Iphone Experiments

[pedz]

About a week ago my iPhone battery started to drain very quickly. Its an iPhone 6+ that is less than 12 months old. I realize that batteries eventually become unable to hold a charge but this feels like something else.

The first experiment I did was charged it to 100% and went into airplane mode and over night it stayed at 100%. This supported my belief that some app is running amock.

Prior to this, I had disabled "Background App Refresh" for all of the apps except Google Hangouts. I'm not clear exactly what that does.

The experiment I am running now is I removed 2/3rds of my apps. I've gone from three plus pages of apps down to less than a page -- basically just the essential apps. I'm going to let it sit for a day and see how the battery holds out.

The experiment is slightly polluted because when I was removing the apps, I noticed the Mac with the iTunes on it was all freaked out. I had to reboot it to get it working again. So, really, I changed two things at the same time. Perhaps the freaked out Mac with iTunes was pestering the iPhone to death. But, the counter argument to that is the battery seemed to drain just as quickly at work. Clearly all these "experiments" have a hefty subjective part to them.

I'm not a big phone user. Before this started, I would go a week without charging it. Now, its a day and a half roughly and its complete drained.

I thought folks here might already know specific apps that might cause this.

 

[Cheryl]

I have noticed that after an update to the iOS, WiFi gets turned on automatically after the phone’s restart. That can drain the battery while it continuously searches for a connection. The same goes for BlueTooth.
If you have Mail set up, change the settings from Push (constantly checking for email) to Manual (when you open the app, it will get mail).
Turn off GPS/Locations. I turn that on only when I need to use Maps.

Check to see how many apps are still open at any given time. When you hit the home button to close an app, the app does not quit. The more apps you have open but hidden, the more your battery will be drained. To quit these apps, hit the home button twice and you will get a screen with layers - all the apps that are open. With a swipe of your finger on the screen, on the layer (window) of the app, quickly to the top of the phone, you will force quit the app. It takes a little practice to do this. If you hold your finger too long on the layer, it will come front and forward so you can use it.

 

[pedz]

Thank you for the tidbits. My experimenting "failed" mostly. I did all of the suggestions above plus many more but my battery kept hemorrhaging power. It was dropping several percent per hour and the only thing that would stop it was going into Airplane mode.

I was going to do a complete erase and reinstall. In preparation for that I did an iCloud backup. My normal backups are on my local machine. The phone was plugged in and it ran for several hours (I have a very small internet pipe). In the morning, it said it had completed. Fine. I was going to do the complete erase over the Thanksgiving holidays. So I just blindly went off with work with iPhone in hand. Oh... I never do my experiments correctly. I *also* changed my Apple password because it was long and convoluted. Now its just long but easier to type and remember. I assumed during the wipe and reinstall I would need to type it in several times so I wanted it simpler than it had been.

In any case, it no longer is having battery problems.

I mentioned this to a friend and his first suggestion (immediately) was a hard reset. I did that as well but I am sure my phone was already "fixed" by that point.

I'm currently at 97% battery and it has been unplugged since 9 or so this morning (a good 10 hours at least).