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Apple Says Installing iOS 26 Might Impact Battery Life

techfreak23 said:
That’s compared to what exactly? Previous betas or just 26 beta vs 18 general public release? Is your overall battery health worse than whatever you are comparing? I’m just going to point out the obvious that betas have more going on in the background including more verbose logging, background processes and optimizations still being ironed out beta to beta, etc. so they tend to drain more power compared to general public releases. I’d love to see your comparison when you’ve been running the public release after a few weeks.
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Compared to iOS 18 since those are the only two OSes this 16 Pro has run. I’ve installed betas over the years. While I’ve read accounts of significant battery drain, I’d not seen any notable drain - until iOS 26 betas. Anyway, not sweating it. I’m sure it’ll return to a more expected battery performance. But it duesntvreally matter. In 4 days I’m swapping my 16 Pro for a 17 Pro Max (my first Max). 😉
 
This happens with every phone, yes even Android. It's a normal thing for any software update on anything so not sure why they have mentioned this unless there is more to it.
 
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lazyrighteye said:
Compared to iOS 18 since those are the only two OSes this 16 Pro has run. I’ve installed betas over the years. While I’ve read accounts of significant battery drain, I’d not seen any notable drain - until iOS 26 betas. Anyway, not sweating it. I’m sure it’ll return to a more expected battery performance. But it duesntvreally matter. In 4 days I’m swapping my 16 Pro for a 17 Pro Max (my first Max). 😉
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I guess I could have assumed that based on your comment saying 16 lol Congrats on the upgrade. Definitely shouldn’t have any battery issues there.
 
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Good to see this support article from Apple. Should help one facing temporary battery drain issues and is searching for some kind of help.
 
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emulator said:
How do you measure that, seriously? I mean even 2x slower would make it almost unusable. But 10x? Looks like a made up number.


After a few weeks can we say indexing is done? And what if it's still eating up the battery much faster than before?
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Batt drain seems to come right after a week or so, but some people can’t handle that devices do get incrementally slower and faster draining with each major update. Three years in now with my 14 pro and 14 pro max. Didn’t care for the 15 or 16 pro models but 17PM’s cameras, battery, AI, weight reduction, USB C, etc, are beginning to wear me down!
 
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Downundermac said:
Batt drain seems to come right after a week or so, but some people can’t handle that devices do get incrementally slower and faster draining with each major update. Three years in now with my 14 pro and 14 pro max. Didn’t care for the 15 or 16 pro models but 17PM’s cameras, battery, AI, weight reduction, USB C, etc, are beginning to wear me down!
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Wearing you down as in that’s a good thing?
 
sziehr said:
Yeah and this statement admits we know we made mistakes and we have no plan to fix it right now, so yep time to downgrade to the 18.7 ....
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Was 18.7 trouble free? I have a 12 Pro and unsure whether to update. Currently on 17.1.1
 
swm said:
I've been running ios26 since dev beta 2 on an iPhone 12 Pro, it seems to have noticeable shorter battery life. but the battery is already at 80% health, so that can be very well related to that too
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How was 18.7 on the 12 pro? I’m on 17.1.1
 
been on beta ios26 to final last night on phone and ultra 1 watch. Have already noticed the drain on my phone and running betas on my watch. quite a but on the watch
 
iZac said:
Performance of the springboard on my 13 mini is immediately pretty rough. Laggy and it’s having to load icons(!) as it swipes between pages. This could very well be impacted by the background activities as the phone updates though, so I'll let it percolate for a few days.

I think I'll immediately be turning on 'reduce motion' in the accessibility settings though.
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Same on my iPad Air 3! I’ve never seen my iPad load icons as I swipe between app pages.
 
I’m worried about what Apple said towards the end. Basically, a new major OS, with a new UI may slow down your phone. Fully expected, but I’m staying on 18 until I use a 15 Pro Max for myself on 26.
 
I fully charged my battery overnight and it's most definitely draining more quickly--there's a stark difference for me. I'm hoping Apple is right and the indexing is causing this temporarily. However, I would not describe this is a "small" change.
 
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This is the Apple equivalent of the notice on the McDonalds coffee cups "Caution: Contents are Hot"

There was no need for this article to be published - it borders on clickbait.
 
hoorayberet00 said:
I was surprised that they didn’t explain how to better mitigate against the effects. Should we be letting our devices plugged in for a day so they settle? Is it better for the battery to feel that hit and it should remain unplugged?
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1) There's no effects that need to be mitigated against. There's no new information here, and nothing specific to iOS 26 at all.
2) Best practice: plug your phone in whenever you're near a charger, especially overnight (with it connected to Wifi and locked to background processing can take place. Enable the 80% charge limit. It's best for the phone if you let it charge to its limit, and then stay plugged in because it runs off the incoming power then and stops incurring battery cycles. A battery cycle is when the battery has been charged the equivalent of 100% worth of charge. Charging from 20% to 70% twice is one battery cycle. Charging from 78% to 79% 100 times is one battery cycle.
 
jz0309 said:
often is way of an understatement, those complaints are there after EVERY OS update ...
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Because people fail to understand the indexing etc. that has to take place, and that they should plan on plugging in their phone as much as possible.
 
Well how many days does it take to index and download new assets?

Been 2 days now.. more than that really with the RC last week.. and ever since then the battery drain on my 16 Pro Max has been stupid… like down from 100% upon waking up for the day and down to 69% with barely 2 hours of usage.. and not like was doing anything super graphics heavy (Apple music, social media scrolling for a little bit, and Pokémon GO up for a one mile walk)

And even the watch.. charged my OG Apple Watch Ultra to 100% this evening, have only been sitting on couch watching TV and in exactly one hour it dropped to 97%

The battery wasn’t draining this quickly on the last few betas before the RC and now official release
 
According to the battery utilization page in iOS 26 on my iPhone 16 Pro Max, it used 50% more battery on day one after the update from iOS 18.7.

Barely made it through my work day away from a charger.

During prior years of iPhone usage and iOS upgrades, none have been this bad.

We'll see if Apple is right, that it's only for the first few days.
 
Well, the additional CPU/GPU calculations and their corresponding additional energy consumption for the new gimmicky eye-candy UI-accident is anything but "temporary". It will eat up remaining battery cycle life way faster than previous OSs. Good for the already starving shareholders though... 🥱

@"the down voting gentleman": Thank you for ennobling my post! ;)
 
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There is definitely something strange with the battery usage. iPhone 15 Pro with 85% battery health. I charged at 5pm at 80% prior to going to the airport. 1 hour of some safari browsing (Facebook, Reddit, etc) - I don’t have the apps. 7pm to 9pm was on a flight mode. When turned flight mode off, I had only 25% left. I restarted the phone it went to 19%.
 
Indexing and other background operations, if indeed those still continue is killing battery life in my iPhone 16 Pro Max.

The one major benefit of owning this phone has been taken away by Apple. Makes one wonder if this is intentional designed to get people to buy new iPhones.

If they came out and offered guidance like give it three to five days to index and adapt to the iOS 26 update, that would restore confidence that they actually care.
 
I'm finding things with my iPhone 15 Pro reasonably good if I'm honest. Upgraded Tuesday afternoon (got my Series 11 watch yesterday so had to make the jump) and after letting it settle it seems to be doing around the same as 18.6.2/18.7. Fingers crossed others see similar after it settles.
 
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