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Horrible battery life with iPhone 12 Pro max after iOS updates

N

nph

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 9, 2005
1,054
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I met a friend yesterday and he confirmed my experience. I bought the 12 pro max right when it was released and the first month I was amazed over the battery life. I would easily get 2 days sometimes almost 3 days on one charge. Then as I got iOS updates it got progressible worse. 14.3 was ok. 14.4 -14.6 have been horrible I get maybe one day with light to normal use and using exactly same apps as I did on 14.2 and 14.3. My friends 12 pro was fine when he got it but he recently had it replaced due to a hardware issue and the replacement came with 14.3 and it had bgreat battery life, right after he took the latest updates his phone now has the same lousy battery life as mine.
This is in big contrast to Big Sur on my MBP M1 that loose 0% over night when in sleep mode. Battery life has been fantastic and with not too heavy load I get always 17-18 hours.

What is going on with iOS???!
I am trying all the usual things to increase battery life but my friends experience proves to me that it is the iOS updates that have destroyed the battery life.
Please tel me 14.7 is getting better! Otherwise I wish I could do like I do on a Mac, erase it, load a time machine backup and go back to the place it worked really well.

This is the latest flagship with the largest battery so I would expect it would have great battery life!

Are most people experiencing the same and does anyone have any indication of 14.7 if that is better?
 
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Just hit 50% 🔋 been on these forums all day. This will fix your battery issues until they finish fixing the issue on this site.

I was having battery issues ever since iOS 14.5 and onwards, not anymore 😃
9838D5FA-BB8B-4AC8-8D2D-0B3CD028D496.jpeg

post 207 onwards 👇 get this app.

forums.macrumors.com

iOS 14.7 Beta 2 ― Bug Fixes, Changes, and Improvements

UPDATE Battery life still going strong with the Mozilla Firefox focus safari add on, been smashing this site all day and light gaming, phone hasn’t even gotten warm once. 😊 75% battery life left, 3h25m usage 😍 Mr 601 is back 😎😂
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com
 
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Add 12 Pro Max to the list. I’d always gotten amazing battery life up until 14.6. I haven’t used my phone except for maybe an hour of listening to music today and its already at 37%. It was fully charged at 6am. I really wish Apple would get their act together, there is no excuse for this.
 
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If you look, you'll see lot of u are having the problem.

Another Apple site had a poll, and a good percentage are having the problem after the update. So it's pretty common.

If you look to see what is using up your battery it will probably help. Mine is the podcast app. So I had to go to another podcast app.

I'm hoping they do an update this week.
 
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Complex757 said:
I'm hoping they do an update this week.
Click to expand...
SAME. I almost wish 14.6.1 suddenly comes out today with no heads up. Just release it!
Tomorrow....Friday, soon! I dont care, just fix the problem Apple.

19% drain overnight - off charger, again nothing running in the BG from what I can tell. I have no idea the reasons for this.
 
Its clearly a software bug. Hopefully they release a fix either this week or next.
 
Not telling anyone to jump to a beta but so far, iOS 14.7b3/pb3 looks to have resolved whatever issue exists in 14.6 that was killing battery. Take it on a personal approach, I will probably wait until final but so far, it looks good :)
 
DMG35 said:
Its clearly a software bug. Hopefully they release a fix either this week or next.
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The issue is how many software bugs are there? Over the last year or more, everyone has been reporting worse and worse observed battery drain on the same phone, with the same usage and apps, and even on brand new phones.

My SE second gen has worse standby drain than my 5 year old 6s.

This is getting ridiculous.
 
I see the same on my iPhone 12 Pro. The "Messages" app takes 31% of battery while I am doing absolutely nothing on the phone. Drops from 100% battery to 80% in under an hour. Pretty sure this started with 14.7. I have tried everything to get it to hold. Interesting to note, I use iMessage on my MacBook extensively throughout the day. I wonder if the cloud sync is what is killing the battery.... I have been doing this for years and never had this issue before. This is new. I am going to 14.7b3 now to see if that helps. Any other ideas are welcome!
 

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bbensten said:
I see the same on my iPhone 12 Pro. The "Messages" app takes 31% of battery while I am doing absolutely nothing on the phone. Drops from 100% battery to 80% in under an hour. Pretty sure this started with 14.7. I have tried everything to get it to hold. Interesting to note, I use iMessage on my MacBook extensively throughout the day. I wonder if the cloud sync is what is killing the battery.... I have been doing this for years and never had this issue before. This is new. I am going to 14.7b3 now to see if that helps. Any other ideas are welcome!
Click to expand...

Do you send only messages on the Mac to other apple users? I don't own a mac myself but from my understanding, if you are sending SMS from the Mac, it would still use the iphone to transmit over the cellular network. It could be the icloud message feature but I doubt it will drain it that bad, unless there is a service issue on Apple's end that is causing it to "misbehave."
 
Last night was the worst. My battery went for 75% to literally nothing while sleeping and my alarm failed to go off. iOS 14.6 was installed over 2 weeks ago and it has not yet stabilized.
 

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JohnE121 said:
Last night was the worst. My battery went for 75% to literally nothing while sleeping and my alarm failed to go off. iOS 14.6 was installed over 2 weeks ago and it has not yet stabilized.
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Do you mind showing the app activity below the graph? It is definitely not normal but the app activity could be of good use.
 
JohnE121 said:
It has been almost 24 hours and the detail is gone, but it just said Home & Lock Screen
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Insane. Right now that's what mine says "Home and Lock screen" also "Find My" runs constantly. Overnight was just a 1% drop. Every night is different...boggles me.

I had that kind of 100%-0% drop back in last Feb., no idea why (Apple had no idea also). I erased the phone and started over and I never had that kind of 100% drain again *knock on wood.

This is also when I started noticing the battery health at 99%...then 98, 97 a few days later.😠
 
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I've found iOS 14 battery life to be pretty good on my iPhone XS. I was getting some rapid drain on 14.5, but 14.6 has been great for me. I've found in the past that having bluetooth on or being connected to 5g wifi can lead to faster battery drain without it being reported in the settings app, but like I said this isn't the case for me on 14.6.
 
PhillyGuy72 said:
Insane. Right now that's what mine says "Home and Lock screen" also "Find My" runs constantly. Overnight was just a 1% drop. Every night is different...boggles me.

I had that kind of 100%-0% drop back in last Feb., no idea why (Apple had no idea also). I erased the phone and started over and I never had that kind of 100% drain again *knock on wood.

This is also when I started noticing the battery health at 99%...then 98, 97 a few days later.😠
Click to expand...
Do you use home by any chance? I saw in another thread a theory that the home application was constantly pulling data and was subsequently leading to less battery life. Unfortunately the "Home and Lock Screen" is pretty generic and can cover a wide range of things from the display itself, to anything that is visible on the display like notifications.
 
iOS 14.7 Beta here. Battery life is the same. Nothing better. Maybe Apple will reach the same battery life with the new iPhones while the older ones have this battery drain. I already have 34% after 3 hours of usage time.
 
My iPhone SE (1st Gen) with a 4 year old 1600mAh battery lasts as long (SOT) as my iPhone 11 with a 3100mAh battery. Main difference is that the SE is running iOS 12. I guess one can surmise that iOS 12 is twice as efficient
 
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