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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.
One problem, no one has an iPhone X yet.
It also says 'We suspect it is also a case of Apple fans wanting to test out all the shiny new features right off the bat.' and then the reporting on this reporting just ignores that and says the update is causing "massive battery drain problems".
I want to know where they got the data. Do they have a lot of data? A little? What app are they using to monitor users' battery usage? I presume they are using some app of their own as a form of spy?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I am having this problem on 6S. I have to charge it twice a day. On hold right now for 6 minutes and battery as gone down 4%!
AR is fun but it drains the entire battery in about a half hour.
iPad Mini 4 is only having the trouble relatively mildly.
The very first thing I did after installing iOS11, is go through the location permissions and convert all apps that were "allows background location" to only be "while in use".
There were not really too many apps that were a problem, but that definitely helped at least with Waze.
Looking at my battery logs, I notice nothing especially different about app usage so I don't really see other changes in battery use...
The one culprit I would guess at, is that if people are using AR apps that drains a LOT of power very quickly. I imagine people will stop using so many once the novelty wears off though, there are a few that are useful but it's not like you'd be in them every day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1. "Update" OS to use more battery.
2. Release new hardware with bigger battery.
3. Profit!
biggest problem: newer devices as of late seldom come with bigger batteries.
I had a serious battery drain issue with iOS11 on the first day installed it on my 6. Updated in the morning with it plugged into my laptop with a full charge. By 6PM, I was getting a 20% warning, when I usually have more like 65-70%. However, over the next couple of days, battery life went back to something closer to what it was prior to updating, maybe 5% less, but not like it was. Seemed better after I power cycled the phone while trying to sort out an issue with connecting to my bedside dock after the update.
Clearly this is user error...
Um... What forced upgrades? As an AppleCare advisor who has seen iPhone 6â(TM)s (not 6sâ(TM)s) on iOS 8, I feel as though you should maybe do a little more research.
Like butter, it melts in your hand?
How is this news? EVERY major iOS update has had this same damn problem with battery life sucking on any older devices.
Now iOS users get to sit back and wait 6 months for Apple fix (errr... make less bad?) this problem while being badgered into buying a new phone to circumvent this preventable problem.
I was synchronizing my iPad in iTunes when I saw there was an update available. After some research into what was new and what problems the early adopters were seeing, I decided to wait. My IOS 10 works just fine and there is no pressing need to upgrade yet, so I think I'm goona wait
Um... What forced upgrades? As an AppleCare advisor who has seen iPhone 6â(TM)s (not 6sâ(TM)s) on iOS 8, I feel as though you should maybe do a little more research.
You're the same AC who's "not a shill". Fix your keyboard mapping or stop trying to use Unicode characters here. Then you AC posts will be a lot more Anonymous.
That's only 4 hours of screen on time. There's tons of good phones out there (Moto Z Play for one) that easily get between 8 and 12 hours of SOT with normal use. Why anyone you settle for only 4? And now it's under 2? Magical!
Open it
Replace battery
Close it
Done. It's easy.
aaaaaaa
*Every* recent iOS release has had reports of battery-drain issues. Wait for the x.0.1 version to address the issue.
Exactly what I always do. I've bled enough, I'll let others be on the bleeding edge for a change.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
A larger, more complicated OS with more code and more processing time because of it uses more electricity? Whaaaat? I thought phone processors ran on magic and newer was always better.
The real problem is that they didn't have Steve QA it! They should have placed the phone on edge on his coffin. If it falls left, fail. Right, means it sucks but will do.
If the phone flies off the coffin and shatters into a million pieces; sacrifice the dev team, repaint the room in their blood, and hire a new team.
when has an iOS update NOT caused older devices to flake out?
seems it's a conscious decision on the part of apple to drive sales, but doubling the batting drain is really giving the middle finger to the customer base
~600 bucks for 2 hours battery capacity? what a joke.
I can't swear on my memory, but it seems this is an issue with every single IOS update.
A month or so from now a patch will fix things right up.
Curious how Apple doesn't catch such things ahead of time.
Or ( dons tin foil head gear )
They DO know about it, but keep it quiet and release the IOS anyway vs pushing the release date out far enough so they can fix it.
Kind of how game developers work anymore. ( Which, coincidentally, is why I never buy games until they have been out for six months or longer. Saves a lot of headaches and frustration. )
Means they're either incompetent or untrustworthy.
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?
So what's your point? We're talking about averages with moderate to heavy use here. Same as I do with my Moto Z and I'd be horribly disappointed if I only got 4 hours. The low end (with high use) for me is 7 hours. The high end (with moderate) is 10-11. From the article. "a subset of 50,000 moderate to heavy iPhone and iPad users." Over three days, battery decay rate was monitored on iOS 10 and iOS 11 devices. We've already mentioned that iOS 10 devices last for 240 minutes and iOS 11 device just 96, minutes, but Wandera provides another way of looking at the figures:"
My Galaxy S5 and its removable battery is still working very well. :)
I should probably locate a replacement battery while I can still obtain one.
Upgrade to iOS11 and you can have that power drain too!
I love Apple's forced upgrades!
No, it is not forced upgrades iOS but rather annoyingly nag you to upgrade. Since iOS9 (iirc), the system will keep asking you everyday on updating the iOS if you haven't done it already. If you click "Later", it will ask you whether you want to set up the upgrade after 5pm and asks you to enter your pin (or authorization). You could simply discard it by canceling to pin entering screen. I don't know what happen if you do not lock your phone though, but that's plain stupid not to lock your phone anyway. Therefore, it is not a forced upgrades, but it nags you to upgrade.
I don't know about battery, but with iOS11 Safari seems snappier.
They were about $7 around a year ago from Walmart
Whenever I upgrade to a new version of iOS I always spend extra time looking around to discover and use its new features. I wonder how much of this report's battery-drain difference can be attributed to that?
Well maybe not *every* time but this is nothing new. I remember multiple major iPhone OS updates in the past that caused battery drain that had to be fixed in a point release. Surprising they didn't catch it in testing, but who knows what weird combos of apps or weird file corruption people have.
BTW, why is it that clearing your history and cache is a common solution to browser problems? If a web browser is behaving poorly with bad data files, isn't it a but that it doesn't just realise the data is bad and ignore it? It's 2017; by now trusting that files are in the right format and not some kind of security exploit seems dumb. But then again there's Equifax.
Too bad many apps don't let you do that
Which ones are you talking about? Ae you saying they stop working altogether? I have not seen that with any app yet.
It seems more like you do not know that in iOS11 *all* apps are able to be switched to "when in use" location updates by the user, even if they only ever asked for "all the time" use. Apps have no ability to prevent you from selecting the location update option you prefer (they still of course have the ability not to ask for location updates at all!).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The jailed apps died off with iOS 10. Only way to see low level battery info on iOS 10 is to jailbreak.
FC Closer
In no small part, this is because iOS 11 turned on every goddamned thing in the system.
All of that cloud shit, and wallet shit, and all of the network stuff I'd turned off was re-enabled when I updated. Within minutes of the update I went through and touched every setting, removing piles of crap I don't use and don't want, but which Apple decided I clearly couldn't live without.
The amount of crap which was suddenly enabled was mind-boggling.
This is my work phone, so I'm stuck with it ... but damn if they didn't pretty much enable every goddamned gizmo and service. Sorry Apple, I'm not interested in your cloud, or Apple Music, or allowing random strangers to Air Drop me files, or Siri.
The problem is every vendor seems to think all of those things are things we can't live without, so you pretty much have to forcibly check every setting and update it to turn off all the crap.
With the amount of shit which got enabled I don't want, I'm not surprised the battery life has dropped. Turn the stuff off you don't need, and enjoy your phone how you want, not how the marketing department thinks you want it.
I was born in 1959. Not sure anymore if that makes me old or not.
iPhone 6S+, although I'm noticing about 10-15 % increased battery discharge, but then, I switch it on and off every few minutes. Thus, so far, so good.
This is wrong on so many levels. Them writing it, you falling for it. This is sad really.
an iPhone or iPad running iOS 10 takes 240 minutes of usage to drain the battery
With this simple sentence they will have you believe that an iPhone (any model) and an iPad (any model) have the same autonomy.
When I read this I see pure garbage. You see news. What a world we are living in!
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Have gnu, will travel.
Fixing a software issue by saying "I should be able to replace my battery with another one" is not a good answer.
There would then be no incentive to even attempt to have reasonable battery life. You could just swap batteries once an hour!
They really need to fix the underlying issue that is causing this. It isn't unusual for OS .0 releases to have significant bugs either.
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
1. Default iOS 11 behavior is to turn ON your wi-fi and your bluetooth even if you think you turned them off using the pop up controller (which shows up when cell is "off" or "locked") 1 hr after. The only way to turn them off for more than an hour is to turn them off with the Settings app. This drains your battery fast, especially if driving.
2. Default iOS 11 behavior for podcasts was reset to check every HOUR instead of every six HOURS. So your podcasts will poll the Net, turning on wi-fi and bluetooth. If set to auto login for wi-fi, nearby devices will request copies of your podcasts and "show" your services.
3. Default iOS 11 behavior is to turn on the shared apple cache, which is then used via both bluetooth and insecure (if you set this to occur while roaming) wi-fi. this results in a lot of traffic and keeps both wi-fi and bluetooth constantly powered, even when you think they're off. You can disable this behavior in Settings app.
Note: you can always turn these services on if you have a reason to do so. And then disable them later. You can also turn off photo sharing. You can always reset individual podcasts to poll every six hours instead of every six hours. Yes, you have to do this for each podcast "Show".
Note: Airplane mode will disable all of these while it is on.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I started noticing a huge drain on my iPhone about 4 or 5 days before I upgraded to IOS 11. I checked the battery status prior to upgrading and Facebook was sucking a lot of my CPU cycles. IOS 11 did not change that at all.
Caution: Contents under pressure
I have all the (user configurable) privacy invading shit turned off, and my battery life on iOS 11 has been better so far than on 10.
Come on, it takes courage to drain a battery so quickly.
So they say that 'an iPhone or iPad' normally drains in 240 minutes or in 96 minutes in iOS 11.
This is already a weird place to start. I go for almost 12 hours on a charge for my iPad, and that's mixed usage, including games that use the GPU. (5th Gen iPad)
Oh, that's also on iOS 11. I haven't had battery drain problems since beta 3 or 4.
My iPhone 6 (1 year old; my original was replaced by Apple) doesn't really have any noticeable battery drain issues either. It lasts about 8 hours on a charge, with mixed usage and GPS apps running in the background, etc. (Worth noting: I removed the facebook app a few years ago because at the time it was absolutely destroying my battery life. From what I've heard, that's no better.)
This isn't to say that battery drain isn't an issue, but I've got a couple devices, some generations apart, and I've been running iOS 11 since beta on one of them. Wandera's numbers don't really pass the sniff test for me—how are they measuring this battery usage? Maybe it's THEIR app that's the problem?
I guess they've run out of good features to copy and now are copying the bad ones...
n/t
Same problem with Android Oreo 8.0 public beta. It may have been due to a Bluetooth bug. Seems fixed in 8.0 final though.
It's very likely that this is just a one time drain as spotlight re-indexes and the OS re-optimizes all the apps. happens with every new OS release then it goes away.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I upgraded a 6, Mini 2 and a 7+. The 6 and Mini 2 had noticeable performance issues after the upgrade. The 7+ seemed fine. I changed the 6 to Battery Saver mode and turned off background updates on the Mini 2 and the battery life is decent again. I will give Apple some time to fix it but I may revert back to 10.3.3 if there isn't a fix.
Actually you can't rule out any of those features as a factor. The absence of hardware does not imply the absence of code supporting that hardware.
The code is obviously there, but just as obvious is the fact it could not run.
The FaceID subsystem literally has zero hardware it can act on. There are no 3D models of faces detected being fed to it. The Secure Enclave holds nothing related to face models. There are no faces to pass into the neural network that determines if the faces match records it doesn't even have. There is literally nothing that could allow any FaceID code to run for more than a nanosecond.
If anything the absence of that hardware is likely to support edge cases that code wasn't checked against and likely to cause bugs.
This is simply nonsense. The MOST COMMON case currently and in testing is/was hardware without that device, it in fact is the most tested path. What "Edge case"" is there to not having FaceID??? Someone accidentally attaches an entire Kinect worth of hardware over the Lightning port? Come on.
The other cases you listed were real, sure, but nothing at all like what we are talking about here with hardware deeply integrated into the system, not an accessory someone may accidentally attach...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is there a battery case available that also replaces the headphone jack?
The update turned on notifications for more than a few of my apps, should have known.
Get up!
Got a bee in your bonnet, do you?
Hah @ downvoting Apple fan boi's, no sense of humour when it comes to your holy objects.
It looks like a drain if you watch percentages drop precipitously. But in my experience, the the *apparent" drop slows as the percentage drops, to the extent that it runs on 1% for quite awhile. And the time it takes to go to zero doesn't seem greatly increased. In other words, if I gauge by time, it doesn't look much worse.