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[Update: fixed!] OS 8.1 ruined my 6+ battery life and charging!

H

hernan1304

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 27, 2011
83
2
UPDATE on 10/22/2014: Thanks to everyone for your responses. As some of you said, giving it a day to settle down and restarting a couple of times seems to have completely resolved the issue. Battery is back to normal and the phone no longer runs hot.

This is the original post (which no longer applies):

I have had my 6+ for a few weeks on iOS 8.0 and skipped the 8.0.1 and 8.0.2 updates. The phone worked fantastically and had awesome battery life. Updated to 8.1 yesterday thinking surely the kinks must be ironed out by now, but it looks like my phone's battery life and charging ability have taken a HUGE hit!!! Faster drain, incredibly slow charging. 8.1 ruined my new iPhone. What can I do? Can an Apple Store do anything for me? I did an encrypted backup before upgrading from 8.0 to 8.1. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Edit: the phone is also running quite a bit hotter.
 
Last edited:
hernan1304 said:
I have had my 6+ for a few weeks on iOS 8.0 and skipped the 8.0.1 and 8.0.2 updates. The phone worked fantastically and had awesome battery life. Updated to 8.1 yesterday thinking surely the kinks must be ironed out by now, but it looks like my phone's battery life and charging ability have taken a HUGE hit!!! Faster drain, incredibly slow charging. 8.1 ruined my new iPhone. What can I do? Can an Apple Store do anything for me? I did an encrypted backup before upgrading from 8.0 to 8.1. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Edit: the phone is also running quite a bit hotter.
Click to expand...

Not sure what you can do, but I noticed the same problems on mine. Charging is soooo slow.
 
Give it couple days till iOS has done all background jobs it does with the installation of a new version.
 
sonicrobby said:
Just curious, did you do an OTA update or iTunes update?
Click to expand...

I did it through iTunes 12 on my Mac running Yosemite.

Coupz said:
Give it couple days till iOS has done all background jobs it does with the installation of a new version.
Click to expand...

I've had iPhones for years and never noticed anything like this when updating. It's not like I went from 7.x to 8.x... I hope you're right!

Here's the plan:
1) I'm doing a restart of the phone (again) to see if it helps.
2) I won't go crazy trying things until tomorrow (I updated yesterday) so it has time to work itself out per Coupz' advice.
3) If it doesn't work I'll delete everything and do a clean restore from backup to see if that fixes things.
4) If all that fails I could try to downgrade to 8.0 using the ipsw file provided by Apple when iOS8.0.1 happened, but I'm not sure I want to risk this. I may just take it to the Apple store if I get to this point.
 
hernan1304 said:
I did it through iTunes 12 on my Mac running Yosemite.



I've had iPhones for years and never noticed anything like this when updating. It's not like I went from 7.x to 8.x... I hope you're right!

Here's the plan:
1) I'm doing a restart of the phone (again) to see if it helps.
2) I won't go crazy trying things until tomorrow (I updated yesterday) so it has time to work itself out per Coupz' advice.
3) If it doesn't work I'll delete everything and do a clean restore from backup to see if that fixes things.
4) If all that fails I could try to downgrade to 8.0 using the ipsw file provided by Apple when iOS8.0.1 happened, but I'm not sure I want to risk this. I may just take it to the Apple store if I get to this point.
Click to expand...

Don't rollback to 8.0:

- 8.1 addresses 3rd party keyboards popping up incorrectly
- 8.1 addresses the screen orientation bug on 6 and 6+
- 8.1 enables SMS forwarding
- 8.1 enables Apple Pay
 
hernan1304 said:
I did it through iTunes 12 on my Mac running Yosemite.



I've had iPhones for years and never noticed anything like this when updating. It's not like I went from 7.x to 8.x... I hope you're right!

Here's the plan:
1) I'm doing a restart of the phone (again) to see if it helps.
2) I won't go crazy trying things until tomorrow (I updated yesterday) so it has time to work itself out per Coupz' advice.
3) If it doesn't work I'll delete everything and do a clean restore from backup to see if that fixes things.
4) If all that fails I could try to downgrade to 8.0 using the ipsw file provided by Apple when iOS8.0.1 happened, but I'm not sure I want to risk this. I may just take it to the Apple store if I get to this point.
Click to expand...

3. How will you do a clean restore from a backup? That's not "clean". If you want to do a clean install, then restore WITHOUT backup.
 
this happened to me on 8.0.1. Phone battery died extremely fast and got really hot.

Restore your phone from an earlier back up. i ended up restoring from the day I got my 6+ (launch day)

That worked for me.
 
Did you enable iCloud photo drive beta? The uploading of the pics was making my phone warm and eating the battery until it was done.
 
enoC said:
3. How will you do a clean restore from a backup? That's not "clean". If you want to do a clean install, then restore WITHOUT backup.
Click to expand...

I meant a) reset iphone, b) restore the backup that I did before I upgraded to 8.1. Don't want to start from scratch.
 
My 6 seems normal so far but home and lock screen is up a good 17% :confused:
 

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edogyip said:
Did you enable iCloud photo drive beta? The uploading of the pics was making my phone warm and eating the battery until it was done.
Click to expand...

No, didn't do that. I use Dropbox :)

Will report back tomorrow after giving it some time. Thanks everyone for the feedback!
 
Just close all apps and go to settings>general>reset and reset network settings. No need to restore as all your data will remain intact. You will have to go back through and setup all WIFI access points you had tho. If that doesnt help go to same place and "reset all settings". Same deal except you will have to run through all your settings and reapply what you want as well as wallpaper and WIFI. Heating up phone typically indicates an app is hung up (exchange email is a normal culprit) so clearing whatever it hung should resolve the issue. Of course a restore is last resort.

[Edit] as a first step, close all apps and reboot the device. Sometimes that will release whatever is being cranky. That is the easiest as no further setup required
 
My money is on either photos uploading or over zealous spotlight indexing.

Mine has been ok, not noticed much difference although I only got the phone Saturday lol
 
Not noticed any significant differences in battery life on my 6 Plus running 8.1. As someone above said, could be the iCloud Beta photo uploads?
 
i have the same problem on my 5. Everything worked fine with the 8.1 b1 but when the b2 came it out, the battery drain was nasty! just nasty. I was getting about 5 hours of battery life a day! Thought they'd fix it in the 8.1 official release but I was wrong. I'm rocking the b1 which expires Dec 4th so they have till then to fix it.
 
The Doctor11 said:
My 6 seems normal so far but home and lock screen is up a good 17% :confused:
Click to expand...

That's pretty good for a 5 or 5s. "Home and lock screen" just means the screen is using battery, not the actual lock screen and home screen. Usually that will be in the top 3 battery drainers.
 
Poor battery life is common after an in-place upgrade. It's also common when you have a rogue process. If you can't find out what it is from xcode you can do some of what was already mentioned.

  1. Reset the phone to terminate all processes and don't launch any apps (but the problem may come back if the same process goes rogue again - typically an app including logging into cloud services)
  2. Perform an encrypted iTunes backup and restore the phone as new to see if the behavior continues (hardware problem) and when done restore your backup
  3. If it's an app, you'll have to trial and error to find out which app is the offender (focusing on with background services and cloud services)

Both my wife and I had poor battery life after upgrading to iOS 8. I went to Settings - General - Reset and Reset Location & Privacy. That turned off all background location permissions and whatever had my location indicator on all the time on the home screen no longer did that and I turned the ones back on that I wanted. The issue has not returned.
 
Nothing like this at all- in fact it seems battery life is improving on my 6 Plus.

Today:

From 07:00 to 15:50, all location services enabled, four mail accounts on either 15 min fetch or push, three calls ~5 min each, 50 minutes in a nearly zero signal area, about 7 photos taken, ~20 minutes of LTE safari browsing, and using either music player or GoodReader audio file playback at all other times (over the speaker).

Now at 84% battery.
 
Just restart your phone, that will probably solve the draining.
This is from my 6+ (8.1)
 

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In most cases the problems when switching to a new iOS version are (as I had with my switch from iOS6 > iOS7):

- rogue app process (app not updated yet to iOS8/8.1) check Settings > General > Usage > Battery usage in percentage to determine which app is using much more battery although you haven't used it at all or much.

- settings in e-mail receiving is changed
- background app refresh (turn it off if you do not need it)
- location services (look carefully which apps you want to use this feature)
- notifications (look carefully which apps you want to use this feature)
- Facebook app

See also this great article about this.
 
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