What's going on with my iPhone? (battery-related)

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve had an AT&T iPhone 5 since February. On a typical day I charge the phone overnight, get up around 6AM, and when I go to bed at 10-ish, I usually have 25-30% charge left on the battery. This will have covered a couple of phone calls, some Facebooking and e-mail checking, a few Words With Friends moves, and virtually an entire day of podcast listening via Downcast. On a really heavy-use day I’ll be down to 15% at bedtime.

Last Tuesday afternoon I realized that the battery level was way down, and by 4PM it was completely drained. No idea why. The next day (after a full overnight charge), the same thing was happening. Thursday I stopped by the Apple Store and spoke to one of their Geniuses to see if there was anything obvious I was missing in my attempts to solve the problem. He said the battery checked out, and he didn’t see anything obviously wrong. He suggested I do a reset and restore from backup and see if that helped. I did this, to no improvement.

Friday afternoon I went back to the Apple Store. I explained everything I had done, and the guy helping me out agreed that he couldn’t see anything obviously wrong, but to try to eliminate hardware as the problem, he replaced my phone. He suggested that if, after a restore from backup I was still having problems, I should reset the phone and then treat it as a brand-new phone, installing apps straight from the app store instead of using the back-up, in case there was some corruption of an app. I did a restore from backup on the new phone, and, again, there was no improvement. I was sucking down battery power at an astonishing rate.

So, I determined that I would need to spend some time today taking care of all this. By the time I finished my morning chores (while listening to some podcasts) and sat down to reset the phone, I saw that it seemed to be draining the battery at a reasonable rate again.

What the hell? I don’t know what caused the problem in the first place, and I have no idea why it should suddenly be working fine. I had not recently installed any new apps when the battery started going FUBAR, and I have not made any changes to my apps since. The only thing that had happened in the recent past was that AT&T updated their carrier settings, but I have not received any notice that they changed them again (so I can’t account for the improvement).

Anyone ever have this happen, or have any ideas as to what might have happened? I’m completely puzzled. I’m pretty good at diagnostics, and at gradually eliminating causes for a problem, but am utterly and completely baffled as to what’s going on here.

2

I don’t have an iphone, but my android has a system panel that includes battery information along with CPU and antenna use. And these are the things that will kill battery time, high CPU use by some application or another, or high antenna use, either because an app is communicating a lot with the web or you are spending a lot of time in areas with poor signal strength.

Is there such an app on your iphone? That might lead you to the culprit. If not, there’s probably an app for that :wink: (tm Apple Corp.) There’s probably something out there that will help you track what is using up your battery. Sorry, I have no direct suggestions.

3

Try deleting the Facebook App. I’ve found all versions of the App (on both the 4S and the 5 iPhones) to be battery hogs.

Also - use WiFi instead of 4G as much as possible.

I don’t use the Facebook App and if I start my morning (around 5am) with a full charge with normal usage (a few phone calls, even more texts, emails, some Words with Friends, maybe a quick search for something, take a photo or two, looking up some match scores, and playing a few hands of Gin I’ll still be at 60% or more. I usually only need to charge every other day.

When I had the Facebook App, it would drain to 20-25% before I made it home from work.

4

You’ve probably already thought of this, but was there a program running in the background that you were unaware of? Or something that was updating in the background constantly or more often than necessary? I have a BlackBerry and when I first got the GPS app BlackBerry Traffic, I didn’t give a thought to leaving it on. Holy cow, it sucked battery power like nobody’s business. I also have a weather app that will check weather really often and all night long unless I set it to update at reasonable intervals. Now I close everything that I’m not actually using.

One problem that drains my battery is I spend time at one client that does not get good Sprint reception. So the phone is constantly searching for a signal and I can practically watch the battery indicator drain itself. So when I’m there, I keep the phone plugged into the computer to keep it charged up. A big nuisance, to be sure.

Even so, I charge my phone every night, and often do so in the car, too.

5

My (android) phone had a sudden loss of battery vigor overnight that I troubleshot for some time before finding out that the problem was my gf’s menopause.

Her nightly hot flashes led to us switching sides of the bed, so she could easily control the window air conditioner. My phone on my original nightstand had a signal. On the new side nightstand I had no signal.

6

I’ve had a VZW iPhone 4S completely lose its battery (woke up and found it almost discharged, wouldn’t take more than 10% charge, then a day later wouldn’t charge at all) but that was clearly a component failure.

you could still have a failing battery; capacity loss is the first sign of impending failure and I’m not sure what the “genius” ( :rolleyes: ) could do in a few minutes to assess its condition.

7

The most puzzling aspect of this all for me was that, as far as I can discern, I did absolutely nothing differently over the last week that would have caused this sudden change. If the Facebook app was the culprit, it would have ben the culprit a month ago, not last week. I am obsessive about closing out apps that I’m not using; if I have more than four open at a time I consider that too many.

I am mostly on WiFi, as most of my time is at home.

The geniuses have some sort of app on their iPads that appears to be able to connect to the phone through WiFi and do some deeper diagnostics than what’s native on the phone. They had something there that assessed the condition of the battery, and it showed everything functioning well.

Hey, it seems to be back to normal, so all’s well that ends well. I just really wish I knew what happened. It just bugs me to have to accept, “I dunno. Sometimes shit just happens,” as the best explanation.

8

Look, I’m no whiz at this stuff but here’s something that was shown to me.

Hit the button on the bottom twice quickly. It will then show all the apps that are active. Shut down all but the basics by touching the app until a red negative sign appears. Then hit that red sign to shut down the app. Any app you open stays active until you shut it down. Meanwhile it eats battery.

Hope that helps.

9

That’s what I mean about being obsessive regarding closing unused apps; I do this virtually every time I do something on my phone, just before I put it back in my pocket. Obviously there are processes that run that aren’t visible in this sense, and my best guess is that there was some kind of rogue something-or-other happening behind the scenes, and it’s no longer happening (for whatever reason).

But the double-tap, hit the red X thing? Yeah, I do that all the time. My wife makes fun of how often I do it. I know Apple says it’s not that big a drain on resources, but I’m not sure I believe them.

10

OK, so back to my experience. Around Xmas I bought 4 iPhone5’s for the family. All went well except my battery drained very fast. I went back to Verizon and the “clerk” for lack of a lesser term, tried to convince me it was normal. I have enough experience with phones, rechargeable batteries, the other 3 phones I purchased and life experience to know when a battery is not up to par. It got to the point where I asked the clerk to quit insulting me. The clerk persisted.

I took the phone to an Apple store and got a replacement. They were very good about it. The battery on the replacement has been good.

The point of this is that there are iPhones out there with bad batteries that don’t hold a sufficient charge. Insist on getting what you deserve. Again, just my experience.

11

Do you (or does the Facebook app, maybe) use something that needs to call the mothership to connect (even if you’re not aware that it does so)? My boss was telling me about his daughter’s iPhone - suddenly, it was eating data like nobody’s business. One week, fine; the next week, bam! Data overconsumption. In her case, it turned out to be that new video app, Vine. (I think it’s Vine, anyway.) Apparently it would constantly check the network for new videos or whatnot, hogging the connection and just killing their capacity. Is there something like that on your phone?

12

I am a tech idiot. However, I will offer the advice that was given to me which you have probably thought of. When I first got my iphone, I could not believe how fast the battery drained. I called my son thinking the battery was bad and he advised me to go to the settings and turn down the brightness. I put it at half and my battery now lasts two days. Is it possible you turned the brightness up by accident?

13

Had you been outside your normal area? When a cell phone radio can’t get a good signal from a cell tower, it increases the power which will increase battery usage.