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 4, 2018 5:51 AM in response to Zide99

Hi,


same here.

iPhone 6s, being able to run a full day on a 100% charge.

After 11.4 update, on a 100% charge phone is empty, even during the night when not used actively!


Have restarted my phone several times, gracefully and hard, without any result.

Again, on 11.3.1 all was fine!

Battery condition is 83%, which looks ok.


Location services have been drilled down to the bare minimum, similar to background sync.

In my case Mail has used 53% of the battery in the last 24 hours.

I tried to find the push interval setting, but that seems to have disappeared?


I hope this is a bug which can be fixed with 11.4.1...


Erwin

Jun 12, 2018 7:59 AM in response to Zide99

It does worry me that despite Apples assertion at the that they are focusing on quality in iOS this still happens. Now I am a developer so I understand how difficult it is to test everything and catch every bug but this is the same battery drain problem that pops up every time Apples does a major release. In fact now it's happening not just on major releases like 9,10 or 11 but on 9.X, 10.X and 11.X. Apple roll out a .X release and it is almost guaranteed to have battery issues. Then those problems are diagnosed and fixed in .X.1 or .X.2 release. BUT roll around .X+1 and the bugs are back.


Apple are also in a rather special position, they control the hardware and the software which makes testing way easier and cheaper for them. They can and probably do have test labs where they can easily have a version of every iPhone supported by a new iOS version, including every chipset or screen manufacturer and still have them all fit on one desk. They can test the hardware for things like "Wifi at 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz" and see how the phones perform and measure the battery drain. These problems have occurred before they have tested and diagnosed them before so they could and should be in the regular test cycle for a release of iOS.


We have gotten to a point where I expect battery problems in the .X release so I wonder if Apple simply loads the .X releases with debug code intended to test and diagnose problems then removes that code in the .X.1 release. In reality the .X is the final mass Beta version and the .X.1 is the goldmaster. They just dont tell us because no one would update to the .X version if they knew they would have a couple of weeks of drastically reduced battery life.

Jun 12, 2018 8:18 AM in response to OxnoxO

If you actually bother to read the manual (I know, no one has for umpteen years) the Control Center disconnects from the current network, but leaves Wi-Fi on. This is actually a very valuable feature. It will connect to other networks, but not the one it had been disconnected from until 5 AM the next day, or until you go out of range of this network, then return to it. But have no fear; there are still FOUR ways to turn off Wi-Fi and have it stay off:


  • Settings/Wi-Fi: OFF
  • "Say "Hey Siri, turn off Wi-Fi"
  • Hold the HOME button to wake up Siri and say "Turn off Wi-Fi"
  • Force-press the HOME button and tap "Wi-Fi"


It has worked this way for almost a year; I'm surprised so many people don't know about this feature. For more information, see: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208086

Jun 12, 2018 2:07 PM in response to Zide99

iOS 11.4 causing massive draining on my iPhone 6, and I mean dropping 1% every 20 seconds at times. Battery health is ok and I'm connecting to 2.4GHz WiFi. But even in LTE it does the same anyways.

I checked battery usage in settings and Mail app is hogging 70% of both time and CPU. So... potential culprit there.

I reset the infamous network settings to no avail, draining madness continues.

However, when I

  1. Switch on Airplane mode & turn off WiFi and Bluetooth (i.e. "isolate" the phone) > rapid draining stops (a bit obvious, but at least to have a starting point)
  2. Turn WiFi and Bluetooth back on > still normal consumption
  3. Switch off Airplane mode (i.e. back to full connectivity) > back to rapid draining - after a little while


So, could this be a cellular issue? I know having cellular on consumes more battery than having if off, sure, but the news here is that in my case wifi doesn't seem to be the issue.

Jun 15, 2018 4:57 AM in response to thorstenfromseevetal

I can confirm that 5Ghz wifi may be involved. But I don't believe its the whole story. When monitoring network traffic, it was the messages app that was causing most traffic across the wifi with a battery usage of 98% over night just by that one app. The culprit turned out to be iMessage. I have switched over to my 2.4Ghz wifi at home and turned off iMessage (I never used it in the past and it was turned off prior to this update). Now my battery is still on 75% after 30 hours of use.

Jun 22, 2018 6:03 AM in response to Zide99

I've had the same battery problem as others since the 11.4 update a couple of days ago. My battery was replaced at the Apple store a few weeks ago.

I may have found the conflict, although I don't know the real solution: SINCE I WENT INTO SETTINGS AND TURNED CELLULAR DATA ON this morning, it seems to have reduced battery consumption.

Note that I turned off Location Services, Background Apps, and did everything I could to reduce battery use last night, and then charged it to 100% before I went to bed. I woke up this morning and it was down to 35%. Since I turned Cellular Data on this morning it has only lost 2% in over an hour. (It was losing almost 10% per hour.)

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iOS 11.4 battery drain

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