I have an iPhone XS. Usually at the end of the day, at around 11 PM, I have about 30% battery left. But since upgrading to iOS 14.6 my battery is empty at around 5 PM. I implemented every suggested way that saves battery time. It did not improve it. It appears to me some iOS system related program is constantly running and draining the battery.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Some Users Reporting Excessive Battery Drain Following iOS 14.6 Update
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
No, not this wide spread.
In all of my years of using iPhones, I have never had a problem this bad after an update. Yesterday cutting grass I lost approximately 50% in just an hour of listening to podcast.
Not sure if it is the weather, but the phone gets hotter too.
(It is actually not that hot here in the snow belt.)
(It is actually not that hot here in the snow belt.)
Have this issue on a 12 pro and also noticed it on the Apple Watch as well with the latest update. Have to charge them way more often than normal.
I had excessive battery drain on my Watch (series 5) after updating to the latest WatchOS, where I could watch it decrease by single digits per minute, while it was doing nothing. Did a (painfully slow) reset and it went back to normal ~36 hour battery life. Haven’t noticed any irregularity with battery on my 12 Pro Max, thankfully.
The last round of updates killed the battery life on my Series 4 Watch. It would spontaneously discharge from fully charged to 5%.
Drains like crazy from 14.5/14.5.1 I'm assuming, where previously you had no issue?
I could usually go 2 days with my 11 Pro to around 40% battery, but now it's close to 20%. The battery recalibration also dropped my capacity to 96%.
iOS 14.5 still for me is no good in my 11 pro max. 2 hours of light safari browsing in Macrumors and 2 other light website and 88% battery left at 10:30am while indoor. And the phone is a little hot. Where are the so called “high efficiency cores?. If I use WhatsApp, the phone gets very hot, very quickly. Ok, WhatsApp is not apple problem, but Safari should be able to stop running whatever background ads or scripts are in the running in 99% of the websites!.
This was happening to me a few months in to owning the 11 Pro and was the key reason I upgraded even though I’d originally planned to keep it two years because I loved the color and size. Something similar started happening a couple of months and two iOS updates into owning my iPhone 7 Plus. It’s like even after people report the issue was fixed, sometimes once it happens my phones seem never to recover. I hope that won’t be the case for you and your iphone. The 11 Pro is a damn good phone and it would be a shame for this issue to continue to plague it.
You’re not alone
Since updating, my battery life has definitely decreased. In the same use pattern that I do every day - creature of habit. I’m now getting a low battery warning halfway through the day, where normally I wouldn’t even be hitting halfway.
But I had just given it the usual shrug and figured we’ll get an update for it sooner than later.
Normally I’m one of the lucky ones who doesn’t get any issues. Suppose I had to have a turn eventually
FWIW, I turned off auto brightness and optimised battery charging, and now, my iPhone 12 Pro Max is running noticeably cooler. Go figure.
Last edited:
I'm usually one of the ones that says "this happens every update...just give it a few days... *facepalm*." However, with 14.6, I did notice it when I go off of wifi and into 5g territory only, my phone was heating up excessively/out of normal. Wonder if there's something with the 5g modem that got affected that's causing the drain because when I got back home on wifi all was good again.
Excessive battery drain listening to music since iOS 14, with 14.6 it even got worse without listening to music.
I have this same experience since the update. My phone overheats, and the battery drains very quickly. I've never experienced anything like this before.
It appears to be something with Mail.app. Yesterday I kept having to plug my phone in and I couldn’t understand why. I first got a 20% warning at 5pm which is highly unusual for my Xs Max, especially since I had low power mode on all day. Even with heavy YouTube usage I don’t expect to see this until maybe 3-5 hours after that. I had to plug my phone into a fast-charger 4 times before bed when I hit 8% before plugging in. That’s when I checked the Battery screen in settings and saw Mail had been responsible for 40% of my battery usage throughout the day even though it was only open for 14mins and doing background activity for 40. Safari didn’t even use half that when used for an hour and a half.
Attachments
I noticed from the update that my location services were reset to almost all on (Settings > Privacy > Location Services). So after I changed every app to "Never" for nearly every app, it made a HUGE difference. Apparently "While Using the App" could mean that it would run while in the background, needlessly draining the battery.
Make sure to also check the "System Services" at the very bottom of the list and turn most of those things off. My guess is that they were all defaulted on to make thing easier for the AirTags (or who knows?).
My issue isn’t 14.6. It’s watchOS. 10 hour battery life on my series 5 at best, 7-8 at worst. My OG 2015 Apple Watch actually has better battery lol
The problem with the smart battery case on 14.6 is that now after a night of charging when you unplug it drains the battery from the phone first and leaves the case at full!
You have to take the case off and put it back on for it to start charging the phone like it used to!
I’ve been reporting this from the get go witb 14.6. Luckily I dropped back down to throttle gate 14.5.1 for the time being!
You have to take the case off and put it back on for it to start charging the phone like it used to!
I’ve been reporting this from the get go witb 14.6. Luckily I dropped back down to throttle gate 14.5.1 for the time being!
(What kind of an "Apple Smart Cover" do you put on an iPhone 11 Pro? I guess we're meant to read that as Apple Smart Battery Case instead?)
My Xs battery at 89% capacity still gets 8-10 hours of battery life per day. More if I use it for work with Fuze and less when I am on news sites like Apple's & Google News with songs streaming when I'm not working.
Cannot say the same thing with my 9.7" iPad pro. Thing gets so hot sometimes I have to hold it differently & the battery % sometimes resembles a count down timer when I spend an hour going through news and songs (no videos), but this is 5 year old hardware and has been the case now for at least a year.
Brought it in to the Apple store and everything checked out fine. Left with a recommendation I upgrade to a new iPad.
Cannot say the same thing with my 9.7" iPad pro. Thing gets so hot sometimes I have to hold it differently & the battery % sometimes resembles a count down timer when I spend an hour going through news and songs (no videos), but this is 5 year old hardware and has been the case now for at least a year.
Brought it in to the Apple store and everything checked out fine. Left with a recommendation I upgrade to a new iPad.