iOS 7 drains battery faster than iOS 6

[Damolee]

Normal usage over the space of a week, I have lost around an hour and half using 3G all day and a good hour or so on WIFI.

Maybe an option to switch off the long animations would help with battery. I hate them.

 

[TroyBoy30]

no change in mine on the iphone 5

 

[matttye]

My phone just died at 15%, and it drained about twice as fast as usual today. First time it has done this since I installed the GM.

Do apps need to be updated to make use of the background refresh? If so, Facebook and Twitter both updated for me yesterday so that could be the difference maker.

I'll try turning off background refresh and see if that helps tomorrow.

 

[phillytim]

Come on people stop complained the battery life.
After a fresh install you have to calibrate the battery.

It means you have to charge to 100%and drain the battery to 0% or 5%. Just do this few cycle and enjoy the new battery life.

Really? I thought the days of this were over, with the current gen of batteries.

Here's Apple's advice (which is for its notebooks, but all its rechargeable batteries are of the same materials):

"For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Apple does not recommend leaving your portable plugged in all the time. An ideal use would be a commuter who uses her notebook on the train, then plugs it in at the office to charge. This keeps the battery juices flowing. If on the other hand, you use a desktop computer at work, and save a notebook for infrequent travel, Apple recommends charging and discharging its battery at least once per month. Need a reminder? Add an event to your desktop’s iCal. When your battery no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs, you may choose to replace it. If your notebook came with a built-in battery, you should have the battery replaced only by an Apple Authorized Service Provider."

 

[k995]

On all my iOS devices, the battery last longer in day to day use. That's all that actually matters to me. And I've been using it since september 10th, in the real world.

Sure good for you but several sites and a lot of users have other expierences .

And the sites that you quote are hardly to be called tech-sites now are they, all quoting the arstechnica benchmark data, heck one of three links you gave linked to another one of the same three links...

Claiming that tweakers.net aren't biased on the subject is blatantly ignoring reality. They are, very much so.

Biased? So when they said the iphone 5 was the best all round high end smart phone it was that famous bias speaking?

5c good but to them overpriced? 5s a significant improvement (over the already best iphone) ?

Sure some bias.

Out of 10 latest articles (wich is btw 3 days) 2 are neutral 6 positive and 2 bad : battery life and servers overloaded something almost all other sites reported as well.

 

[Casiotone]

I use an app called SysStatsMon which shows CPU usage. Their are probably other apps that do so as well.

I'm curious, how can you know how parallax affects CPU usage when you're in an app that doesn't use it and you're not in the homescreen?

I'm going to try to monitor CPU usage with XCode to know how parallax really affects CPU while in the homescreen. I'm sceptical that simply tilting a few textured polygons can drain the battery compared to a 3D game which shows millions of them.

 

[applesith]

My iPhone 5 usually went through 25-30% of a full battery during my morning commute. Today with iOS7, it was close to 50%. I disabled parallax, background app updates and refreshes.

It's disappointing but I always plug in at work in the late afternoon anyway. I wonder how it will be with LTE off.

 

[Morac]

I'm curious, how can you know how parallax affects CPU usage when you're in an app that doesn't use it and you're not in the homescreen?

I'm going to try to monitor CPU usage with XCode to know how parallax really affects CPU while in the homescreen. I'm sceptical that simply tilting a few textured polygons can drain the battery compared to a 3D game which shows millions of them.

Parallax is active all the time (or at least the code to handle orientation change is). I'm assuming this is a bug since as I stated turning Parallax off and on fixes it.

Reminds me of an older fixed bug where one of the processes associated with GPS kept running after using GPS causing CPU usage to increase by 10% until the phone was rebooted.

 

[Casiotone]

Parallax is active all the time (or at least the code to handle orientation change is). I'm assuming this is a bug since as I stated turning Parallax off and on fixes it.

Reminds me of an older fixed bug where one of the processes associated with GPS kept running after using GPS causing CPU usage to increase by 10% until the phone was rebooted.

Ok so I did some tests with Xcode's Instruments. It does use up to 45% CPU when it is active on my iPhone 4S, which is much more than I expected (isn't it just a few OpenGL polygons to tilt?).

But on my iPhone at least the parallax effect only affects CPU usage on the homescreen or when a system dialog (or HUD) is displayed, which normally should only represent a few % of my global iPhone usage (because I don't spend my all my time staring at the home screen or system dialogs...).

If there's indeed a bug that makes parallax active all the time even inside apps, it could explain some of the unexpected battery drain on some devices (which I don't get on my 4S, I actually have the best battery life I've ever had since beta 4). It should hopefully be fixed with 7.0.2.

 

[redshovel]

iOS7 was killing my iPhone 5 battery until I performed a restore.....now it's back to normal.

 

[Casiotone]

iOS7 was killing my iPhone 5 battery until I performed a restore.....now it's back to normal.

I think backward compatibility with previous settings is one of the hardest thing to achieve for a major OS or app update, because it's hard to test internally all the possible combinations of settings real-world users might have (including corrupted ones).

Sometimes, settings corruption might carry through several updates. That's why even today, every major OSes and many applications will benefit from a "clean install" when things go awry, especially after a major update.

My friend had an iPad 1, which he updated through all iOS versions until 5.x. Performance became abysmal all over the place and eventually the music app wouldn't even start. A restore solved all this and brought back acceptable performance.

It only takes one process to go into a time-out/crash loop because of unexpectedly corrupted/incompatible settings to drain battery at an abnormal rate and affect performance.

I know that iOS 7 beta 1 and 2 drained my 4S battery like there was no tomorrow (it would seriously drain the whole battery in a couple of hours and the phone got very hot) but not everyone was experiencing that. Since beta 3 I've got the best battery life I've ever got on my 4S and iPad 3.

 

[greenteal]

Situation A: I installed iOS 7 with a fresh restore on my iPhone 5 and set up as new, manually putting all my apps and settings. Battery life was horrible, getting about half to 2/3 of my typical usage before battery required a charge (was now getting about 4-5 hours of usage, and my usage habits did not change despite the excitement of a new OS).

B: Disappointed with the batt life after a few days, and decided to restore from a backup. No change in diminished batt life, perhaps it was even a tad better? Still dismal from iOS 6 though, not exceeding 6 hours of usage based on usual usage.

C: one day with parallax on and the other with it off and found no diff in batt whatsoever.

All expected culprits of decreased batt life on this version have been turned off (background app refresh, updates, location services for system settings and most apps).

Ah well.