Although many iPhone users experience better battery life after the iOS 4.0 update, a number of users have reported decreased battery life after updating. A sampling of reports from Apple’s Discussion boards:
- shafeen: “Losing about 1% battery life every few minutes.”
- Graham Powell1: “Upgraded 3G last night and bettery useage is through the roof. Getting less than an hour from full charge, phone very very hot.”
- vatkins1906: ”[...] Horrible Battery Life after iOS 4. Before going to bed my 3GS had 100% battery power. With no applications running in the background, I awoke with the phone completely dead! Before installing iOS 4 it would be at around 95%.”
Fixes
Check Internet tethering. Some reports indicate that the iPhone may be persistently attempting to establish a tethering connection, thereby draining the battery. Navigate to Settings > General > Network and tap Internet Tethering, then tap “cancel” if you it is trying to connect, or turn off tethering altogether. You may need to turn Wi-Fi off then back on to stop the tethering connection attempts.
Bad apps to blame? Anecdotal evidence suggests that apps incompatible with iOS 4.0 or otherwise problematic under the new release can cause battery drain issues. Backup your iPhone in iTunes, then delete apps from the device in groups (you can always sync them back from iTunes later). After each group, restart your iPhone and check for the battery drain problem. Via this method, you can isolate the problematic app and remove it permanently.
Also, make sure all apps are up to date; developers have released a flurry of iOS 4.0-compatible app editions in the past few days.
Turn off Push. Navigate to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars and tap “Fetch New Data.” Turn off Push.
Calibrate the battery. Fully charge your iPhone, then allow it to drain until completely empty (device powers off on its own and displays a spinning progress indicator). Then recharge your phone and check for excessive battery drain.
Close open Safari windows. One iOS application that consumes memory and processor time (and therefore battery life) in the background is Safari. Close all unused windows in the application by pressing the page switch button in the lower right portion of the screen then clicking the X at the top left of each page. See this page for screenshots.
Restore, but not from a backup (use as a last resort). As is the case with some other iOS 4.0 problems, one less-than-ideal fix for the battery drain issue involves restoring the iPhone as a new device rather than from a backup. It appears that bad holdover data from iPhone backups can cause excessive battery use. Restoring as a new phone will delete contacts and other data, but may resolve this problem.
To do so, connect your iPhone or iPod touch to your computer, click “Restore” in iTunes, then choose “setup as new phone.”
Feedback? info@appletoolbox.com.
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June 23, 2010 at 1:05 PM
I’ve found that iOS 4 kills my battery as well…..after looking around on the web, I’ve noticed that if you have “push mail” turned on, it will drain the battery at a rate of about 1% every 2 minutes. I turned off “push mail” and have it fetch every 15 minutes and the battery seems to be working like prior to the update to iOS4. For anyone with a rapidly decreasing battery after installing iOS 4, I wonder if “push mail” is turned on or not for the folks experiencing this battery drain issue.
Thanks.
June 23, 2010 at 1:33 PM
My iPod touch 2nd gen is also down on battery after update. Think this may be due to wifi now being active during sleep, which seems crazy.. Wish I had held off update and urge everyone else not to update, since there are no benefits anyway.
June 23, 2010 at 2:16 PM
Well I’m glad that I’m not paying to do Apple’s QA for them. Then again maybe this is just a tin foil hat conspiracy to make everyone buy new phones
June 24, 2010 at 11:05 AM
I have the battery drain issue also. My battery was fully charged and drained quickly.. I plugged it into my car charger and if I am using the web browser the charger can’t even keep up! I honestly think it’s Apple’s sneaky way of getting people to upgrade their 3G and 3GS phone to the new 4.
June 24, 2010 at 5:23 PM
My 2G iPod Touch is rinsing the battery in a few hours, since upgrading to iOS4. I have put a little app on it that monitors the battery, and also looks at the system to tell you what tasks are running and how much CPU they are using. This shows that most of the time, the CPU is 96% idle, so I came to the conclusion that the wifi transmitter is being left on, even when no app is looking for a network connection. So I went into “settings”, and manually shut it off. This seems to have halted the drain issue, but is of course, inconvenient. I am hoping that Apple have made an error here, and it’s just a bug that will be patched. If not, then for me, it has spoilt the operation of my iTouch …
June 24, 2010 at 7:11 PM
Check and see if you have to many apps running in the background (Multitask feature).
Double click the function button to display running apps and then hold down on the icon to stop app.
June 24, 2010 at 7:27 PM
My fairly new 3GS went from 100% at 5:00 pm when I left work to just 16% a few hours later, and it was in standby mode the whole time not even being used. And I take great care of my battery, I do ‘full cycle’ charges at least once every 2 weeks. This is ridiculous !
June 25, 2010 at 8:28 AM
Update on my post from yesterday. Shutting off the wifi has definitely halted the battery drain issues. Standby battery is totally back to normal. As well as turning off the wifi, I have also turned off Location Services
, , , “OFF”
as apparently, this can cause the wifi to remain active even when the device is sleeping, if there is an app trying to communicate its whereabouts to some remote host site. You can check if any apps have tried to use this facility, as it tells you on the last page of the above menu tree, which have (or are doing). In my case, The Weather Channel desktop app was showing as having been recently active in this regard. It has also been suggested to me that ‘notifications’ should be set to off
, , “OFF”
So I currently have this done as well. Later today, I will try turning just the wifi back on, and retry my news apps or go to the Apple store or whatever app that makes use of the wifi, but should completely drop it on exit.
Hope this is helpful so far to anyone else with battery life problems after upgrading a 2G to iOS 4, and I will post another update if I get to the bottom of which issue is causing the problem.
Arfa
(find me on usenet sci.electronics.repair)
June 25, 2010 at 8:37 AM
Apparently, the text on here can’t handle left and right arrows as a printable character. At the two places in my previous post, where it says
,,,”OFF”
it was intended to read
(settings), (general), (location services), “OFF” for the first one, and
(settings), (notifications), “OFF” for the second one
Arfa
June 25, 2010 at 12:56 PM
after the update i lost all my songs on itunes the next day when i turned my computer on. it wanted me to choose a library:S. Anyway this is annoying because it will take me a whole day to get all the album artwork ect.
June 26, 2010 at 5:50 AM
Why didn’t they include a settings option to disable multi-tasking?
June 26, 2010 at 9:53 AM
this is pathetic apple…thats why it is free! id rather pay for a good update, unlike this one with iOS 4. iSO 4 is a battery sucker!
June 26, 2010 at 3:20 PM
I had this problem myself – the wifi was staying connected, even when the device was sleeping – after doing a clean restore this isn’t a problem anymore. If it’s not to much trouble, I would suggest doing a clean install between major OS releases… just because of weirdness like this.
June 26, 2010 at 5:40 PM
OK. Final update. I have finally gotten to the bottom of what’s rinsing the battery on my iTouch 2G after upgrading to iOS 4. It is “Notifications”. If you have the battery problem, and have no need for this feature, just turn it off in “Settings”. Battery standby time will then return to whatever it was before you installed the upgrade.
Arfa
June 26, 2010 at 8:00 PM
I have same issue, losing 15-20% per hour in sleep mode. I noticed that Internet Tethering option keeps spinning and spinning and I can not shut it down. Help Anyone?
June 27, 2010 at 6:00 AM
I have the same problem with my OS 4.0
I think it has something to do with location services (the little purple arrow icon). While this service should only be activated when the app is open, I believe the service stays on because of the multitasting feature.
Is there a way to remove any/all apps from the multitasking bar?
June 27, 2010 at 9:30 AM
I’ve just woken up to a dead iphone which has never happened. I plugged it in about half an hour ago and it’s still giving me the low battery warning. iOS is lame…after my app updates are finished i’ll disable push mail and that will hopefully help.
June 27, 2010 at 10:54 AM
I had the same issue – batterry drain after OS 4 upgrade on my 3GS. Called Apple support and she could not find a reason. Googled and found this informative link.
Followed these instructions and it worked for me..
1) Closing Apps running in the background – Multitask feature
Double click the function (home) button to display running apps at the bottome and then hold down on the icon to stop the apps (red ‘minus’ symbol appears on holding down on the icon)
2) turned off “push mail” – Settings > mail,Contacts, calendars > Fetch New Data > off
3) If you have facebook app – settings >facebook> push notifications > off
June 27, 2010 at 11:24 AM
I had the same issue – batterry drain after OS 4 upgrade on my 3GS.
Followed these instructions and it worked for me..
1) Closing Apps running in the background – Multitask feature
Double click the function (home) button to display running apps at the bottome and then hold down on the icon to stop the apps (red ‘minus’ symbol appears on holding down on the icon)
2) turned off “push mail” – Settings > mail,Contacts, calendars > Fetch New Data > off
3) If you have facebook app – settings >facebook> push notifications > off
June 27, 2010 at 2:20 PM
I started this morning at 8:30 with 100% charge on my 3GS battery. Last night I checked to make sure all apps were closed, location services disabled, and push disabled for mail. I left it alone until now, 14:15, and I am down to 40% battery life. This is incredibly terrible. Next try is to eliminate all but the essential apps….probably only leaving those that come with the iphone and eliminate any potential rogue app that may be draining it. The phone worked fine along with all the apps until I did the os4.0 upgrade. I am reluctant to the the full reset but will try as a last resort.
June 27, 2010 at 6:01 PM
I had the same problems but this FIXED IT!!
I ran it all the way down to 1% and let it shut down. Then charged it all night. Now it works perfect – better than before actually in regards to battery life. I used it all day with phone calls and pandora and am only at 65% yesterday it would be dead by now.
June 27, 2010 at 6:03 PM
BTW – that is with Push ON every 15 minutes and all kinds of background apps and wifi on and all the rest. Try it.
June 28, 2010 at 7:50 AM
After turning off Push, my battery no longer drains. My battery has run completely out, and been fully recharged numerous times, yet still drains ONLY if Push is on.
June 28, 2010 at 12:53 PM
I thought is was just me. I have the same problem with poor battery perfoance after OS 4 upgrade. It also toasted my keychain so I have to enter password to get phone messages. I really don’t want to retort to original state.!!!
June 28, 2010 at 1:49 PM
I’ve experienced the battery drain as well. I’ve done all of the above, spending a few hours on all of this over the weekend, but nothing seems to work.
June 28, 2010 at 4:22 PM
I shut down all the apps that were running and had no issues from then on. Push still activated, Tethering and all. The multi-tasking feature is a battery killer if they are not turned off.
June 28, 2010 at 11:12 PM
If you have trapster, or any other app with location service required, will keep draining battery life. To disable the Location Service option from settings – general – location services. The arrow next to the battery icon will disappear.
June 29, 2010 at 12:15 PM
My new iPod Touch is also experiencing significant drain since going to OS4. Goes to less than 20% in 5 hours while in sleep state (push off, mail recommendation as noted above). I called Apple and they told me I may need to do a full restore. UGH! Wish I had not updated OS!
June 29, 2010 at 7:10 PM
i upgraded to OS4 on my 3g and i feel like i’m getting longer battery life but the battery life display is always in the red.
Prior to after normal usage (email and web throughout the day and games during lunch break during an 9 hour workday) i would have to charge. But it seemed to last through all of that with no charge. However the battery life indicator was always in the red and i never got the 20%battery life warning. It just shut down on its own.
June 30, 2010 at 7:46 AM
My iPod Touch 8gb is having the same drain issue. Does anyone know if there is any way to revert the OS from 4.0 to 3.1.3? I hate new update…
July 1, 2010 at 11:46 AM
Had this problem start right before travelling and created a major pain. I turned off 3G but it didn’t help. Never thought about App updates being the issue but that appears to be what fixed it. Had 4 app updates as follows: Facebook, Dragon Dictation, Allpoint ATM Finder, and AOL Radio. Not sure which one was the battery hog, but all is well now.
July 1, 2010 at 1:59 PM
This may explain the battery drain, at least for those who have Microsoft Exchange accounts set up on their iPhones: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3398
I found this out yesterday after my email Exchange provider disabled ActiveSync for my email account without notifying me. In the process of sorting this out with our IT consultant, I got this message:
“In addition to these issues the bug in iOS4 causes significant artificial load on the Exchange servers which may result in performance issues for users using Outlook or OWA. Microsoft’s current way to mitigate the issue is to disable Activesync for IPhone users with iOS4. ZZZZZmedia is closely monitoring usage of ActiveSync and we have proactively disabled a number of devices that are causing artificial load due to this software bug.” (emphasis mine)
I downloaded the configuration profile fix yesterday, but I haven’t been able to directly test whether this improved the battery life as I was able to exchange for my 3GS for a new one in the interim. But our IT consultant thinks it is related. And the Apple Genius Bar technician also thought it was a software issue. He suggested erasing the phone and then setting it up as a brand new phone (not restoring if off a backup, as I’ve done multiple times). I think he is right, but Apple Care had already agreed to exchange the phone (they blamed the battery), and I didn’t want the hassle of setting everything back up and organizing all the apps.
A hint for for those downloading the configuration profile. I could not do it off Safari on my iPhone. I did it on my Mac, and then emailed the configuration profile to myself. On my iPhone I opened the attachment, and the the iPhone took care of the rest. Don’t forget to to a reset (I did a hard reset for good measure).
I hope this helps and saves others hours of frustration.
July 3, 2010 at 10:27 PM
My 3GS battery lasts about 14 hours since the update. I also noted the processor gets HOT!!! I killed the multitask apps, rebooted a dozen times, and then gave up. The heat issue is mostly gone, but battery life still is worse than it used to be. Could be worse, I could have a 4G with antenna issues (HA)!
Anyway, maybe I can call Bill Gates. At least Win7 works and I get to view Flash files and WMA video. I wonder if I can port that to my iPhone.
I guess the Apple has only one bite for a reason. Goodness knows we are tasting it now.
July 4, 2010 at 12:01 PM
Think I solved my battery draining problem. I installed the app Fonehome, which will locate my 3Gs if lost or stolen. It kept location services on all the time, makes sense to locate the phone. I turned off locations services for Fonehome and the little purple icon disappeared. Hope this works.
July 5, 2010 at 3:38 AM
I also woke up more than once to a drained iphone 3GS after having installed iOS 4.0 and having a fully charged batttery in the evening.
This is fully related to OS4.0 and indeed rediculous. I can not work with an unreliable phone and am angry at having to look into online fora to get hints about how to ‘maybe’ solve the issue.
If apple does not solve this issue through an OS update soon, I will be swapping my Iphone for another brand.
July 6, 2010 at 6:28 AM
Has tried all of the above options on my 3G, even resorted to a complete scrub and reinstall…solved my problems with apps freezin and closing mid open…also cured that serious lag time I was having with entire OS…stand by time seems ok, but with even just a little use today… Usage time 1 hr 23mn standby time 2hrs 12mn…data sent 657kb received 11.8 mb…battery is at 40% remaining…and I powered cycled and hard reset it after restoring everything. I’m gonna try power cycling again…oh yes wifi, bt, and push are off, data fetch is set to 1hr….will keep checking
July 6, 2010 at 12:22 PM
I have a 3G which I recently updated to 4.0.
The phone is constantly hot (while charging or not) and as a result, the battery life is worse than crap!!!
I haven’t scrubbed it and reinstalled everything yet but based on the comments above, this may be the only way.
July 9, 2010 at 12:19 AM
I have 3G running iOS4 for 3 weeks and without any problems.. maybe iPhone is slow sometimes…
July 9, 2010 at 6:20 PM
Hi.
This might be a hunch but idk. Maybe it’s the fact of multitasking.. The os 4 update is what I like to call the jailbreak update because they got some ideas from jailbreaking hence multitasking.
For all jailbreakers you you mos likely had backgrounder and such.. You had to quit the app for it go away.. Maybe the multitasking in the update is the problem.. For people without multitasking abilities it’s still enabled idk.. Jus a thought.. Most likely wrong but I’m in da dame boat as everyone else.battery was never dis way until I updated. On 3.13 I was jailbroken running many things at te same time and I could last on one full charge for about two and a half days.. Hope they fix this and again. My idea was a hunch..
July 11, 2010 at 4:06 PM
I tried every reasonable suggestion (not including deactivated necessary features like 3G); backing up and restoring my 3G iPhone got may batter back to its usual state of inadequacy, which I’ve learned to live with.
July 14, 2010 at 7:39 AM
Mine also died overnight, which has never happened before. It drains in a few hours.
Alerts or notifications from Facebook, CSPAN, etc — these were features I previously relied on, why should I have to turn them off with OS 4?
July 19, 2010 at 8:04 AM
I am having problems with my touch. When it is in sleep mode, the battery drains out. This happened after installing the update. I called apple care, they said to take it to the store. I did. A nice young man reinstalled my software and told me to go home and sync it like it was a new ipod. I did and it worked for one day. Now it’s back to draining the battery while in sleep mode! I called apple care again – this person told me to turn it completely off and see if the battery drains then. I told him irregardless of what is causing it, I want my ipod fixed! (It is still under warranty). I have read everything about the notifications etc. and will try that. But, shouldn’t the ipod work the same as it did before the update? This is crazy. I have purchased so much from apple I don’t understand why they didn’t offer to replace it. Now I am stuck diagnosing the problem.
July 20, 2010 at 9:05 AM
I went to get my 2007 ford serviced and worked on in order to keep it performing at a top level. They even did it for free! Now it’s nearly indriveable? I guess I should just buy one of their new cars. Or maybe I’ll go look at those new cool looking droids, I mean hondas.
July 20, 2010 at 12:08 PM
Ipod Touch 2nd Gen with 4.0 IOS. I saw that battery life was horrible after I did a FULL restore from factory defaults and set it up as a new iPod to 4.0. Going to bed at 95% battery I would wake with 40%. I just turned off Push inside the MAIL section and set it to fetch every 15 minutes. I have been at 72% now with the screen on for about 10 minutes.
Note: airplane mode fixed the issue to as its been 75% all day. This is def. wifi usage related.
July 21, 2010 at 9:17 AM
Had the same issue as Matt above. Did a full restore from backup and as new to no avail. Turns out it is the wifi for me and my 2nd gen Touch. In airplane mode, my battery life increased back to how it was before. The wifi at my university usually disconnects you after 5 min or so of inactivity. Under the previous OS, I had to log back in frequently. Yesterday I noticed I was constantly connected to the university’s wifi, which meant it was always accessing/connecting with the wifi. If I forget to turn of the wifi, it completely drains the battery before the day is over. I wish I could go back to the previous OS.
July 24, 2010 at 2:08 PM
Deleting my exchange account helped my battery issue. I was having the same problem with 1-2% dropping off every couple of minutes. I believe my company was having issues and I’ll wait until they resolve them before adding my account back to my phone.
July 25, 2010 at 10:15 AM
Problem with the battery quickly draining since upgrading to the new OS4. Please get this fixed.
July 25, 2010 at 4:18 PM
The best thing Apple could do for obviously thousands of affected users would be to provide an option in iTunes to revert to iOS 3.1.3, at least for 3G users. We were all happy with what we had, or relatively so, but now most are unhappy following the iOS4 update. From discussion groups it appears many are trying messy ways of reverting, so at least Apple could provide an ‘unmessy’ way to achieve that. It would make a lot of people happy again!
July 27, 2010 at 2:40 PM
This has gotten pretty ridiculous, don’t we think ? There is no doubt a serious problem with the impact of the iOS4 on the 3GS and earlier phones on battery life. The folks who aren’t having a problem haven’t turned off their phones yet. One reboot and they will become victims like the rest of us. Latest sta. my phone has been plugged in since noon , when it was at 17% and its now 5:35 and I’m just at 94%…because I’ve avoided using it. Apple needs to get us a fix or a reasonable pathway back to the previous OS. Whole point of this phone is its functionality. No one should be satidfied that a fix included shutting down applications and capabilities that were running fine a day or week or 1 operating system ago. More noise, less acquiescence please !
July 28, 2010 at 1:03 AM
After the upgrade to iOS4 my battery was drained in 3-4 hours, even if I shut down all the background apps and just had the phone laying there. I did not have push mail active.
I discovered that the problem was related to either Notifications or the Location Service, since the battery drain problem disappeared completely when I disabled both completely. (I didn’t have the patience to disable them separately and see which one was the source
I carefully enabled these two services again, but disabled notifications for all apps in the notifications list, and similarly letting no apps be allowed to use the location service. Then I turned on notifications and location services for selected apps and tried to see which was the culprit.
My conclusion was that it was one single app called Latitudie that caused the battery to drain in my case. It is a program that automatically updates your location in Google Latitude. However, it seems that this program has something going on in the background even if the app is not started and there is no sign of it in the list of background apps.
Anyways, I uninstalled Latitudie and the battery problem was gone; even when I had turned on notifications and location services back to the level I had them at before the problem started.