Turn Screentime off. This will help improve battery length. I believe it’s on by default in iOS 12. Also let the OS index on the charger for 24 hours. I doubt you will get 10 hours on a 3 year old battery it’s all dependent on how many charge cycles it’s gone through. But once the battery starts to degrade you will start to see significant drops more rapidly vs gradually.
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iPad I don’t want anyone ever telling me again that updates don’t devastate battery life.
- Thread starter FeliApple
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Thank you! Someone knows what they are talking about. After an upgrade, a lot of things are going on in the background of iOS. Indexing, being the biggest one.
Give it a few days and your battery life will most likely return to normal, or even better.
I understand you're not happy that you can't downgrade to iOS 9 but that's impossible. Venting your dislike of it might make you feel better so by all means do so but it's not going to change what's there. I don't think anyone feels insulted by your complaints.
This boils down to your choices. You can wait to see if battery life improves. If you don't want to wait or waiting doesn't help then you can stay on 12.4.1 and accept the reduced battery life. If dealing with reduced battery life is not acceptable then you can restore it to factory settings that will install the latest OS, iPad OS 13.1 and this might fix your issue. Maybe the upgrade didn't go well so a restore would fix this.
I think waiting would be the obvious choice to start with then restoring would be the fix if that didn't work. Not trying the restore just because you can't downgrade to iOS 9 doesn't make sense to me. Regardless if you choose to restore or not you will not be able to downgrade to iOS 9 so this doesn't effect the outcome.
Edit: I will say I had the same battery life all the way up to and including 12.4.1 except the days right after upgrading. I can't speak for iPad OS 13.1 since I just installed it.
It’s been over a week. I recall people saying screen time can be a culprit, at least when it was just released. Just turned it off, I just used my last bullet.Thank you! Someone knows what they are talking about. After an upgrade, a lot of things are going on in the background of iOS. Indexing, being the biggest one.
Give it a few days and your battery life will most likely return to normal, or even better.
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Thank you, I forgot about Screen time. I have a Xʀ on iOS 12 with Screen Time on and battery life has been amazing, but maybe it’s optimised. I got 13 hours on a 3 year old battery on iOS 9. The problem is not the cycles or degradation. It’s the iOS version. Which I was forced to update to.
If this indexing business is true, which seems to be the common reason cited for shorter battery life, I’m surprised Apple allows it to happen when the phone isn’t plugged in. My iPhone 7+ used to last the whole day with moderate use. Today I was very busy at work so barely touched it, and it was down to 30% battery life by noon.
It seems to make more sense to run the indexing overnight when the phone is plugged in.
It seems to make more sense to run the indexing overnight when the phone is plugged in.
Lots of different use cases. During the day, my phone and ipad mini are almost always plugged in. I take one of them with me when I need a device. At night, I have one nearby, usually not plugged in. The other is sometimes plugged in and sometimes not. Having two devices theoretically means, though, that one is always on the charger with a good amount of power. I also have a backup iPhone 6 (it has phone and data service) but it is almost always turned off. It's for those cases where I need a spare phone for battery life or someone needs to borrow a phone for a day or longer, or I forget my phone.
Ok. So you’ve successful proved the conspiracy.
I do thank you for remembering me though.
I still don’t understand how you get 10 hrs on iOS 13 with an old battery. That’s still too high even if it is much less than before. How light is your usage?
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I checked the apps that use most of my battery and it was email at 65%. Every year or two, I clean out my email accounts - either deleting email that I no longer need, or archiving it off on one of my MacBook Pros. My consolidated inbox has five email accounts. My work email has 5,600 messages going back to January 2017. I find that archiving email and cleaning up emails every one, two or three years makes email a lot faster, particularly searching, and improves battery life. I guess maintaining all that email uses up more CPU. It's especially true since I mainly use my phone for email. I would guess that I use the iPad Mini for watching videos and reading books too.
The only time I've ever seen an activation screen was after an update. Of course I've never tried to keep iOS for more than one version, ie 12 when 13 is out. The thought using something with so many security holes would make me cringe.
First time I heard it too. I thought that happened when I erased it. I swear, I was in Safari reading a newspaper, the iPad rebooted, and it went right to the activation screen. I couldn’t do anything other than update it.
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Netflix, web browsing, Reddit. Low brightness, Wi-Fi. It scrapes 10 hours on iOS 12. Got 13 on iOS 9.
Okay, so I did a test today. I turned off iCloud and let my device set in standby for 2-hours (it started a 35%) after the two hours my iPhone X is still at 35%. I remember anytime I kept my phone in standby for 1-hour I would lose 4-5%. Therefore, I think something with iCloud is keeping my phone awake and pinging to check for updates. I can do a more extensive test for those who might be interested.
I checked my iPad’s standby time today. It had just dropped to 98%. After I left it for 5 hours on standby, it was still at 98%. I think that in my case - luckily - standby time seem unaffected. On-screen time took a dive.
In fact, calling AppleCare couldn’t hurt. They may have interest in the unit for engineering (unlikely given age but hey can’t hurt). Google iOS 9.3 activation with and without iPad and you’ll see apple support forum threads etc on the issue I’m referring to
This is exactly why I switched to the latest google pixel. Was tired of apple's forced obsolescence with their "updates", only to render your old phone useless so you have to buy a new one. What good is supposed improved security if you need to keep your phone plugged in all the time. I would just skip the hassle and get a landline then.
Hopefully this thread gets more visibility so that people can see the truth about apple's tactics.
Hopefully this thread gets more visibility so that people can see the truth about apple's tactics.
I browsed everywhere for a way to keep iOS 9. I saw that it happened to many devices. As a matter of fact, I first read about iOS 9 activation issues back in 2017. I remember thinking: “please don’t do this to me when iOS 33 is released because you’ll cripple my iPad”.
I contacted Apple and they told me to restore, as always. My issue is the following: Why now? I had been using iOS 9 for three years. It rebooted on its own a couple of times, but it always activated correctly. Just have it happen when it was new... iOS 10 was the latest back then - bought it just after iOS 10 was released - and yes, it would have bothered me, but battery life was like-new on iOS 10. Obviously, If I knew this would happen, as soon as I got the iPad I would have restored to 10. I would lose the original version (I like having original versions), but I would have saved an old, flawless-battery-life version at least. Battery would have been like-new (every single battery life fact I read on iOS 10 about this iPad described that battery life was unaffected), and it would have ended there. Now this thing is crippled, and I don’t like it as much as I did.
Now, freaking Apple, tell me if you will force me to update my Xʀ to iOS 43, ok?
PS: If I had known that this would happen, I would have traded it in for the Air 3. I have no interest on a crippled iPad. Too late now...
me also i dont like the way apple treat upgrades. i want freedom to choose what ios i want. i dont care about jailbreak and maybe apple do it for this and for security reasons. but i want to stay in ios i want and i dont care about security or holes or what else could be. i just want to go back to ios 10 or 12 in my phone 7 and i dont care about new features. i just want the speed.
When I update macOS on my 512GB SSD, it takes about 4 hours for the mds worker threads to go away, according to Activity Monitor.Thank you! Someone knows what they are talking about. After an upgrade, a lot of things are going on in the background of iOS. Indexing, being the biggest one.
Give it a few days and your battery life will most likely return to normal, or even better.
If all you want is speed then the newest iOS version is what you want. It's a common misconception that newer versions of iOS will slow down your device. Often what happens is an aging battery will slow down the device and people think it's the updated version of iOS that did it. Yes there have been cases of very old iOS devices slowed down by updates (iPhone 4 if I remember correctly) but not with newer devices.
I recall getting my Nexus 7 and Google making it unusable two years later. I had to jailbreak the device to go back to a version that wouldn't take 20 minutes to boot. I am far happier with Apple with generous OS updates and support.
I don't think anyone likes updates, but it's required for security. Using an older version of an OS can leave you with some serious security issues. This is the reason Microsoft doesn't ask anymore if you want Windows updates. My only thing is the newer versions of an OS play nice with hardware for at least five years. After that basically it's outdated so you use it at your own risk.
So I have a half bias (used to work for the fruit company but have left macOS entirely and switch back and forth between iOS and Android), but I don’t personally think this is related to forced obsolescence or forcing updates. This is a bug, one that cost Apple money both in fixing and then in support costs. Forcing someone with an iPad running a version with a known bug to update just costs more money in support.
like I said, I’ve always thought this was a bug on the activation server. Some iPads, update em or restore em, good as new. Some, particularly 2’s, wouldn’t activate again no matter what, DFU mode, tethered or wireless activations, nothing. And it was a random assortment of iPads that were hit (notably no iPhones to my recollection), though the 2’s got it the worst. Given the lack of consistency (and you now having it years later), I think the culprit has to be the one common thread, the activation server handling iPads on that OS.
A few less invasive steps to try if you haven’t already : try going to settings -> General -> reset and erase all settings. This puts preferences back to default without eliminating data. So just a few tweaks in the settings app and you’re set. MacOS will sometimes have issues and you’ll need to trash the preferences files. iOS at its core is fork of macOS and that reset is the equivalent.
since you’re using iCloud, if you’re using iCloud Photo Library and messages in the cloud, a restore and setup as new isn’t super terrible, mostly just redownloading apps. It’s a pain, but a pain that does correct issues.
worst case: call applecare and ask for tier 1, explain your situation and your unhappiness with its result. Can’t hurt.