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iOS 18 Battery Life Thread
- Thread starter gwhizkids
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I did see some reliable readings after. Still have occasional idle drain but I’d definitely seen some improvement.
18.1 betas 5-7 had been good on my 13P with more flat lines.
iPhone 14 Pro was wiped yesterday, fresh install, no backups loaded, only 3 Apps downloaded and this is what I’m seeing: took it off the charger at 07.24 now it’s 16.20. Down to 67% after only 55 min of SoT and 2h44m of music. Same crap as per usual, worse than an iPod. I’m using wifi at work, phone is on the table, and everything else is being accessed from my desktop (chat, mail, news, etc.). I give up. I guess I’ll have to charge it multiple times throughout the day and carry a battery.
Give it some time. There’s a lot going in the background when you set it up. You should see an improvement in the next couple days.
Leave it plugged in when you can so you can speed up the process.
I understand what you’re saying however I disabled all synchronization of iCloud data to the phone, like for example photos, mail, so on and so forth. My approach is to install app by app and study the phones behaviour. Nonetheless, I’ll give it a few days and see how it goes. But even if it issyncing/indexing and whatnot, those battery figures are still subpar.
Do you stream music with Apple Music or offline usage only?
14 Pro isn’t that great in form of battery life but that’s rough !
Yeah, I use Apple Music streaming via Wifi since I’m at work. However, 3 hours of music shouldn’t eat half your battery… it’s literally all I’m using this phone for right now. God forbid I install social media or a game!
It doesn’t matter if you’d disabled a lot of it and you don’t have to. With fresh install there’s always things that need to settle down.
Install all the apps except for the known hogs like Facebook or Insta and give it a week. Leave it plugged in overnight during this time. And at the end of the week try calibrating the battery. That should definitely solve your battery woes.
Streaming is very demanding, and you had 67% so not the half of your battery life…first fact, second fact is, streaming is way more power consumption as offline listening to music.
You lost 33% over the last 3 hrs, that’s heavy, but you got off the charger at 7am and you have 67% battery life left at 4pm, I would say that’s good. Apple Music was always battery demanding.
Give it some time to settle down, you installed clean only yesterday right?
And the 14 Pro isn’t that good like the 15 Pro too in battery life…
I had a 15 Pro for about 3-5 days and it was horrendous how fast the battery life went down…
Now with 15 Pro Max it’s way better (still not as good as I wished for)
I agree, I will definitely give it a week to settle down. Here’s the situation roughly 80’ later:
I would still say not as good as it could be, but still not horrible, especially for an 14 Pro…
Fingers crossed that it gets better.
But I don’t recommend anyone using beta software…
I got my 15 PM back in early July and hopped on beta train (my watch was already on beta so I couldn’t use it with my new iPhone…🙈) lost 1% health because I was on the beta I believe (had extreme heat problems almost the whole time)
I chose not to get on the beta train this time around, phone is chaotic enough as it is. Sorry to hear the battery loss, that hurts a lot!
It is what it is, learned something from that - never install beta software if you care about your battery, I will try to do that next time I get a new iPhone (2-3 years from now)
In my experience it seems like the battery continues to drain at a constant speed regardless of what I’m doing. Pretty much exactly 4%/hour. That could be reading on safari, streaming or offline Apple Music, watching a show (live, streaming, or offline), or having the phone in airplane mode with AOD, WiFi and Bluetooth off. feels like there should be some difference in battery drain between those different tasks.
Sometimes it’s higher than 4% if I’m really pushing it on cell or asking something demanding of the phone. But that makes sense to me. I’m asking more of the phone and expect a hit.
Possibly a hardware issue? My experience is in software so that’s always my first guess for the root cause. But for those of you with hardware knowledge, could it be hardware?
I’m on a 16pro. Forgot to mention that. FB15465048 If anyone at apple reads these threads
Sometimes it’s higher than 4% if I’m really pushing it on cell or asking something demanding of the phone. But that makes sense to me. I’m asking more of the phone and expect a hit.
Possibly a hardware issue? My experience is in software so that’s always my first guess for the root cause. But for those of you with hardware knowledge, could it be hardware?
I’m on a 16pro. Forgot to mention that. FB15465048 If anyone at apple reads these threads
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Well it's 20.19 in the evening, just did 1h fitness workout (+ some more earlier in the morning), and here are the stats:
Battery charged to 100% and off the charger at 07.24
- 3h 56min hours of music streaming with AirPods Pro (the clear culprit)
- 58 min of texting via Discord
- 26 min of Safari
- 1h 17min of apple fitness
So far, with only 23% left in the tank, I've gotten 3h37 min of SoT and funny as it is, it has recalculated the Idle Screen time, a few posts back it was showing 1h40 min, but now only 30m -odd but hey, precision is welcome.
All in all it looks like with this use I would be getting aprox., 4h or 4h30m of SoT.
Funny as it is, 1h 17min of Apple Fitness, which involves data streaming from the watch and session, AirPods and max brightness only used 7% of the battery whereas 3h 56min of Music (screen off, bluetooth and wifi on) used 31% of battery.
It's clear that the Music App is what's killing my battery here. Also, as you can all see, I'm not using social media apps, games, or anything else that could be harsh on the battery, however, data doesn't lie and Music is the killer here.
Tonight I'll leave it on the charger so that it goes up to 100% and stays like that until 06.15 when I wake up.
I'll keep you posted.
**EDIT**
I just realized that I could test dropping the music quality. Will test this out tomorrow.
Battery charged to 100% and off the charger at 07.24
- 3h 56min hours of music streaming with AirPods Pro (the clear culprit)
- 58 min of texting via Discord
- 26 min of Safari
- 1h 17min of apple fitness
So far, with only 23% left in the tank, I've gotten 3h37 min of SoT and funny as it is, it has recalculated the Idle Screen time, a few posts back it was showing 1h40 min, but now only 30m -odd but hey, precision is welcome.
All in all it looks like with this use I would be getting aprox., 4h or 4h30m of SoT.
Funny as it is, 1h 17min of Apple Fitness, which involves data streaming from the watch and session, AirPods and max brightness only used 7% of the battery whereas 3h 56min of Music (screen off, bluetooth and wifi on) used 31% of battery.
It's clear that the Music App is what's killing my battery here. Also, as you can all see, I'm not using social media apps, games, or anything else that could be harsh on the battery, however, data doesn't lie and Music is the killer here.
Tonight I'll leave it on the charger so that it goes up to 100% and stays like that until 06.15 when I wake up.
I'll keep you posted.
**EDIT**
I just realized that I could test dropping the music quality. Will test this out tomorrow.
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Streaming over Wi-Fi is not as draining as over cellular. So I doubt that streaming is the culprit.
To me, it looks more and more like there is also a serverside "problem" (?) involved.
I didn't change any settings on my 15 Pro, also my usage is basically the same (Mo to Fr). (Apps have been updated, so this is a variable in my observation)
However, since 2 days, it seems the battery lasts longer for about 15-25 % (not battery%, just lifetime with a charge).
I'm observing about the same with my Apple Watch, it lasts about 30 % longer (also lifetime with one charge, not battery%).
I didn't change any settings on my 15 Pro, also my usage is basically the same (Mo to Fr). (Apps have been updated, so this is a variable in my observation)
However, since 2 days, it seems the battery lasts longer for about 15-25 % (not battery%, just lifetime with a charge).
I'm observing about the same with my Apple Watch, it lasts about 30 % longer (also lifetime with one charge, not battery%).
I've been on iOS 18.1 B7 for just under 24 hours. I understand that updates take time to index, but the battery issues remain unresolved. The drain isn't due to indexing; it's the same problem that started with iOS 18—just idle drain. This morning, I woke up at my usual time of 4:15 am and checked my phone for about 10 minutes. After that, I got ready for the day, which took about 45 minutes without using my phone, and it stayed at 95% charge.
During my 15-minute drive to work, it dropped to 94% immediately. Two minutes later, without using it, it fell again to 93%. After sending a few texts, it dropped to 92%. This is completely unacceptable. It shows me that Apple has no intention of addressing this issue and is only focused on AI development.
I've been a loyal customer since the iPhone 3G, but this situation is making me reconsider staying with Apple. Poor battery life is not an area where I expect compromise. iPhones were never known for idle battery drain—that was always an issue with Android. This is very disappointing.
During my 15-minute drive to work, it dropped to 94% immediately. Two minutes later, without using it, it fell again to 93%. After sending a few texts, it dropped to 92%. This is completely unacceptable. It shows me that Apple has no intention of addressing this issue and is only focused on AI development.
I've been a loyal customer since the iPhone 3G, but this situation is making me reconsider staying with Apple. Poor battery life is not an area where I expect compromise. iPhones were never known for idle battery drain—that was always an issue with Android. This is very disappointing.
I've had updated to iOS 18.1 b7 and my watch ultra 2 is on 11.0.1 and the battery is really good, like watchOS 10.
2 H 38M screen time out of 5H 51M total time I'm at 89%---25 minutes Carplay wired connection. This is what I was getting on 17.XX on my 15PM
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Unfortunately, this issue hasn't been widely discussed yet on any Apple blog, which means no one has likely started working on a solution.
I encourage everyone to write to all the editorial offices and bring this up:
https://www.macrumors.com/about/ (or the bottom homepage of the main website for 'Our Staff' contact info)
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The more we are and the more you will start writing to them all, the better it is and faster this issue will be highlighted and solved.