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.
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.
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”.