iOS 26 battery life thread.

[Inland-Empire]

Updated to iOS 26.0 6 days ago and factory reset my iPhone 14 Pro.
Battery life is significantly worse, even now, than it was on iOS 18.6.2.
For example, two hours of scrolling and Safari use was ~55% of my battery. Phone gets randomly hot doing extremely mundane things like using Bluesky when it didn't before.
This morning, listening to a podcast via CarPlay for 30 minutes with the iPhone screen off used a whopping 5% of my battery.

How is this acceptable? This was a full functional, high performance phone a week ago. Apple robbed me.

 

[max2]

iPhone 13 Pro Max latest iOS works great. Battery life same.

 

[Inland-Empire]

Interesting test of how the Liquid Glass effects might be using much more battery vs iOS 18:

13x higher battery consumption is INSANE.

Apple, what are you doing??

 

[imagineadam]

Updated to iOS 26.0 6 days ago and factory reset my iPhone 14 Pro.
Battery life is significantly worse, even now, than it was on iOS 18.6.2.
For example, two hours of scrolling and Safari use was ~55% of my battery. Phone gets randomly hot doing extremely mundane things like using Bluesky when it didn't before.
This morning, listening to a podcast via CarPlay for 30 minutes with the iPhone screen off used a whopping 5% of my battery.

How is this acceptable? This was a full functional, high performance phone a week ago. Apple robbed me.

I updated on Tuesday and same thing. Phone gets very warm doing basic tasks where before it was ice cold. It’s weird because when I check the cpu usage it still shows it at and idle like 1-5% so I don’t know what exactly is heating up?! It feels like it’s right where the soc is so I’m stumped. Could it actually still be doing the indexing? And if so you’d imagine that would be using cpu cycles. Maybe they unleashed the main power cores for everything now and the efficiency cores are disabled? My phone is plenty snappy but the heat and faster battery drain is super annoying. I’ve been burned again by and update! I thought it would be better by now but still getting the random heating.

 

[sleepyking]

Updated to iOS 26.0 6 days ago and factory reset my iPhone 14 Pro.
Battery life is significantly worse, even now, than it was on iOS 18.6.2.
For example, two hours of scrolling and Safari use was ~55% of my battery. Phone gets randomly hot doing extremely mundane things like using Bluesky when it didn't before.
This morning, listening to a podcast via CarPlay for 30 minutes with the iPhone screen off used a whopping 5% of my battery.

How is this acceptable? This was a full functional, high performance phone a week ago. Apple robbed me.

Same experience for me. 16 pro battery is horrible after updating. At the time of writing I’m at 60% with barely 58 min active safari, 25 min active YouTube

Every night by 7pm I’m dipping at 20% or less with less than 5 hours of active screen time

Zero background app refreshed, mail set to fetch.

Battery on this phone has become annoying AF

 

[willdude]

Updated to iOS 26.0 6 days ago and factory reset my iPhone 14 Pro.
Battery life is significantly worse, even now, than it was on iOS 18.6.2.
For example, two hours of scrolling and Safari use was ~55% of my battery. Phone gets randomly hot doing extremely mundane things like using Bluesky when it didn't before.
This morning, listening to a podcast via CarPlay for 30 minutes with the iPhone screen off used a whopping 5% of my battery.

How is this acceptable? This was a full functional, high performance phone a week ago. Apple robbed me.

What's your battery health? My 14 Pro at 78% health was also pretty bad on the public betas, and I'm wondering how much a new battery would help.

 

[FeliApple]

Interesting test of how the Liquid Glass effects might be using much more battery vs iOS 18:

13 to 1 on the latest updatable iPhone (i.e., the latest not to have it as the original version) is INSANE.

Every user who potentially wants to update on any iPhone should at least keep this in mind and consider it.

Absolute obliteration. Absolute irreversible malware. Ridiculous.

 

[goldmac2006]

13 to 1 on the latest updatable iPhone (i.e., the latest not to have it as the original version) is INSANE.

Every user who potentially wants to update on any iPhone should at least keep this in mind and consider it.

Absolute obliteration. Absolute irreversible malware. Ridiculous.

True or false: Liquid Glass is a battery eater.

 

[FeliApple]

True or false: Liquid Glass is a battery eater.

The video speaks for itself. It is ridiculous.

People should update if they want to, but they should at least consider that.

 

[goldmac2006]

The video speaks for itself. It is ridiculous.

People should update if they want to, but they should at least consider that.

Exactly.

Doesn’t it take so much graphics to make it look good yet destroy y’all’s battery life?

And it ain’t malware 😂 only people who jailbreak or do hideous stuff on their iPhone or iPad would get viruses 🦠

 

[FeliApple]

Exactly.

Doesn’t it take so much graphics to make it look good yet destroy y’all’s battery life?

Apparently it does. I mean, at this point I’ve given up on people learning. Apple has no reason to care: it has shown that it can do anything and everything to any iOS device and people will keep updating. They have no incentive to stop.

It’s fine, I’ve solved the issue for myself regardless. If people want to continuously and endlessly kill their own devices, let them.

And it ain’t malware 😂 only people who jailbreak or do hideous stuff on their iPhone or iPad would get viruses 🦠

It’s a manner of speaking, but it is quite malicious, imo.

 

[Abazigal]

Battery life is definitely worse on my 13 pro max.

Battery health is at 85%. I used to end the day with my phone at 50-60%. Now, I end the day at around 30%.

Funny observation - I have this budget app, Nudget, which had been lagging on my device for quite some time now. When I switch to transparent icons on my device, the lag magically goes away and the app works as smooth as butter. Not sure what to make of it.

 

[LogicalApex]

The battery life on my 17 Pro is leaps and bounds better than my iPhone 16 Pro. I am usually ending the day with 50% left. My 16 Pro needed at least 1 midday charge to stay above 20% at the end of a day.

 

[goldmac2006]

Apparently it does. I mean, at this point I’ve given up on people learning. Apple has no reason to care: it has shown that it can do anything and everything to any iOS device and people will keep updating. They have no incentive to stop.

It’s fine, I’ve solved the issue for myself regardless. If people want to continuously and endlessly kill their own devices, let them.

It’s a manner of speaking, but it is quite malicious, imo.

We also can’t control what others do with their iPhones, whether they receive betas or public releases, etc. Therefore, you all need to assess the risks involved with these builds. That’s why Apple recommends that all iPhone and iPad users back up their devices through Finder before installing these builds.

People may need to revert to iOS 18 if they find the battery drain too uncomfortable. Adaptive power mode isn’t sufficient to help preserve battery life, and even any mitigation to reduce screen time or charge limits (if applicable) may not be enough. Additionally, there may be other unpredictable issues that require a downgrade.

 

[SoYoung]

You can’t downgrade anymore to iOS 18. Also at one point you’ll have no choice to update and yes, staying on an old OS without any update for months is also not very responsable. Yes the chances are minimal but as further the times go, the further you expose yourself on security holes. So I can’t blame anyone who update to the latest OS. But yes, being on a beta is another story though.

And returning on topic, after 8 days, my 16 pro max stabilized since 2 days and I have very decent battery life now. I don’t think it’s on par with iOS 18,7 but it’s not too far away like the days after I installed 26.

 

[MetalMatt24]

Battery life on my 16PM, with reduced transparency on, reduced motion, charge limit is 90%, background refresh off, system services all off etc etc etc.

Bottom line is it’s been over a week and the battery goes down very quick. Horrid to be honest.

 

[Maloney~888]

It’s been 5 days since I installed 26.0 on my 15 pro. Battery has settled down and is on par if not close to 18.7 battery performance. I didn’t have AI or background app refresh on for either iOS. Never had a heat issue.

 

[cigz]

Interesting test of how the Liquid Glass effects might be using much more battery vs iOS 18:

There's also a person on reddit that shows the power draw of iOS 26 on iPhone 17 Pro Max

https://www.reddit.com/r/iPhone17Pro/comments/1nrc5zi/iphone_17_pro_max_ios26_is_actually_crazy_battery

And also the video on YouTube:

Doing basic things like swiping down Control Center consumes more power than taking pictures or taking a screenshot draws almost 19W of power, sorry but that's embarrassing and that has to be fixed by them immediately. What's funny is that reducing transparency consumes even more power lol

 

[FeliApple]

There's also a person on reddit that shows the power draw of iOS 26 on iPhone 17 Pro Max

https://www.reddit.com/r/iPhone17Pro/comments/1nrc5zi/iphone_17_pro_max_ios26_is_actually_crazy_battery

And also the video on YouTube:

Doing basic things like swiping down Control Center consumes more power than taking pictures or taking a screenshot draws almost 19W of power, sorry but that's embarrassing and that has to be fixed by them immediately. What's funny is that reducing transparency consumes even more power lol

That is utterly insane. That’s why the video you quoted shows a 13-to-1 difference.

You just can’t have optimisation so poor or an OS so draining that OS animations have the same power draw of a fully-fledged game, or almost twice as much consumption as shooting 4K video (!!!), one of the heaviest activities on an iPhone barring gaming.

It just can’t spike that high. An iPhone 11 would be absolutely torched, then.

You can see with this example that there is no consideration for any older devices at all. If it does this to the 17 Pro Max, it absolutely vaporises battery life on any older iPhone. Apple knows this. How can you prevent downgrading if this is the case? Absolutely appalling, malicious behaviour by Apple.

 

[SoYoung]

That is utterly insane. That’s why the video you quoted shows a 13-to-1 difference.

You just can’t have optimisation so poor or an OS so draining that OS animations have the same power draw of a fully-fledged game, or almost twice as much consumption as shooting 4K video (!!!), one of the heaviest activities on an iPhone barring gaming.

It just can’t spike that high. An iPhone 11 would be absolutely torched, then.

You can see with this example that there is no consideration for any older devices at all. If it does this to the 17 Pro Max, it absolutely vaporises battery life on any older iPhone. Apple knows this. How can you prevent downgrading if this is the case? Absolutely appalling, malicious behaviour by Apple.

I’m totally agree with all you said. Apple also should add a true dark mode like iOS 18 was close to. We don’t have true dark background anymore on iOS 26 and it’s also a part of the problem for oled screens and try to have better battery life for those who want to.

 

[Reverend Benny]

There's also a person on reddit that shows the power draw of iOS 26 on iPhone 17 Pro Max

https://www.reddit.com/r/iPhone17Pro/comments/1nrc5zi/iphone_17_pro_max_ios26_is_actually_crazy_battery

And also the video on YouTube:

Doing basic things like swiping down Control Center consumes more power than taking pictures or taking a screenshot draws almost 19W of power, sorry but that's embarrassing and that has to be fixed by them immediately. What's funny is that reducing transparency consumes even more power lol

It would have been interesting to see a similar experiment carried out with iOS 18.

I think its important not to jump into conclusions without more information on how things work.
As an example, brighter images or a flash will consume more power for a split second such as the screenshoot taken, its how OLED works. That's why it would have been interesting to see the same thing carried out on iOS 18.

But its obvious that there are some issues with certain models, but I'm not sure liquid glass is to blame for all of these issues.

My guesses where the bugs could be found.

• GPU drivers, since the GPU's are model specific it may be why we see some models getting decent performance and some not
• Baseband drivers/fw, all models seem to have an update with iOS26, this may also be a reason for excessive batterydrain in some conditions and depending on what you do connect to (network standards both cellular and wifi).
• Apps not behaving as they should
• HW revisions, the same model can have different hw, that may also be why we see different people with different results.

Of course it can be a combo of things making it harder to find whats causing these issues.
I can only assume Apple is looking into this and will be releasing fixes asap so that those who are affected get their phones working properly again.

 

[FeliApple]

It would have been interesting to see a similar experiment carried out with iOS 18.

I think its important not to jump into conclusions without more information on how things work.
As an example, brighter images or a flash will consume more power for a split second such as the screenshoot taken, its how OLED works. That's why it would have been interesting to see the same thing carried out on iOS 18.

But its obvious that there are some issues with certain models, but I'm not sure liquid glass is to blame for all of these issues.

My guesses where the bugs could be found.

• GPU drivers, since the GPU's are model specific it may be why we see some models getting decent performance and some not
• Baseband drivers/fw, all models seem to have an update with iOS26, this may also be a reason for excessive batterydrain in some conditions and depending on what you do connect to (network standards both cellular and wifi).
• Apps not behaving as they should
• HW revisions, the same model can have different hw, that may also be why we see different people with different results.

Of course it can be a combo of things making it harder to find whats causing these issues.
I can only assume Apple is looking into this and will be releasing fixes asap so that those who are affected get their phones working properly again.

Come on, you can’t defend this. This is ridiculous.

What combo of things? It’s liquid glass. It’s iOS 26. No other reason. No combo of things. Just the update.


Look at the video that that post quoted. In fact, I’ll share it myself again:

 

[Reverend Benny]

Come on, you can’t defend this. This is ridiculous.

What combo of things? It’s liquid glass. It’s iOS 26. No other reason. No combo of things. Just the update.


Look at the video that that post quoted. In fact, I’ll share it myself again:

Read my post again.

I'm not defending anything, but rather trying to understand what might cause this rather than going on a rant.

 

[FeliApple]

Read my post again.

I'm not defending anything, but rather trying to understand what might cause this rather than going on a rant.

But it’s nonsensical. It’s not GPU drivers. It’s not baseband drivers. It’s not apps misbehaving. It’s not hardware revisions.

It’s iOS 26.

 

[Reverend Benny]

But it’s nonsensical. It’s not GPU drivers. It’s not baseband drivers. It’s not apps misbehaving. It’s not hardware revisions.

It’s iOS 26.

Ok, will try and explain a bit more so that it makes sense.

Most updates do include updated drivers and FW. iOS 26 is a significant update and most likely do have updated drivers and FW for most models. Since devices might have different HW, even within the same model (OLED panels is a good example), these drivers may need unique configs to work properly.

Baseband/network drivers is another example, there a loads of different network configs out there and on top of the the cellular companies sometimes need to update their equipment to work well with devices in their network.

Apps missbehaving can absolutely be an issue, especially with a new OS being released.

Lets say you have a combo, missbehaving app, indexing and another bug such as a GPU driver not working properly, that makes it a lot harder to find the source of the issue to try and correct it quickly.

More GPU intensive features such as liquid glass are most likely to use more GPU power, but what some users with issues report here isn't how its designed to work, I think its down to bugs in the software that will be fixed in future updates.