22% of the entire day's battery life in standby mode isn't great. My results: 9 hours of screen-on time and 75% of the battery drained. iOS 18.7, iPhone 11.
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iOS 26 battery life thread.
- Thread starter goldmac2006
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I refuse to update my 16 Pro Max to iOS 26 for now. I’m currently on 18.7. I like the new design, but there’s no way I want my one-year-old phone to already be running warm with reduced battery life—especially when there’s nothing truly new or useful for me besides the updated look.
Yeah, I mean, I will never criticise a conscious choice. If someone prefers the update for whatever reason, knowing that battery life will most likely be reduced, they’ve weighed the pros and cons and decided to update.
But I really don’t understand those who update (especially older devices) and expect perfection.
It’s hard to gauge because battery life can be so variable. I don’t even blame users, unless you actively track it, knowing your exact battery life loss is difficult.
But I don’t know exactly how much battery life users got on iOS 18, so comparing is difficult.
I’m hoping that at least the 15 and 16 series aren’t impacted when the dust settles, but it’s looking less and less likely by the minute.
Yesterday I had my best comparison for usage vs my iPhone 14 Pro Max. Typically I would end the day around 15-20% and my new 16 Pro Max with iOS 26 ended the day at 49%.
The first few days / week with a new iOS I tend to explore and change a lot of things so that amounts to heavier usage. Whereas now I’m back to using it as I was before and it’s pretty good if you ask me. I have no complaints on battery. My only complaint is Apple Intelligence to be honest. It’s pretty useless.
My first day with IOS26 in my iPhone 15 Pro, yeah it sucked down electrons like the town wino,... presumably doing house keeping post upgrade. But it has since returned to normal.
my 16 Pro Max is suffering heavy battery drain! Hopefully it sorts itself out over the next few days or a fix is incoming!
Updated Monday... 16 Pro is still sucking juice like there's no tomorrow. WTF Apple??
My 16 Pro battery life seems better than before on 26.0. Off the charger at 6:30 this morning, light usage on and off all morning, battery life still 96% at 1:10 pm.
Gonna need to see a screenshot of this... that's crazy talk
About average for me in a morning. Point is, if you look at the days before Monday, when I was still on iOS 18, battery usage is about the same or lower, so 26 isn't destroying my battery life.
Yes and no, SOT is so low there that the percentage used looks consumed by either standby or background use. I don’t think you can conclude much from a screenshot with 11 minutes of SOT.
Nevertheless, if your screen-on time is always that low, I don’t think battery life is relevant at all for you. Chances are you’ll always have enough.
I feel the same when I use my iPhone lightly on Wednesdays
Still trying to figure how to get used to it
I think those days shouldn’t be considered at all for battery life assessment. I know I don’t. Standby isn’t good enough (and has never been, even on iOS’ golden standby days) to assess battery life after a day that’s something like “11 minutes of usage and 26 hours of standby”.
These new battery graphics are not very easy to read/understand. I preferred the previous where we were able to distinguish the consumption of a day.
For me iOS 26 is awful for battery and iPhone being warm for no reason. I have 16 Pro Max 125 cycles battery. Turning Off na On iPhone 4% gone … Web broswing on WiFi iPhone warm 30-40min 5% gone. I have complains about percentage and complains for being warm on no heavy tasks…
Hey! Can someone confirm about this issue i am going to explain? It has happened to me both on my iPhone 16 Pro Max since the begining of the ios 26 betas, and i just got my new iPhone 17 Pro Max, and same thing happens 🤦🏻♂
So basically, I charge my phone every night, unplugs it at the morning with 100%battery, if I start using it (it quickly goes that to 99%. Today I unplugged my IP17PM and after 15 min, it went down to 99%), now when this happen, try restarting the phone, then it jumps to 94/95%… it seems like either it has a problem charging or ready the battery status. This does not happen with ios 18.
I dowgraded my IP16PM when I saw this problem, from ios 26 to ios 18 and this did no happened, same usage of the phone took more than and our or maybe two, to get down from 100 to 99%
So i think it is a bug on iOS 26. Anybody else experience it?
You can algo see, that restarting in iOS 26, doesn’t matter which % of battery you have, makes a big jump down in battery %
Can you try to charge the phone completely to 100% and as soon as you get to 99%, restart and see if it jumps down?
Hope I explained it good so you understand me.
Here I send you and example with my IP16PM: you can see first with 100% battery, and as it went down to 99% super fasts ,I restarted and then it jumped down to 95% in just 5 min
So basically, I charge my phone every night, unplugs it at the morning with 100%battery, if I start using it (it quickly goes that to 99%. Today I unplugged my IP17PM and after 15 min, it went down to 99%), now when this happen, try restarting the phone, then it jumps to 94/95%… it seems like either it has a problem charging or ready the battery status. This does not happen with ios 18.
I dowgraded my IP16PM when I saw this problem, from ios 26 to ios 18 and this did no happened, same usage of the phone took more than and our or maybe two, to get down from 100 to 99%
So i think it is a bug on iOS 26. Anybody else experience it?
You can algo see, that restarting in iOS 26, doesn’t matter which % of battery you have, makes a big jump down in battery %
Can you try to charge the phone completely to 100% and as soon as you get to 99%, restart and see if it jumps down?
Hope I explained it good so you understand me.
Here I send you and example with my IP16PM: you can see first with 100% battery, and as it went down to 99% super fasts ,I restarted and then it jumped down to 95% in just 5 min
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The new battery statistic section on iOS 26 is completely useless and I'm sure it's by purpose, they don't want us to really know how many hours our phone last since last charge. it can't be otherwise because I can't figure out how this new graphics or percentages are useful and help to know our screen times. I know the battery is worse on iOS / iPadOS 26 but I can't tell how much is worse because I can't read the stupid statistic of this new section.
It’s utter and complete garbage. Now, it is impossible to know screen-on time since last full charge unless you charge once, maybe overnight, and the first use of the day is after unplugging.
iOS 26’s garbage stats include screen-on time since 00:00 without distinction for use while charging. iOS 12 through 18 included hourly breakdowns for the last 24 hours. The disadvantage? You had to keep track of it if you used it for more than 24 hours or you’d lose the data, but the information was there if you cared enough to keep track of it.
Now, I’ll give you a hypothetical situation: I don’t charge overnight and start the day with 60%. I drain it to low battery, say, 10%, and I plug it back in with a fast charger. I need to use it while charging for a little while because I have to check something. It charges quite quickly to 100%, about 1.5 hours, and then I unplug it. I drain it to 50% and plug it overnight. The battery stats would show 100% use with a screen on time which would include time used whilst charging, time used while not charging, and the stats make it impossible to discern true screen-on time.
Apple should scrap all of this garbage and give you SOT since last unplugged. Either the designers of this are complete idiots or it is deliberate. The iOS 12 through 18 graph was poor too, because it should have shown stats since last full charge rather than throughout the last 24 hours, but at least the previous graph gave you the chance to know if you cared enough.
It is impossible with this one. Like I said, it is either a deliberate holding back of information for some ridiculous reason, or the designers are utter and complete idiots.
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My aging 13 Pro Max really took a hit. 😞 The drain was clearly there before 26. Wasn't TOO bad this week since Tues. when I updated it. I took it off the charger... sitting at 100% since last night. Within 1 minute it dropped to 99%. THAT has never happened.
*Battery STILL shows "89% health" but I really don't pay much attention to that number anymore.
EDIT: Popped in my head, I did mess around last night adding 6-7 different photos (they change every time I 'wake up' the screen) with that cool Spacial effect, no doubt that may be sucking the absolute life out of this phone so I'll be ditching that wallpaper effect / photos.
*Battery STILL shows "89% health" but I really don't pay much attention to that number anymore.
EDIT: Popped in my head, I did mess around last night adding 6-7 different photos (they change every time I 'wake up' the screen) with that cool Spacial effect, no doubt that may be sucking the absolute life out of this phone so I'll be ditching that wallpaper effect / photos.