Iphone battery mystery... incosistent behavior.

Can someone help me understand how iphone battery .... works??

I have noticed that some days... the phone has EXCEPTIONAL battery and other days i have drain for no apparent reason...

Let me explain:

Before I start though, please keep in mind that both situations I explain further down are with completely charged phone, with no apps in the background and the EXACT same settings.


So here it is:

On the one day, after a full charge, I leave the phone doing nothing (standby) with everything on (3G, Wifi, LTE, location on etc etc) and the phone after 6 hours loses only 1-2% of battery and is at 99-98% charge. PERFECT.

The next day, I am doing the EXACT same thing. Charge the phone, everything ON as the last day, leave the phone in standby for 6 hours doing absolutely nothing, and ... BAM! Battery is at 85%....

I mean... why? What is happening that is so different from one day to the other?

I look at my usage at the example of 85% day and I see a lot of "used time" when in fact i havent even touched the phone. And as I said background apps are all closed.

Why is the phone battery performance incosistent from one day to the other? Are you experiencing something similar?

Lucille Carter said:

Just use your phone and stop sweating the little things.

How nice it must be for this to be what occupies your day.

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Whats with the insults??

You dont want to help? cool, dont read, dont reply...

Do you go on each and every thread in this forum telling people to stop sweating?

Please go and do something better in your awesome busy day, other than post in some uninteresting forum about "little things".

Would appreciate someone with a proper reply for a change.

jabingla2810 said:

It could be a few things.

Most likely, signal strength.

Weak Signal Strength can drain the battery insanely fast because the phone is constantly straining to achieve a better connection.

Second, background location services.

iPhones track location infrequently in the background, for things like adjusting time, tracking where singal strength is low, etc etc.

It may be possible that this happens on some days and not others.

Third, number of emails, messages, notifications received.

Somedays your phone is busier than others

Or with iOS 7, it could have background App Updates, either from the App Store, or app background refresh.

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Thank you for that thorough reply. Much appreciated.

Signal strength is something I did not know I admit. Is it something that counts as "used time" in the usage indicator? Because i have noticed that when this drain happens the phone reports big usage times that are wrong compared to the actual time I used it. No the usage time and standby times are not the same. But the usage time is definetely wrong the days when this happens.

If weak signal counts as "used time" then I can explain the entire situation.

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MiniMoke said:

Does this happen in the same locations?

Plus, when your cellular signal is normally low, weather changes can affect the connection strength and cause more battery usage.

Background app updates?

Anything can cause this

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its the same locations but it is true the signal sometimes varies. like I said to the friend above, this could explain the difference I see from day to day battery performance.

Today for example my phone reports Used Time and Standby time perfectly accurate. 57 mins used time and 12 hours of standby and my battery is at 93%, which is of course... PERFECT.

Other days though like I said I get readings of 3 hours of "used time" when in fact i am nowhere close to that.

The signal is the only explanation, as long as signal, counts as used time. Its not like I get no signal at all, that never happens but I am in an area where i get 1 or 2 out of 5 dots of signal.

largefarrva said:

My 5s does the same exact thing. With the same exact conditions one day it will show battery life acting normal (very slow battery life remaining going down) and the next it can show a 1% drop in a matter of a couple of minutes. I've seen it go down to 90% in the matter of about 10-15 minutes.

My solution to fix this.....reboot the phone on those days it's going down quickly. After the reboot it shows 100% (or maybe as low as 98-99% if I let it get down fairly low) battery life. See if that "fixes" your issue the next time it happens.

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Will try this, thanks for the feedback!

nlkccom said:

Something like this happens to me quite a few times. Whenever I noticed the battery was draining faster than usual, I'd just restart the phone, and the battery % goes up some percentages. Very strange. Hope apple will fix this.

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Ιndeed I confirm this happens in my case as well.

Tried it yesterday when after a full charge the phone went to 95% in just 1-2 hours of standby. I restarted the phone and batter went up to 98%.

This is weird.

Now does anone know if poor signal counts as used time in usage indicator? Because sometimes I see the phone having a lot of used time that certainly is not accurate. No it is not same used time and standby time, it just shows used time of 3 hours when in reality it is just 1 hour. That means that the phone while sleeping was in use. Could that be because of poor signal?

Rat-Boy said:

Mine is even worse than what is reported here.

I will be on it, and it will drop from 40% to 1% just reading an email.

Then as soon as I plug it in to charge, it jumps to 38%.

Then it shuts down completely at 22%.

Then I turn it back on, and it still says 22% and shuts down again in 5 minutes.

Then I turn it on again and purposely drain it and it shuts down a second time and I turn it back on and it says 10%.

Then I finally drain it again and it shuts down and I assume it is completely dead now. Then I charged it over night and unplugged.

And now I am typing this message.

Its been doing this for weeks now but I can't figure out why and haven't really tried any fixes.

I was wondering if you could wipe the OS entirely from an iPhone and reinstall it? Is there an easy way to do that?

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Perhaps your battery indicator is messed up? Try and do once more a full cycle charge and see if the battery indicator is calibrated properly.

If not, then maybe a restore is the only option unfortunately...