iPhone 5 battery life [Merged]

[apb89]

I got a replacement iPhone 5 due to issues with the screen and ever since restoring the phone from a backup my battery has been horrendous:

[ShaunOK]

For the people with usage/standby so close together were you using your phone for that long? There has been issues with the battery draining randomly even with the screen off and no apps running, happened to me a few weeks ago when I lost about 50% in a few hours doing nothing at all. Fixed itself and hasn't happened since (though it has happened with the 4/4S according to some threads on here).

[CthrewU]

No wifi no LTE no Music. Mostly web browsing with a few calls and text. This would be my fourth iPhone 5 and so far it's the best battery I have gotten.

[solo118]

Originally Posted by CthrewU

No wifi no LTE no Music. Mostly web browsing with a few calls and text. This would be my fourth iPhone 5 and so far it's the best battery I have gotten.

Are you turning off LTE on purpose to save battery? Or no LTE in your area?

Just a heads up, but anandtech has reviewed the ip5 and said that 3G (4G on iphone 5) does not get much better battery life.

Otherwise, I would say usage is good. It also depends on how many push accounts you have on, and of course notifications/location services etc.

[CthrewU]

LTE is not available where I live and I keep it turned off. All mail accounts are set to manually fetch. Considering the cell signal strength I would say that I managed to get one with a decent battery. Almost on par with apples claims.

[J.L.Photography]

I didn't take a screen but I got 9.5 hours today on 1 day 8 hour standby. Listened to alot of music, mail, tons of Facebook and web.

If I try not to use it, I notice standby kills the battery.

[berniemakaveli]

It's almost like my iphone adjusted to daylight savings time, the battery is at 20% at 5pm. Seriously what the ******* Apple?

[BreakGuy]

Had my phone two days now. usage to me seems fine.

[frozzbite]

Hi everyone,
I have gotten alot of tips from different posters in this thread and I think I have solved my battery problem. I have gone through numerous solutions and trips to the genius bar. Done countless trial and errors. The only thing I did not want to do was to set up my phone as a new phone. I mean, whats the point of a back up if the conclusion is that a back up from your previous phone destroys your new phone. So my objective was simple, to achieve at least 9 hours and a half hours of battery life without resorting to "Set up as new iPhone".

While I am tempted to think that most of my issues were hardware issues, I found it hard to believe that I could be so unlucky to get one with a bad battery. Furthermore, my hesitation to swap for a new phone stemmed from the fact that there is a real distinct possibility that my next phone will have a good battery but some other flaw (yellow screen perhaps?).

**PS. you can just scroll to the bottom of this post for my final solution. But if you want to know how I got there or what other possibilities I eliminated, read on.**

I know for a fact that the iPhone 5 has a strong battery. My previous iPhone 5 (yes i got a swap) had great battery! Pushing almost 10 hours on a daily basis without breaking a sweat. This replacement phone on the other hand, was perfect in every single way but i found that the battery was really sub par.

Through my usage I found several things (also contributed by some users here):
1. BAD RECEPTION absolutely kills battery life. Whether 3G/4G/E. all the same. Anything below 3 bars is just a nightmare for battery. There are a few web articles on this. Go read up.
2. Phone calls have a massive draining effect. So don't be too concerned by that
3. Surfing the web on 3G/4G causes significant drain as well. It is definitely worse than wifi
4. Auto Brightness is crazy at times. My phone is usually on my desk under my lamp, so it causes the brightness to hit 100% the whole time.
5. System services also uses your location and not just your apps. Another hidden battery drain.
6. I finally understood the difference between Push and Fetch. Basically, Push doesn't consume as much battery as Fetch. Gmail is fetch, where the phone literally looks for email. Push is when the servers contact your phone telling you that you got an update(think along the lines of receiving an imessage). I even contacted a couple of app developers for my favourite apps to find out about whether their apps were fetching data. Apparently, its mostly push. They strongly avoid fetch
7. Messaging drains battery significantly. Regardless whatsapp/ etc
8. Software update to 6.0.1 through wireless caused my battery to go nuts. The battery would sometimes drop by 2% each time. A DFU restore solved that issue.

Objective: hit at least 9 and a half hours of usage.
***SOLUTION***
1. DFU restore your iPhone 5 to 6.0.1. You HAVE to do a DFU restore. This is especially so if you updated through the wireless updater in ios.
2. Restore from your favourite back up
3. In Settings>General>Reset, Erase Network Settings. Phone will reboot.
4. In Settings>General>Reset, Erase All Settings. Phone will reboot.
5. Set email notifications to every Hour
6. Turn off auto brightness and set to 25% to 35%. *I doubt anything more will be comfortable, but its really up to you. Just try to keep it as low as possible*
7. In Settings>Privacy>Location Services>System Services, turn off "genius for apps" & "location based iAds"
8. In Settings>General>Date & Time, turn off "Set Automatically"
9. In iCloud, turn passbook off. *optional if you actually use passbook*
10. It is important that you maintain these settings in the use immediately after these changes. After which, you can just use your phone and find out which app/perferred setting actually drains battery.

For my result,
- I spent about 3/4 of the day on wifi.
- Had 2 seven minute calls and quite abit of 2D gaming like lemonade tycoon.
- A lot of flipboard and Facebook.
- Constant checking of usage times in settings.
- 5 mins of apple maps navigation.
*I think I could have hit ten hours if I didn't use my gps for navigation during the day.

Alright guys, thats it. I hope this works for you. If you have more questions, just message me. (michelle, don't be lazy.)

Below is my Before and After screenshots

[grease2000]

mine is getting worse by the day!

[BUFFBOY]

i cant get more then 7 hours on mine....sigh

[Adutrumque]

Originally Posted by BUFFBOY

i cant get more then 7 hours on mine....sigh

Have you tried turning stuff off?
Like, have you tried any of the tips?

And ... what are you doing on your device?

[ShaunOK]

Originally Posted by J.L.Photography

If I try not to use it, I notice standby kills the battery.

Same. If I use my phone all day I can reach near/over Apple's stated usage times but if I hardly use it it'll drop a lot on standby over 1/2 days.

[Roofy.]

My battery life is around 4.5 hrs usage. Then again I just got the phone and have been using it a lot. YouTube, safari, Netflix, and other basic things all on 4G or LTE. So it's understandable I guess. LTE is so fast that I can deal with the pretty mediocre battery life. But I'm sure it will get better once I stop using the phone for entertainment so much.

[Cuechick]

See this thread: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1483487

I tried this and am getting much better battery performance.

[2010madone]

as a long time apple customer (at last count i figure i have 28 apple devices) and someone who just switched from the iphone 4s to a new Droid Razr Maxx HD after thoroughly evaluating the 5. . .if you take a step back this thread is pretty funny. i mean. . .maps that work. . .a battery that lasts an entire day. . .these seem like very very basic functions of a smartphone that apple fanboys are contorting themselves into pretzels trying to defend

[ShaunOK]

At 3 hours usage with 67% battery which I thought was crap but that is with nearly 24 hours standby and if the iPhones standby is 200 something hours then you should be losing about 10% per day just on standby? So by rights that would be 3 hours at 77% if I hadn't been on standby for a whole day. As previously said I can hit Apples estimates if using my phone all day but not using it and leaving it on standby it won't last as long.

[ECUpirate44]

How's this?

[2010madone]

i mean. . .its just humorous. Droid Razr Maxx Hd day 3

[canucksfan88]

as echoed by others, i found a complete reinstall of 6.0.1 from itunes did the trick

[Godf1st]

Originally Posted by frozzbite

I know for a fact that the iPhone 5 has a strong battery. My previous iPhone 5 (yes i got a swap) had great battery!
***SOLUTION***
1. DFU restore your iPhone 5 to 6.0.1. You HAVE to do a DFU restore. This is especially so if you updated through the wireless updater in ios.
2. Restore from your favourite back up
3. In Settings>General>Reset, Erase Network Settings. Phone will reboot.
4. In Settings>General>Reset, Erase All Settings. Phone will reboot.
5. Set email notifications to every Hour
6. Turn off auto brightness and set to 25% to 35%. *I doubt anything more will be comfortable, but its really up to you. Just try to keep it as low as possible*
7. In Settings>Privacy>Location Services>System Services, turn off "genius for apps" & "location based iAds"
8. In Settings>General>Date & Time, turn off "Set Automatically"
9. In iCloud, turn passbook off. *optional if you actually use passbook*
10. It is important that you maintain these settings in the use immediately after these changes. After which, you can just use your phone and find out which app/perferred setting actually drains battery.

For my result,
- I spent about 3/4 of the day on wifi.
- Had 2 seven minute calls and quite abit of 2D gaming like lemonade tycoon.
- A lot of flipboard and Facebook.
- Constant checking of usage times in settings.
- 5 mins of apple maps navigation.
*I think I could have hit ten hours if I didn't use my gps for navigation during the day.

Alright guys, thats it. I hope this works for you. If you have more questions, just message me. (michelle, don't be lazy.)

Below is my Before and After screenshots

This procedure works, but I also noticed turning off imessage helped even better. I think there may be a bug in imessage that once was there back in ios 5 which may have been carried over to some devices. I have screen shots in the thread started by the person who wrote this procedure if in one is interested in seeing. Here's where I am after another cycle of doing this procedure and also turning off imessage. I'll post another once this cycle has run trough.

[Godf1st]

Originally Posted by 2010madone

i mean. . .its just humorous. Droid Razr Maxx Hd day 3

Being a former android user, it doesn't look like you did too much during that usage. You should have showed how much time besides the percentage of the display. To show how long the display was actually on for. That's just my opinion, not trying to get anything started, just stating a little more screenshots could have been showed. Here's some screenshots of what I was talking about, from when I was on the galaxy s3.

[2010madone]

Originally Posted by Godf1st

Being a former android user, it doesn't look like you did too much during that usage. You should have showed how much time besides the percentage of the display. To show how long the display was actually on for. That's just my opinion, not trying to get anything started, just stating a little more screenshots could have been showed. Here's some screenshots of what I was talking about, from when I was on the galaxy s3.

dont know how moto or droid calculates it. . .but i am a reasonably heavy user. had location services on all day, multiple apps on. left my house at 7 am and the phone was cranking at 11 pm. my iphone 4s on the same daily schedule / same usage wouldn't make it past 130pm. i actually played youtube videos the last 15 minutes on 1% to kill it as i am trying to fully discharge the battery since its early days. . .battery is quite possibly double what i have observed on the iphone 4s or 5

[2010madone]

Originally Posted by 2010madone

dont know how moto or droid calculates it. . .but i am a reasonably heavy user. had location services on all day, multiple apps on. left my house at 7 am and the phone was cranking at 11 pm. my iphone 4s on the same daily schedule / same usage wouldn't make it past 130pm. i actually played youtube videos the last 15 minutes on 1% to kill it as i am trying to fully discharge the battery since its early days. . .battery is quite possibly double what i have observed on the iphone 4s or 5

just to clarify furthere. . i run Inrix traffic app on both devices. monster battery hog and near constant use of GPS. . .

[Cosmos01]

I have found my iPhone 5 battery life to be MUCH worse than my previous iPhone 4's. I have my brightness low and turned off mostly everything including:

LTE
Bluetooth
Location Services
iCloud
Most notifications
Siri
Mail
+ And much more

My usage on 1% is around 6 hours. Under that usage my time was spent solely browsing the Web under 3G with wifi and LTE turned off.

On another day on 3G I had 67% with 2 hours 18 min usage with 10 hours 23 min standby.

I noticed that being soley on wifi I still experience dramatic battery loss. I dropped 10% in 1 hour usage.

I did two full cycle charges (drained battery to shut off then to 100%) and no change. I did notice that my battery lasted on 1% for a good hour before shutting down. Strange, huh?

So any tips on getting better battery life based on my stats or do you think it is a hardware problem and I should try and replace my iPhone 5?