Why (sometimes) my iPhone battery depletes faster?

Try calibrating the battery. Use it until the phone powers down, then plug it in until it reaches 100% full charge.

Bad reception can be the culprit

I have found that "quick" charges back to 100% deplete faster than all night charges. I call them "soft charges." They may get your battery back to 100% quick, but it drains much faster than a long, full charge.

jlake02 said:

I have found that "quick" charges back to 100% deplete faster than all night charges. I call them "soft charges." They may get your battery back to 100% quick, but it drains much faster than a long, full charge.

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Lithium batterys dont have memorys, they could care less when you charge then; disable battery % and your life will be more easy.

roxxette said:

Lithium batterys dont have memorys, they could care less when you charge then; disable battery % and your life will be more easy.

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Didn't say they had memories.

Just said that quick charges may give you 100% (or a full battery image) but they're not as "full" as long, complete charges.

jlake02 said:

I have found that "quick" charges back to 100% deplete faster than all night charges. I call them "soft charges." They may get your battery back to 100% quick, but it drains much faster than a long, full charge.

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Not supported by the science.

roxxette said:

Lithium batterys dont have memorys, they could care less when you charge then; disable battery % and your life will be more easy.

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Lol I'm sure not looking at the percentage all day can have positive benefits.

OP, these phones are notorious for using up battery switching from cell to wifi, back and forth. You can blame network issues if you like. I would be willing to bet it's more of a notification settings issue as they can be on even if you don't have them in notification center but sometimes network switching is a culprit.

People should stop the obsession with %

If you have facebook, twitter and the likes setup with notification it will eat battery; fetching for mail too

I'm thinking also the location services. Your GPS - that will drain your battery. As will LTE, searching for towers, and bluetooth being enabled.

thiagos said:

I have an iPhone 5 and I have noticed that some days my battery depletes faster.
I use the same apps everyday and I have the same usage pattern. Yesterday my phone showed 91% battery left. I plugged it in the charger for about 20 minutes and it showed that my battery was 100% charged.

Three hours later, I had 60% battery left.

My question is, even though it shows that it is 100% fully charged, it might not be?

I found that very weird. I shut my phone off every night before going to bed and close all apps to make sure they are not running in the background.

Any help to keep this from happening, will be highly appreciated.

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I took my phone in to a Genius appointment and they actually can log into your phone and run a diagnostic. The Genius found that my diagnostic log showed many crashes due to a bug in my restore. He said that if you set up your phone using a previous backup, even if you do a soft restore through itunes or your phone, the bugs won't go away.

He pointed me and did in store a DFU restore of my phone and had me set it up as a new phone. Then I had to sync the apps over as if it were new. Good thing is iCloud back-up keeps many settings so its not a total loss. I'm getting a bit better battery life at this time.

I think Apple is aware of the issue and will address it as ios6 gets more optimized. I was very frustrated with my performance as the phone got down to 46% prior to my appointment and I hardly did anything on it all day. Granted, I had 2/3 bars of 4g. But I had LTE off, location services mostly off (not fully off), brightness at or below 40%, Siri off and most notifications off.

The Genius said 9 of 10 "complaints" of battery life he's encountered so far are not due to hardware, but software issues. So this is encouraging. The downside is he did say that your carrier's strength of signal will reduce your battery life as the phone tries to maintain signal.

I used my phone outside a bit today while waiting to vote, and noticed the battery was draining very quickly. I realized that reason: Screen brightness. I was outside, so the screen was at 100% brightness!

So check your screen brightness and see if it relates to when the battery drains quicker.

just turn the battery % indicator off.. you may be paying more attention to that than actually using your device

I am with the OP on this. It keeps happening to me.
I have the same routine everyday - charge overnight so its over 100% for sure. I go to the train station and use my phone the same way everyday - twitter, facebook updates and read and it depletes faster every other day. And then days in between it gets great battery life. No idea why.

My battery was awful with iTunes Match on. Now under the same use, I end most days with 42% or more battery.

thiagos said:

I have an iPhone 5 and I have noticed that some days my battery depletes faster.
I use the same apps everyday and I have the same usage pattern.

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Coverage, as stated above, can definitely affect battery life on any wireless device.

Also, "same usage pattern" doesn't always mean "same power consumption". You may think your pattern is the same but you could certainly be running something that's more power hungry one time versus the next. Or something in the background could be the difference.

It's really impossible to say for certain on these topics. You have to carefully monitor your usage and environment and track what specifically changes to pinpoint the cause. There are any number of potential causes.

Have you calibrated the battery, try letting it drain all the way down as much as possible before charging it again. Turn off anything you aren't using such as bluetooth, turn screen brightness down, close out some apps if you have a million running