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iOS 26 battery life thread.

Reverend Benny said:
Was playing around with an iPhone 13 on iOS 26.5.2 that had 76% battery health and man what a difference in terms of performance from a usability perspective. The phone was lagging quite a bit and was from time to time not a very good user experience.
Sure, the phone will throttle the CPU and other components but never thought it would be so noticeable. Have messed around with a good few iPhone 13 with a healthy battery on iOS 26 and that was a completely different experience.

Not saying the CPU/GPU throttling feature is a bad thing but it was very noticeable when it was active on device with below 80% battery health.
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It is an utter and complete insanity how much the relevance of battery health changes once you update.

This clearly showcases that iOS updates increase their resource consumption so massively that the experience is entirely different.

It is especially evident on iOS 26, I assume, due to the massively increased resource consumption of the part of iOS in charge of rendering (widely shown and tested when 26 was released with specific watts comparisons).

I don’t replace batteries and I don’t update iOS. I have two iPhone 6s. One was forced by Apple to iOS 13 and one runs iOS 10. The one on 13 has 75% health. The one on iOS 10, 63% health.

The one on iOS 13 is unusable, it dies on standby within a few hours and drops to 60% after an hour of music playback, so much so that I finally retired it.

The one on iOS 10? Like-new. It can play music for hours on end and has a normal standby battery life.


I can’t imagine how poor 26 is on an older iPhone like the 11 with a severely reduced battery health. Resource consumption really skyrockets with updates, and what surprises me the most is that people just accept this as if it was fine.

I am absolutely, 100% sure that if that iPhone 13 were on iOS 15 it would be just fine. My own long-term experience with original versions has repeatedly been like that.

And 26’s introduction of Liquid Glass, sadly, only compounds the issue, as it skyrockets resource consumption to levels that were unheard of before.
 
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@FeliApple battery health decline matters whatever software version it’s running, whether it be the original or a later supported version for the device.

In 2022 me and the other half got iPhone 14’s which launched with iOS 16. My other half kept theirs longer, over a year on the original software version, battery health was about 87% with a noticeable reduction in runtime they complained about before upgrading.

There is absolutely no way that a device with significant decline to 63% battery health operates like new even on the original software version. It cannot defy the laws of physics and how batteries degrade over time, if it could then you’d be having as new battery life even with 20% battery health which is impossible!

Anyone using an iPhone with battery health well under 80% will be getting a warning that the battery is significantly degraded and needs replaced, original software version or newer.
 
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First day with 26.6 RC on my Air and I think it’s a decent update & improvement over the shambles that is 26.5.2.

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RC does NOT fix the overheating issue people are experiencing with the phone, doing nothing; or simple web browsing and it getting hot and so the battery drains faster.

I’m reading reports of this being fixed in iOS 27.
 
James6s said:
Yep! 3rd say straight that it wants to do a full charge with a charge limit of 90% set. Usually it’s once a week, if that! Not sure what the problem is that’s causing it.
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My iPhone did that yesterday morning. Not even the battery was used as much.
 
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One thing I have noticed throughout the years (and keep forgetting about and to check) is how a jampacked storage to can affect battery life a good bit. It's not as bad as it used to be but it still makes a noticeable difference to have around 50GB free space (have 256gb storage) compared to when its almost full.
 
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A good few days have passed since installing iOS 26.6 RC on my Air, and for sure battery life has improved a bit over 26.5.2.

I know It’s never going to be great given its small battery capacity, but improvements are welcome!

Minus 40 minutes screen time that it had when I took it off the charger. Roughly 60\40 WiFi/mobile data.

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Some similar usage days on iOS 26.5.2, around 30-40 minutes of screen time whilst on the charger as usual in a morning.

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Reverend Benny said:
One thing I have noticed throughout the years (and keep forgetting about and to check) is how a jampacked storage to can affect battery life a good bit. It's not as bad as it used to be but it still makes a noticeable difference to have around 50GB free space (have 256gb storage) compared to when its almost full.
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interesting observation. My iPhone 7 did have bad battery life when 3/4ths of its storage was used.
 
Is anyone else using the adblocker Wipr 2 on the iPhone and also Filtr which is blocking as an URL blocker in iOS? I am trying to find out if its the reason that my phone is warming up all the time.
 
Blue Hawk said:
Is anyone else using the adblocker Wipr 2 on the iPhone and also Filtr which is blocking as an URL blocker in iOS? I am trying to find out if its the reason that my phone is warming up all the time.
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I’m using both on my 17pm. No heating up on my end. I’m running 26.6RC
 
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Not been on my Air much this morning, standby time is excellent on 26.6. Can’t remember the last version that had such low idle drain, also 28 mins of screen time so far.

IMG_0689.jpeg
 
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James6s said:
Not been on my Air much this morning, standby time is excellent on 26.6. Can’t remember the last version that had such low idle drain, also 28 mins of screen time so far.

View attachment 2648168
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The first percentage point (even if it’s not 100%) tends to last longer than the rest.

How’s standby on your Air, say, overnight on a percentage point that’s not the first? Or do you always charge overnight?

As an example, my 16 Plus on iOS 18 dropped from 75% to 74% in about 8.5 hours yesterday (after being charged to 100% earlier in the day).
 
FeliApple said:
The first percentage point (even if it’s not 100%) tends to last longer than the rest.

How’s standby on your Air, say, overnight on a percentage point that’s not the first? Or do you always charge overnight?

As an example, my 16 Plus on iOS 18 dropped from 75% to 74% in about 8.5 hours yesterday (after being charged to 100% earlier in the day).
Click to expand...

I’ve used the various charge limits 80, 85, 90% etc and they all start dropping quicker than from a full 100% charge.

Overnight it looses about 2% sitting idle over 7-8 hours, and during the first use upon waking it usually drops 2% in a short time during active use.
 
James6s said:
I’ve used the various charge limits 80, 85, 90% etc and they all start dropping quicker than from a full 100% charge.

Overnight it looses about 2% sitting idle over 7-8 hours, and during the first use upon waking it usually drops 2% in a short time during active use.
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Yes, the 100% percentage point lasts the longest, but all of the first percentage points last longer than the others.

Well, that’s not too bad. My 16 Plus dropped 1% more very quickly this morning, but 2% with 2% more afterward isn’t too bad.

Overall, iOS 26 seems only slightly worse on the 17 series when compared to the 16 series on iOS 18.

The problem comes with updating older models, 16 series report a 15-20% loss coming from iOS 18, rather consistently.

Luckily, even if the 17 series is slightly worse than the 16 series on 18, it doesn’t sound meaningful at all.
 
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FeliApple said:
Yes, the 100% percentage point lasts the longest, but all of the first percentage points last longer than the others.

Well, that’s not too bad. My 16 Plus dropped 1% more very quickly this morning, but 2% with 2% more afterward isn’t too bad.

Overall, iOS 26 seems only slightly worse on the 17 series when compared to the 16 series on iOS 18.

The problem comes with updating older models, 16 series report a 15-20% loss coming from iOS 18, rather consistently.

Luckily, even if the 17 series is slightly worse than the 16 series on 18, it doesn’t sound meaningful at all.
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iOS 26.6 is being a little kinder to battery life than the recent versions that came before it!

After 5 betas + RC you’d like to think Apple have been working hard to give stability for what has been overall a poor software release in iOS 26!

Be interesting to see peoples experience once 26.6 is released to the public.

iOS 27 promises to bring system wide improvements, even to older devices! I’m sure you’re keeping on eye on that.
 
FeliApple said:
Yes, the 100% percentage point lasts the longest, but all of the first percentage points last longer than the others.

Well, that’s not too bad. My 16 Plus dropped 1% more very quickly this morning, but 2% with 2% more afterward isn’t too bad.

Overall, iOS 26 seems only slightly worse on the 17 series when compared to the 16 series on iOS 18.

The problem comes with updating older models, 16 series report a 15-20% loss coming from iOS 18, rather consistently.

Luckily, even if the 17 series is slightly worse than the 16 series on 18, it doesn’t sound meaningful at all.
Click to expand...

2% drain since midnight & another 1% after 7 minutes of screen time.

IMG_0708.png

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