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iPhone XS Horrible xs battery life
- Thread starter Ffmedic130
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Just the opposite for me. My 6s, with a new battery, required charging during the day. The Xs has gone the distance each day so far including an 18 hour day with 1% left.
This may not be fair, but I’m incredibly happy with the battery life on the XS Max. My last two generations of iPhone were the 6 & 7 and I used the Apple battery case for both. While it worked splendidly on the 6 I had quite a few issues on the 7 with battery case (I even bought a replacement battery case when I started experiencing issues and still had problems). I decided to suck it up and get the bigger model so that hopefully I could get a good battery life sans a battery case. The XS Max survives the day and then some with pretty above average use. I hope it lasts.
I just got my first iPhone so I can't compare it with older ones. I'm getting really good battery life. Right now I have 4h sot, the phone has been away from the charger for about 22hours and I still have 42%. iPhone Xs 5.8.
I signed up here to post about this specifically. Brand new XS Max. I turn the screen on for two minutes and it goes down to 97%. I am really contemplating taking it back and getting it exchanged. I got it last week.
Numerous threads on this forum about Xs-Max battery life but I hadn't found one on regular Xs battery life so thanks for posting one. I was just about to start a thread on this myself because yes, I'm having very crappy battery life on my new Xs.
I upgraded from the 6s I bought on release day in 2015 so it's got a pretty much exactly 3 year old battery in it and my 5-day-old Xs is giving me worse battery life than my 3-year-old 6s is. I just did a check 30 minutes ago after I'd left it off the charger overnight. My Xs dropped 5% battery, my 6s would drop more like 2% in that scenario.
Yesterday I went out with 78% battery. I was out for about 3.5 hours during which time I sent/received 3 SMS messages, made no phone calls, used Google Maps twice for about 60 seconds each time, hailed an Uber (location services set to only use when app is active), and did 2 NFC electronic payments. I have no email set up on my phone, no iCloud syncing active and my calendar and contacts are set to manual pull only and I didn't do any manual pulls. The only other thing I did was 1 hour and 27 minutes (minus however long the Uber/maps/texting took from that screen time total) of iBooks reading but that is deliberately with the iBooks theme set to dark (white text on pure black background) to optimise power consumption for an OLED display and in terms of the number of pixels lit on the screen is probably not far off the number that Samsung lights up with its always-on-display, i.e. the screen was effectively more off than on so definitely nothing like watching a video or surfing the web.
Well, all that activity left me with 52% battery when I got home - virtually no demanding activity dropped 26% off my battery life! On that basis this phone is going to give me about 6 hours of super-battery-optimised white-on-black iBook reading before it dies. How on earth does that tally with a phone that Apple claims gives 14 hours of wireless video playback on a single charge ( https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone-xs/specs/ )
I'm not happy to the extent of considering returning it, going back to my 6s for a year, and waiting to see if 2019 might finally be the year when Apple can deliver good battery life.
There's been lots of talk about WiFi and mobile connectivity issues on the Xs and Xs-Max and I do seem to get worse signal strength as shown by the indicators on both WiFi and mobile when I'm at home compared to my 6s. Perhaps this is an issue with simple standby and keeping connected to the phone masts draining a lot more power in less-than-perfect reception areas. If yes then, with a lot of other chatter about how the new Intel modem in the Xs is a step back technically from the Qualcomm one in the X, I wonder if this is fixable in software. Do I wait long enough to find out?
Ultimately I'm going to play for another week, maybe do a few marathon reading sessions to see how much iBooks time I can get per 10% of battery loss. Leave it in airplane mode for a day to see how much battery is lost then, and perhaps some other experiments like playing music on a loop for 12 hours or so to see how the music playing time compares with Apple's claim (Apple claims 60 hours wireless so I would expect at least that when playing local content).
I don't want to end up returning my Xs because I like the new screen, FaceID and the general form factor but if battery life is this disappointing then I don't think that Apple deserves my money with this year's model.
These threads always pop up... Its probably a rogue app that needs to be updated or spotlight is busy indexing your phone. This should clear up in a few days.
Without knowing more about your usage or the apps you are using not much more can be said or done.
How long would you give spotlight indexing? I read someone in another thread saying 48 hours. I suppose it probably depends on content on the phone but at least for me I would hope that after 3 days it's finished. Maybe not. (Actually, I say I hope it would be finished. Since I do want better battery life I would love this to be the explanation so what I really hope is that it's not finished!)
I have background app refresh switched off globally on my phone and am very careful to switch off location services for anything that doesn't need it and, for the apps that do, I only ever have them set to "while using" rather than "always". I also have all system location services apart from Emergency-calls and find-my-phone turned off. I'm assuming that with all that done I am much less likely to get a rogue app draining battery or am I wrong on that? I'm also very careful to turn off notifications on anything that doesn't really need them.
- Julian
I am. I'm coming from an X and where my X lasted a full day, sometims 1.5, the XS is half drained by lunch??
Not sure what your problem is but my Battery Life is excellent. Today 3 hrs screen time, off charger at 5:30 am. Now 14 hours later I am at 60%. Just got the phone yesterday so I know its going to get even better. Word to the wise, lose facebook messenger and Facebook app. I only check Facebook thru Safari.
CC
I don't have FB on my phone, never have. All the settings are the same because it just came from a restore.
What apps have permission to work in the background ? Are location services activated? are you sinning pop, map or other 3d party mail clients? there are so many things that can impact the performance of a battery but no details have bene supplied!
I'm going to try and drain it down to zero and recalibrate it. I hear your point about optimization, and some things are optimized and some are not. I haven't done it to extremes. I have what I need/want to have on, and have turned off what I don't. My underlying point is that, that suggestion is moot as the settings and apps were and are the same on both phones, as they were clones of one another, and the performance so far is different.
I am also getting terrible battery life with my iPhone XS that I'm taking a hard consideration of returning it. I came from a Note 8 (very bad battery), and I am getting the same experience with my XS. Since I've only had the phone for three days, I hope the performance improves over time.
Anecdotal, and it’s early days, but I’m getting better battery life from my XS compared to my X. My X was running at 95% battery health so that obviously is also a factor.
My iPhone XS Max lasts about 16 hours on a charge with medium usage. I have about 120 applications installed and location services enabled on a few of those applications. The battery is much better than my old Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus. The S9 Plus only lasted about 8 hours and needed to be charged at least twice a day.
What's your SOT at the end of the day on a single charge?
Screenshots of Screen Time and battery graphs please?
