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pullman

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 11, 2008
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In another thread @coffeeplease suggested a restore to factory settings to deal with the poor battery performance on 14.6. I'm posting this here rather in that thread in the hope that it gets noticed. Basically my conclusion is that it works wonders to do a reset.

My iPhone X suffered badly from battery drain since iOS 14.6 and it continued on 14.7.1. The phone would hit red somewhere between 1200-1400h each day after only very, very light use and only while on wifi. And this was with a brand new battery, installed by Apple in January 2021.

After the factory reset I decided to install apps on a "need basis" by which I mean that I would only install an app if I found myself at any given point to 'reach for' that app. The result is a much leaner (and faster) phone.

The first two days after the reset continued with poor battery performance, likely due to the behind-the-scenes indexing. But on the third day, which was yesterday, I saw major improvements. At bedtime yesterday it was still at 40% after quite heavy use having streamed music from my home server for several hours, a lot of use of Instagram and Flickr and some FaceTime calling. Today the phone has continued to be rock solid battery-wise.

I don't know if the poor battery performance is due to one or several apps that were not updated to play well with iOS 14.6 and .7 or if it simply was a result of a bogged-down phone to which I had just added apps over the last 3+ years. Or if it was due to some bad design flaw in these two iOS versions which made them incapable of operating effectively regardless of the phone's app configuration.

But the difference after the admittedly somewhat tedious factory reset is incredible. It's as if the phone is only sipping energy from the battery, as opposed to literally gulping it down like there was no tomorrow.

I hope this helps someone.

Best
Philip
 
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I’m happy it ended up working for you! It really was night and day difference for me. My guess is some configuration got messed up after iOS 14.5 causing the drain.

To other folks thinking of doing this, you do not want to restore from backup. The easiest way to get your things back is to have it synced to iCloud.
 
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In years past, I did this once a year just to keep things lean. But there's SO much stuff I'd have to re-download on my phone, all the two factor authentication stuff, etc.... it's crazy. I kind of want to see the new iOS to see if that reins in apps a bit.
 
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In years past, I did this once a year just to keep things lean. But there's SO much stuff I'd have to re-download on my phone, all the two factor authentication stuff, etc.... it's crazy. I kind of want to see the new iOS to see if that reins in apps a bit.
The apps may be understandable for redownload but apple is baking some form of TFA into iOS 15. Fingers crossed, we won't have to worry as much when reinstalled from scratch. Otherwise, depending on what app that you use, I would try the Microsoft authenticator app. Works just as well as Google's but also has a cloud backup to it. Makes it much easier if you need to restore the phone as new.
 
I fixed it and now my iPhone 12 Pro Max is giving me the excellent battery I had initially. It now lasts at least 2 days.
The thing I did that had a huge impact was to remove my AirTags and completely turn off "Find My".
I will turn it on if I need it, say I travel again. However otherwise it will be off so I can have normal battery life. It was truly an amazing difference, now it looses almost no battery over night for instance.
 
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What does battery under setting tell you about what app is using the most battery?
 
I'm very grateful that you suggested this :)

And good point, I should have been a bit more detailed in my post. A restore from backup will just cause the same poor battery performance to reappear.

The slight challenge for me was that I don't use iCloud photos so I had to find a way to get all the photos off the phone and then onto the phone again when it had been wiped. It's possible (if time consuming) to do with iTunes and (I suspect) with Finder for those who use the latest macOS.

The other challenge was WhatsApp. The backup I had in iCloud was not found when I relaunched WhatsApp on the phone after the reset. And WhatsApp only lets you restore from a backup upon first launch. So I had to restore the phone from my full backup and then backup WhatsApp from within the app. Then WhatsApp found the backup on the first launch.

Reconnecting to iCloud repopulated the phone quite swiftly but the indexing took the better part of two days on my phone. Even if it took a while to set it up as I wanted with respect to settings it wasn't that bad actually. I just did it whenever I realised that something wasn't the way it used to be, so it didn't become a very onerous task.

I’m happy it ended up working for you! It really was night and day difference for me. My guess is some configuration got messed up after iOS 14.5 causing the drain.

To other folks thinking of doing this, you do not want to restore from backup. The easiest way to get your things back is to have it synced to iCloud.
 
I fixed it and now my iPhone 12 Pro Max is giving me the excellent battery I had initially. It now lasts at least 2 days.
The thing I did that had a huge impact was to remove my AirTags and completely turn off "Find My".
I will turn it on if I need it, say I travel again. However otherwise it will be off so I can have normal battery life. It was truly an amazing difference, now it looses almost no battery over night for instance.
With the exception of AirTags, does leaving the 3 Find My options enabled consume a lot of battery? I leave all 3 turned on, including Find My Network.
 
For me removing Airtag didn’t do much difference only when all Find My was off did it get truly back to 14.3 level
 
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I will turn back on “find my iPhone” and see if battery remain high. Currently I have 30% left after 44 hours since I last charged it fully.
 
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I usually do this once a year. It’s incredibly annoying having to set up my 28 banking apps again after the reset but it really does wonders for battery performance.
 
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Ok today battery was down to 4% after 66 hours of use so I put it back on charger. My fantastic battery life is back!
 
Ok today battery was down to 4% after 66 hours of use so I put it back on charger. My fantastic battery life is back!

Can you post your 24hr and 10day battery graphs? I’m curious what ‘66hrs of use’ means…. Standby? Audio in the background? Screen on Time?
 
It was normal use or even more phone call s than I have had lately. Sorry don’t have the saved data for the 66 hours. Can redo the test and take a screenshot of the usage at the end
 
That's very impressive. While I don't have that on my iPhone X, my phone has been in active use for a total of 13 hours today and now, at 2130h, it's still at 36% which I am very happy with.
 
That's very impressive. While I don't have that on my iPhone X, my phone has been in active use for a total of 13 hours today and now, at 2130h, it's still at 36% which I am very happy with.

Still don’t know what we’re talking about here, are you saying you got 13 hours of screen-on-time?…
 
Correct. When I checked under Sys Prefs Battery last night it said a total of 13 hours of "screen on".

Can you post a screen shot of a 24hr and 10d battery chart? Doesn’t need to be the 13hr run… just a current one should give a good indication of your efficiency.

13hrs SOT with still 36% batt remaining (assume no intraday plug-ins) implies ~20hrs screen-on-time on an X that Apple specs 12-13hrs (Internet-video). 50% over spec SOT is AMAZING and should be a record from what I’ve seen. How old is your phone?

Also you mentioned ‘today’ and 08:30 to 21:30 (a normal-ish ‘day’) is 13hrs straight - were you more or less using the phone continuously… or do you keep strange hours?
 
I don't know if it's happening with your iPhone, but sometimes, when I open the Battery section, it shows me 5h of Screen On Time, after a while, when I go into "Battery" again, it shows me 3h and a few minutes, that is, there are times when it decreases. Is this because the device is redoing the calculations for the current day eliminating the result of the previous day?
 
Sure thing, no problem. I do hope I haven't given the wrong impression but it said screen on time 13h when I checked the other day. I haven't plugged the phone in during the day. I bought the phone in March 2018 and Apple installed a new battery at the end of Oct 2020. Battery health is 92% at the moment.

I reset the phone to factory settings on the 18th so I only have 9 days worth of data (apologies for the huge images):

IMG_0107.jpg

And here's for the last 24h period:

IMG_0106.jpg

Can you post a screen shot of a 24hr and 10d battery chart? Doesn’t need to be the 13hr run… just a current one should give a good indication of your efficiency.

13hrs SOT with still 36% batt remaining (assume no intraday plug-ins) implies ~20hrs screen-on-time on an X that Apple specs 12-13hrs (Internet-video). 50% over spec SOT is AMAZING and should be a record from what I’ve seen. How old is your phone?

Also you mentioned ‘today’ and 08:30 to 21:30 (a normal-ish ‘day’) is 13hrs straight - were you more or less using the phone continuously… or do you keep strange hours?
 
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Sure thing, no problem. I do hope I haven't given the wrong impression but it said screen on time 13h when I checked the other day. I haven't plugged the phone in during the day. I bought the phone in March 2018 and Apple installed a new battery at the end of Oct 2020. Battery health is 92% at the moment.

I reset the phone to factory settings on the 18th so I only have 9 days worth of data (apologies for the huge images):

View attachment 1824026
And here's for the last 24h period:

View attachment 1824027

OK, thanks - that explains everything. About half of your 24 graph’s ‘14hrs’ is while plugged in, or the 7-ish hours between 00:00>07:00. You can only look at batt% and hours while unplugged if we’re talking about battery life/runtime.

The 15:00 > 00:00 time period looks to be ~60%batt for ~4hrs SOT or ~15%/hr or ~7hrs extrapolated max SOT. The 07:00 > 15:00 time period looks to be ~50% batt for ~3hrs SOT or 17%/hr, so pretty much the same. So it looks like your batt is worth ~7hrs on a full charge while OEM specs ‘up to 12-13hrs’. That’s pretty typical/average.

I’m personally a battery/runtime geek and can still probably get 15-16hrs XR OEM spec but have rarely seen anyone else get that close to Apple spec, much less over it.

EDIT: Also just curious, but it does look you’re plug-in overnight/sleeping… what are you running on the phone to show continuous SOT between 00:00 and 07:00?
 
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Sure thing, no problem. I do hope I haven't given the wrong impression but it said screen on time 13h when I checked the other day. I haven't plugged the phone in during the day. I bought the phone in March 2018 and Apple installed a new battery at the end of Oct 2020. Battery health is 92% at the moment.

I reset the phone to factory settings on the 18th so I only have 9 days worth of data (apologies for the huge images):

View attachment 1824026
And here's for the last 24h period:

View attachment 1824027
According to this graphic, your Screen On time since you unplugged it, is 3 to 3,5 hours.
If that is using half the battery (~50%), your total Screen On Time is 6 to 7 hours. Which is pretty good for an -aged- iPhone X.
 
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