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.