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iOS 11 Is Causing Massive Battery Drain Problems (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: A study conducted by security research firm Wandera shows that iOS 11 is causing iPhone and iPad batteries to drain faster than ever -- much faster. The difference between iOS 10 and iOS 11 is anything but minor; batteries can drain in half the amount of time following the upgrade. Wandera's report shows how, on average, an iPhone or iPad running iOS 10 takes 240 minutes of usage to drain the battery from 100 percent to zero. With iOS 11 installed, this number plummets to just 96 minutes -- over twice as fast. Users have also complained about the issue.
Yes, Every. Single. Time. Each time a new major version of iOS comes out, people forget (or never heard about) the fact that Spotlight Re-Indexes the "Drive" in iOS Devices for the first day or so, and people whine about "Battery Life".
Yes, sometimes there are some adjustments needed to background-task prioritization; but most of the time it is simply Spotlight. If that is the case, then the drain should settle-down in a couple of days. If it requires Re-nice-ing, then you'll soon see a "point update" that will do so.
But this happens. Every time. Apple really needs to tell people to expect it; but who wants to give "bad news" about the new shiny; even though it is fully-explainable, temporary, and expected by experiened iOS users?
Not only did they incorrectly blame FaceID in the original article, they even acknowledged the actual cause right at the start, before leaping headfirst into a series of factually incorrect assertions. Right at the start:
Battery drain is a common iOS problem that usually pops up immediately after a major iOS upgrade release. This is partly due to Spotlight re-indexing and other behind the scenes shuffling.
I.e. We know exactly what's causing it, and it's a perfectly understandable problem that resolves itself after a few days, but let's author a report using data that we know is in no way representative of actual usage so we can stir up a storm over an "issue" that won't exist in about a week.
As for the iPhone X stuff that you mentioned they got wrong, here's the relevant quote for anyone interested:
New functionality in iOS 11 could also be responsible for draining the life out of your phone. Animoji and iPhone X’s FaceID hardware use face-scanning technology relying heavily on the camera which is a notorious battery sucker. The hardware enabling this advanced facial recognition (A11 Bionic GPU) in the iPhone X could be the reason there is such a dramatic difference in battery decay rate.
They managed to pack a lot of wrong into that one paragraph, namely that:
A) The iPhone X doesn't launch until November, so we can safely rule the iPhone X out as a factor.
B) Animoji is an iPhone X feature, so we can safely rule Animoji out as a factor.
C) FaceID is an iPhone X feature, so we can safely rule FaceID out as a factor.
D) FaceID does not rely on the "notorious battery sucker" camera (it relies on an IR sensor like the Kinect's), so we can rule the camera out as a factor.
E) The A11 SoC is not available on any iOS 10 device. Given that Wandera claims to have measured "the same device" draining in different versions of the OS, we can conclude that they didn't measure any A11 devices, so we can safely rule the A11 out as a factor.
More or less, they said exactly what the actual cause was, then proceeded to lie through their teeth for no reason other than to make a salacious headline that would drive traffic their way.