I’ve had system customization disabled for years and optimized battery charging still works.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iOS 18 Battery Life Thread
- Thread starter gwhizkids
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I would use post #844 and in addition at the bottom turn off significant locations (and clear it while you are in there).
The guy in the video says the apple merchant setting isn't really necessary for the apply pay and apple card. It's supposed to better identify the merchant for apple data which isn't really necessary, if you use the card it shows up properly where it was used without this being on.
I’ll disable it as well then, thanks. Turning these unnecessary system services off definitely saves battery life man, especially significant locations, which is completely useless. Do you use Night Shift? How about True Tone? I wonder if those have an effect and battery life as well.
I use True Tone but not night shift. Those are probably insignificant compared to the system settings that use the gps.
Got it. Since I don’t use share my location should I turn the system service of that off as well or would they break some core process of iOS?
Would the same rule apply if I don’t use Find My iPhone? should I disable find my iphone under that system services menu? I have Find My iPhone disabled so technically speaking that Find My iPhone system service under location services should not have any activity anyway, correct?
Question, I travel across time zones. Wouldn't I want to location service on for changing time zones?
Don’t you need significant locations for stolen device protection to work?
I believe all of these features have a purpose, and disabling them might disrupt some functions in iOS. I'm not looking to turn off theft protection or any other feature on my phone that I may not realize isn't functioning anymore.
So you’re keeping ALL of these system services under location services enabled including significant locations enabled? Did you watch the video that was shared in the previous page of this thread? That is an ex Apple employee explaining that these system services are nothing but battery draining processes that are there to benefit Apple by sending your usage data
Last edited:
I don't know; I'm asking. In the past, I never had to turn any of these off to achieve good battery life. Why is it suddenly necessary for decent battery performance?
The point was to try them and see if it made a difference to your battery drain issues. If it does then great. If it doesn’t then turn them all back on.
Battery savings might be noticeable if you disabled most of the services but don't think it'd do much good for just a few. They're already pulling the location data for Weather and other services so I'd assume they'd be using the same data instead of another pull if needed for a different service within a specific window.
You can if you happen to lose your iPhone and don't mind being able to track it down.
Better leave it On then.
I don’t think they share the same pull. That’s why they each have a gray or purple individually to show when they accessed the gps. I think if it was shared they would all be purple or all be grey.
But agree if only one or two are changed it’s probably not gonna make any difference and may as well leave them all on
Well, how could disabling significant locations NOT have a major impact on battery life? That setting, by definition, is tracking you non stop throughout the day to determine what your significant locations are. If it wasn’t doing that then it wouldn’t be very accurate and based on my experience having that featured enabled for several weeks proved it to be pretty darn accurate which means it’s constantly pulling gps data to determine your location throughout the day. How could that NOT be a battery hog?
Day 3 with the iPhone 16 Plus running iOS 18.1 RC.
Nothing is turned off—VPN (ShadowRocket) is running 24/7, even during the daily server resets that temporarily block access while I’m asleep and haven’t refreshed the nodes. Here are the latest stats from the last full charge:
Nothing is turned off—VPN (ShadowRocket) is running 24/7, even during the daily server resets that temporarily block access while I’m asleep and haven’t refreshed the nodes. Here are the latest stats from the last full charge:
- Screen-on time (SOT): 315 minutes (hand-counted and calculated)
- Total standby time (mostly on WiFi, with 2 hours on cellular and dual SIMs on auto 5G): 12 hours 36 minutes
- Total power consumed: 46% (54% remaining)
I think for the most part it’s quick to do its thing. Comes on, gets location, and off. The problem is when cellular is weak, fringe areas, indoors, etc. then it isn’t so quick and runs the battery down.
I mean if two or more services needed access within a window of say 5 mins, both would still show a purple arrow as they both accessed the data but from the same pull since not much would change in the location in that tiny span.
Pulling data each time would be terrible logic.
Agree, it would be bad logic. On the other hand, a lot can change in five minutes if you are moving in a car. Lots of variables which is why I think they all fire individually when they are called