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iOS 14 battery life

I don't know if this will help anyone, but my OG SE (2016) started to have terrible battery drain under 14.1 -- it would lose >1% per minute, the CPU was obviously pegged as everything else slowed to a crawl and the thing felt like it was burning a hole in the table.

I decided to ditch it and get a new SE (2020), but I restored from the old SE's back up, and lo and behold, the huge battery drain continued on the new device.

I just "reset network settings" on the new device and now for whatever reason that CPU usage seems to have dropped, battery is lasting a bit longer.
 
Read some internet this morning, went for a walk. 1.5h of screen on time, 8 minutes background usage in 3 hours of me being awake.

That used 59% of my iPhone SE 2016 battery (@ 100% health) 😟. Most of it while walking. I still suspect the motion co-processor handling has something to do with this. People keep larger iPhones flat on the table, no movement, no drain.

Recently 'reset all settings' which includes WiFi networking at least (but not Bluetooth?). Edit: 'reset network settings' also doesn't remove Bluetooth devices. Edit2: For good measure I've removed all bluetooth devices except the Apple Watch and re-paired my one headphone (which I didn't carry on the walk).
 
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Has anyone else noticed this? I wonder why did the battery (hardware supposedly) ID change from a version to another.
1603799411905.png
 
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Henk Poley said:
Read some internet this morning, went for a walk. 1.5h of screen on time, 8 minutes background usage in 3 hours of me being awake.

That used 59% of my iPhone SE 2016 battery (@ 100% health) 😟. Most of it while walking. I still suspect the motion co-processor handling has something to do with this. People keep larger iPhones flat on the table, no movement, no drain.

Recently 'reset all settings' which includes WiFi networking at least (but not Bluetooth?). Edit: 'reset network settings' also doesn't remove Bluetooth devices. Edit2: For good measure I've removed all bluetooth devices except the Apple Watch and re-paired my one headphone (which I didn't carry on the walk).
Click to expand...
It's quite crazy on my SE 2016 (@86%). Made a 1 minute phone call and battery went from 97 to 91. Something is massively wrong here.
 
Is it possible for apps to be doing background activities even though you have disabled background refresh and force closed them?
 
shadyman said:
Is it possible for apps to be doing background activities even though you have disabled background refresh and force closed them?
Click to expand...
There was a bug where you had to first disable each app individually then disable background refresh overall. I always do both.
 
chaoslimits said:
There was a bug where you had to first disable each app individually then disable background refresh overall. I always do both.
Click to expand...

Ok, so first enable background refresh and disable every app individually and then disable it completely?
 
ios14.1-iphone7-1.PNG


ios14.1-iphone7-2.PNG


This is on a fresh install of the public release of iOS 14.1 after putting my iPhone 7 in Recovery Mode. I did not restore from a previous back up and did not install any apps from the App Store. Only thing I did was sign in to iCloud and pair Apple Watch S3 (running watchOS 7.0.3). This is about as stock as I could practically use it.

Disabled the following:
  • Location Services
  • Background Refresh
  • Screen Time (never enabled)
  • JavaScript
  • Auto-brightness (manually set to about 30%)
Battery Health is at 100%.

As the screenshots clearly show, the phone was last charged to 100% on Sunday Oct 25 at 1814. As of Tuesday Oct 27 1013, the total onscreen usage is 72 minutes and my battery is down to 46%. At this rate I can expect another hour of onscreen usage, totaling just over 2 hours. That is objectively abysmal performance.
 
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shadyman said:
Ok, so first enable background refresh and disable every app individually and then disable it completely?
Click to expand...
Yes that's the process.
elvineet said:
This is on a fresh install of the public release of iOS 14.1 after putting my iPhone 7 in Recovery Mode. I did not restore from a previous back up and did not install any apps from the App Store. Only thing I did was sign in to iCloud and pair Apple Watch S3 (running watchOS 7.0.3). This is about as stock as I could practically use it.

Disabled the following:
  • Location Services
  • Background Refresh
  • Screen Time (never enabled)
  • JavaScript
  • Auto-brightness (manually set to about 30%)
Battery Health is at 100%.

As the screenshots clearly show, the phone was last charged to 100% on Sunday Oct 25 at 1814. As of Tuesday Oct 27 1013, the total onscreen usage is 72 minutes and my battery is down to 46%. At this rate I can expect another hour of onscreen usage, totaling just over 2 hours. That is objectively abysmal performance.
Click to expand...
That's pretty awful. It seems you're really just out of luck on an anything earlier than an iPhone X or non-Plus device...
 
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Henk Poley said:
Read some internet this morning, went for a walk. 1.5h of screen on time, 8 minutes background usage in 3 hours of me being awake.

That used 59% of my iPhone SE 2016 battery (@ 100% health) 😟. Most of it while walking. I still suspect the motion co-processor handling has something to do with this. People keep larger iPhones flat on the table, no movement, no drain.

Recently 'reset all settings' which includes WiFi networking at least (but not Bluetooth?). Edit: 'reset network settings' also doesn't remove Bluetooth devices. Edit2: For good measure I've removed all bluetooth devices except the Apple Watch and re-paired my one headphone (which I didn't carry on the walk).
Click to expand...
That is an interesting hypothesis about the motion co-processor. But I suspect it's not quite on the money because my iPhone 7 drains about 7% overnight with zero usage with Do Not Disturb enabled.
 
shadyman said:
Is it possible for apps to be doing background activities even though you have disabled background refresh and force closed them?
Click to expand...
My experience with prior versions of IOS - if you have turned background app refresh off and then add a new app - the new app shows as background turned on. I had to turn background on -then go into the individual apps and turn off and then turn general background off to actually turn the new apps off. Maybe try that
 
Is anyone with an iPhone 7 on iOS 14.1 seeing decent battery life? On iOS 13 I would typically get 5-6 hours of screen on time (on WiFi, at pretty low brightness). Now 3 hours would be a good day
 
se95dah said:
Is anyone with an iPhone 7 on iOS 14.1 seeing decent battery life? On iOS 13 I would typically get 5-6 hours of screen on time (on WiFi, at pretty low brightness). Now 3 hours would be a good day
Click to expand...
That's what we've been discussing in this thread. It seems iPhone SE/8 form-factor or earlier is hosed by iOS 14.
 
The sad thing about all this is that this issue doesn't even seem to be getting noticed. Apple don't seem to care. I went yesterday and got a Pixel 4a, I'm gonna give this a few weeks to see how it plays out if apple don't fix this battery drain my practically new se will be on eBay
 
dj1891 said:
The sad thing about all this is that this issue doesn't even seem to be getting noticed. Apple don't seem to care. I went yesterday and got a Pixel 4a, I'm gonna give this a few weeks to see how it plays out if apple don't fix this battery drain my practically new se will be on eBay
Click to expand...
The only reason I am still with iOS is because of Apple's focus on privacy and the polar opposite stance in terms of Google's business model of making money off the user. Unfortunately, this also means that Apple has zero incentive to make older iPhones work as well as the newer ones. Apple often gets praise for providing OS updates for older models, but more and more my experience with their products has been that they provide updates to models a little too old. I wish they had just excluded all the Touch ID phones from iOS 14.
 
elvineet said:
The only reason I am still with iOS is because of Apple's focus on privacy and the polar opposite stance in terms of Google's business model of making money off the user. Unfortunately, this also means that Apple has zero incentive to make older iPhones work as well as the newer ones. Apple often gets praise for providing OS updates for older models, but more and more my experience with their products has been that they provide updates to models a little too old. I wish they had just excluded all the Touch ID phones from iOS 14.
Click to expand...

My issue was and it's unfortunate for the new SE is that it falls under this older phone bracket even though it's only 6 months old
 
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