on a charge. i turn wifi on at night while phone is on charger. bottom line, at least with our phones there is something going on with wifi connections causing the drain. don't know why it's different between my wife's 6s and mine.

3 weeks ago i was given a replacement iphone6 (to replace another 6 whose battery went fully dead after the 11.4 update) and have had battery issues literally from the first night of receiving this new phone. but for the first time in 3 weeks, that is for the past 36+ hours my phone has finally functioned with super low battery usage, like i was used to getting. over the course of the day i texted, listened to podcasts for over 2 hours, and spent over 1 hour on the phone, with total battery use for the whole day: 10%. if you have a phone that is draining sooo much that you actually can't use it, then try this:

-turn wifi OFF in settings. then go to cellular (in settings), turn cellular ON, then scroll down til you see a list of apps/functions that you can turn cellular on for. turn it on for the apps you intend to use. obviously this will use data so if you have a limited data plan, limit the number of apps you turn cellular on for (and limit your usage accordingly). i have unlimited data, so i turned it on for phone, contacts, text messages, email, find iphone, podcasts, shazzam, waze, and weather. next, hunt through your settings and turn wifi OFF for anything that uses wifi and switch that dependency over to cellular. periodically check and continue to make sure the wifi is turned off - for some reason for me it comes back on on its own at some point in a 24 hour period. but with wifi off and all programs that use wifi switched over to cellular, i finally have a phone that hasnt had to be charged in over 36 hours and still is at 54% battery remaining.

please note: i did not list the usual suspects like background app refresh, email fetch, etc... i already have all those things turned to minimal usage, but made sure to switch any wifi dependencies over to cellular.

also note: this is not a fix, but a temporary solution that will (hopefully) allow you to at least use your phone for bare minimum stuff like texts and calls, possibly even other things... i dont use my phone to play games or surf the net, so i cant say how the battery will behave for those uses. but if you can turn wifi off and minimize it's usage on your phone, im fairly certain you will see a substantial change in battery consumption. try it and see for yourself! it should at least get you by until apple figures out what needs fixing and fixes it.

Hi nibor209

I think it may be related to what apps you have open when connected to wifi, even if the apps are not being used. I found that if the Safari and/or Map apps are open, my battery drains four times as fast since the 11.4 update. I confirmed it by ensuring I only have open what I truly need all the time, Messages, Notes and Settings and my battery drain is down to 1% every three hours. However, I had to turn of iMessages as that was increasing battery drain even when not using Messages. I still have to try opening Safari and Maps to see if consumption increases again to confirm. Still, even 1 % every three hours is more then before the 11.4 update. Prior to the update I merely used 3% in 24 hours when my phone was idle for most of it.

Update to my post from last night. So digging a little deeper into my iPhone battery problem, I decided to try, not reverting to an older iOS but to a newer, Beta version. I installed iOS 12.0 last night before going to bed and tested all of my apps and phone's functions and so far haven't had a single issue with any of them.

But my battery is back to normal, and only dropped a couple of percentage points overnight while on battery normal mode, instead of low power mode as I had taken to using ever since this battery drainage problem began.

While taking the risk of using a Beta iOS may seem a little drastic for some of us, (and it was new to me), I believe it was worth the trouble of finding out. I made sure that I backed up my phone before installing it however, just in case I had any problems and wanted to revert to my old settings.

If you may be interested in trying an install of the Beta iOS 12.0, it is a very simple procedure, and Apple has all the instructions for you to do so here: Apple Beta Software Program

Hope this helps.

This issue has nothing to do with battery itself. It does not even show under usage percentage. It was caused by the latest 11.4 update. It seems to be the WiFi that keeps searching non-stop until the battery dies completely. Everybody knows it by now and I am sure, just like me, most people have been contacting apple through Feedback - iPhone - Apple though I do not understand their silence...

I leave my 6s phone with a %100 charge on the table and find it turned off after two and a half hours, with a good (%91) battery health. The only solution I have found so far is to just turn off the WiFi and then everything goes back to normal. So, I have no doubt about the reason for the problem; I just don't understand why there is no urgent patch or fix and update released for it.

Does anyone know if there is a fix or release for it yet? Maybe there is and I am not aware?

As I reported earlier I HAD the same problem. Dead battery the next morning, excessive drainage. I went through my phone settings and turned off all the features that I don't need, and don't use. I noticed there were some features on that were not on prior to the update to 11.4. I shut things off like notifications, location services, a couple other things that would keep the phone "actively" running. Like I said, there were services and features on that were not on prior to the update. I then shut the phone off completely (rebooted). Started it back up, charged to 100 percent and my phone is acting normal again and my battery drainage problem appears to be gone. I'm guessing the update turned on services that allow it to operate with the new update features in the IOS and perhaps this may be the problem. It worked for me and by the way my wifi is on all the time at 5G. If you haven't done it already, carefully go through each and every setting and see what is on/off. Maybe this is the problem. Worked for me.

TomKingston wrote:

Important UPDATE on iOS 11.4.1 - I can report I charged my phone last night and unplugged it at 6:59 AM with 100% battery charge. It is now 10:17 PM (15 hours and 18 minutes) and my iPhone 6s is reporting 39% battery charge. That is good and a major improvement from iOS 11.4 and is similar to iOS 11.3.1 - I can sure live with that!

Your observation is well worth noting by others still experiencing this is, the rumour that 11.4.1 would fix both battery drain and camera problems have been around for a few weeks now, and again a report following it's release to the public still confirms that view (see last paragraph).

What might be good practice is to apply the update via iTunes if possible and also consider doing a forced restart when done, plus remember the device needs to "settle" for a while afterwards to allow any background "processes" to complete. After which hopefully your device should be back to pre 11.3 behaviour.