Why Does My iPhone Battery Die So Fast? Heres The Real Fix! Exactly why your iPhone battery drains so quickly & exactly how to fix it. Explain how you can get longer battery life out of your iPhone without sacrificing functionality! Take my word for it: The vast majority of iPhone battery issues are software related. We’ll cover a wide range of proven iPhone battery fixes in this article that come from first-hand experience with hundreds of iPhones, not theories about what should make your iPhone battery last longer. Here’s just one example: Did you know your iPhone has been tracking and recording your location everywhere you go? Don’t believe me? I’ll show you how to see for yourself in Tip #2. Let’s get right to it. Believe it or not, the first tip, Push Mail, can make atremendous difference in your iPhone’s battery life. Read on – I promise your battery life will improve. Here Are The Real Reasons Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Battery Dies So Fast: 1. Push Mail When your mail is set to push, it means that your iPhone maintains a constant connection to your email server and asks, “Is there mail? Is there mail? Is there mail? etc.” This constant flow of data drains your battery very quickly. The problem seems to be compounded for those of us who have Exchange servers set up on our phones. The fix: Go to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Fetch New Dataand turn off Push. Scroll down to change Fetch to Every 15 Minutes and set each individual account to Fetch. The Mail app will still check for new mail every time it’s opened and always send your messages right away. If you have an Exchange server set up on your phone, get ready to jump for joy! You’ll see a huge difference. If you’ve been having issues with syncing contacts or calendars between your iPhone, iPad, and other devices, you’re not alone! I wrote a follow-up post that I hope will help a lot: Why Are Some Of My Contacts Missing From My iPhone, iPad, or iPod? Here’s The Real Fix! 2. Location Services Like I said, I’m all about using your iPhone to its fullest. That being said, there are built-in services that are constantly tracking your location that you might not know about. I don’t recommend disabling Location Services entirely, but I think it’s important for you to choose which ones you want to allow to run on your phone, especially given the significant battery drainand personal privacy concerns around these features. Share My Location Let’s head to Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services. New for iOS 8 is Share My Location, which allows your family and friends to see your location when you send them iMessages (iMessage is Apple’s text messaging service). Note that this isn’t enabled automatically when you text someone, but you can turn on Share My Location indefinitely for a specific contact using the Messages app by tapping Details in the upper right hand corner and choosing Share My Location. This part of Settings allows you to turn off Share My Location entirely or see who you’ve given permission to see where you are. Does This Mean Other People Can Track Where I Am? Yes – if a friend or family member wants to spy on you, all they would have to do is ask to borrow your iPhone to make a call, open up the Messages app, and enable Share My Location in your text messages with them. They’ll always know where you are – so be careful if you choose to leave this feature enabled and especially if you let other people use your iPhone. System Services Next, let’s scroll all the way down to the last item inSettings -> Privacy -> Location Services and tap on System Services. It seems that every iOS introduces a few new services that track your location, and iOS 8 is no exception. Here are my suggestions on how to handle System Services: • Turn off Location-Based Alerts. This piece of Location Services causes ahuge battery drain, and the Reminders app is a good example of how this works – and why it uses so much battery. If you create a reminder and choose ‘Remind me at a location’, your iPhone tracks your every movement to determine when it’s supposed to remind you. In tech jargon, this process of drawing virtual boundaries around places you might arrive is called Geofencing. I recommend turning off Location-Based Alerts because I’ve never seen anyone who uses them make it through a full day on a single charge – and those reminders are no good if your iPhone is completely dead. • Turn off Location-Based iAds if you find Apple’s tracking your location to deliver you personalized ad content unnecessary. • Turn off Setting Time Zone if you don’t do a lot of travel. Did you know your iPhone has been tracking you everywhere you go? Yes, buried deep within the Settings app is a feature that allows your iPhone to track and record your location everywhere you go. Let’s tap on Frequent Locations and open it up. I recommend turning this feature off, especially because it uses a lot of battery by constantly tracking your whereabouts, not to mention the personal privacy concerns about having a log of everywhere you’ve been. Product Improvement? Not My Job. I recommend that you disable Diagnostics & Usage, Popular Near Me, and Traffic, because each of these services can use a lotof battery. Note that if you turn off Traffic, traffic still works in the Maps app. Turning off Traffic here only stops your iPhone from sending yourlocation to Apple, not from receiving up-to-date traffic information. After you’ve taken care of those pesky hidden services, scroll all the way to the bottom of System Services and turn on Status Bar Icon so you knowwhen your location is being tracked. Not all apps are created equal. When an app uses Location Services, it drains the battery quickly, no matter how well the program was written. For example, I used to use Inrix Traffic, but stopped after I noticed it never stopped using Location Services, even when it was in the background. 3. Diagnostics & Usage Before we move on, here’s a quick one: Head to Settings -> Privacy and scroll to the bottom of the screen. Open up Diagnostics & Usage and Turn Off the automatic stream of data that your iPhone is sending to Apple. 4. Close Out Your Apps Once every couple days, make sure you close out your apps. Double tap the Home Button (the round circular button just under the display) and swipe up on each app to flick it off the top of the screen. This doesn’t delete your apps, it just clears them from the application memory. Apple’s official line on this is that apps have 10 seconds after you close them to go into a dormant mode, where they sleep happily until they are retrieved. In actuality, especially since all apps are not created equal, often times a battery issue is the result of an app crashing in the background. The app should have closed, but it didn’t. Is your phone getting hot? I’ve written a new article called Why Does My iPhone Get Hot? that you may want to check out later. A hot iPhone isn’t a hardware problem: It’s a software glitch in the background. Apple doesn’t like to admit that could happen, but it always does. Need proof? Head back to Settings, General, About, Diagnostics and Usage, and take a look at all of the crashing apps on your phone. 5. Notifications – Only Use The Ones You Need You’ve seen this popup before, usually right after you’ve installed a new app: But what exactly did you agree to? When you allow an app to send you Push Notifications, you’re giving that app permission to keep running in the background so that if something important happens (like you receive a message or your favorite team wins), the app can wake up your phone to let you know. Check out Apple’s article called iOS: Understanding notifications if you’d like to learn more about how they work. Notifications are a good thing, but they do drain battery life, so it’s important to only use the ones you need. Head to Settings -> Notifications and take a look through the list. Apple updated this part of Settings for iOS 8, and it’s a lot easier to use than it used to be. Notifications is divided into two sections now: Include and Do Not Include. If you want an app to be able to alert you when something happens, make sure it’s in the Include section. You might, however, see some apps under the Include section that you don’t need to alert you. If that’s the case, tap on the app, and tap the slider next to Allow Notifications to disallow that app from sending you notifications. Every time you move an app from Include to Do Not Include, you’re saving a little more battery life. 6. Turn Off Your Phone Once A Week (The Right Way) Turn off your phone once a week. The iPhone is an amazing little computer that we carry around with us everywhere we go. Just by holding the top power button for a few seconds, sliding to power off, and turning it back on, many of the processes that you don’t see running on your phone stop and start up fresh again. Apple designed the iPhone with ease of use in mind and they would never tell you to do that, but imagine if you left your PC running for a month, or two, or three. It would slow down, and so does your iPhone. If you can avoid it, don’t hold down the power button on the top and the home button on the front together for several seconds to do a hard reset. That’s basically the same as unplugging your desktop computer from the wall while it’s turned on. It can cause software glitches and could be contributing to the battery problem you’re having. Just to be clear, pressing down the power button and the home button together for just a moment takes a screen shot, and that’s absolutely OK to do! 7. Background App Refresh Lots of little programs are always running on your iPhone to keep things running smoothly. I like to think of them like the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that did all the background work so Willy Wonka could sell his delicious chocolate. Now let’s take a look at your phone: Head to Settings -> General -> Background App Refresh to see a list of apps that are allowed to run in the background on your iPhone.Tap the little toggle switches to choose which apps you’d like to allow to keep running in the background while you’re doing other things. Turning off even a few can save a lot of battery life. 8. Keep Your iPhone Cool. Temperature Matters! Can the weather really affect my iPhone’s battery life? Absolutely! According to Apple, the iPhone, iPad, and iPod are designed to work best from 32 degrees to 95 degrees fahrenheit (0 degrees to 35 degrees celsius).Exposing your iPhone battery to temperatures above 95 degrees fahrenheit (35 degrees celsius) can permanently damage your iPhone, iPad, or iPod’s battery. But that’s not all – it’s even more harmful if you charge your iPhone in high temperatures. Even storing your iPhone in high temperatures can decrease your battery life forever. Here are my recommendations about how to keep your iPhone cool: • Don’t leave your iPhone in a hot car • Don’t charge your iPhone in high temperatures Conversely, those of us who are familiar with cold environments are used to low battery warnings when the iPhone gets cold, but cold weather can’t damage the iPhone’s battery. When your iPhone warms up, your battery should be right back to normal. 9. iPhone Getting Hot By Itself? That’s A Problem. We just said it – high temperatures are no good for iPhone battery life. But what if your iPhone is getting hot, all by itself? You guessed it – that will drain your battery life too. I wrote an article called “Why Does My iPhone Get Hot?” that addresses this specific issue. Usually it boils down to a software problem, but sometimes, it can be the case your iPhone is in. If you’ve got a big, bulky case that traps heat, Apple suggests taking your iPhone out of the case when you charge it. A little warm is OK – hot is bad. 10. Turn Off Auto-Brightness Right above the earpiece of your iPhone, there’s an ambient light sensor that your iPhone uses to adjust the brightness of your display to the amount of light all around you. Head to Settings -> Display & Brightness and turn off Auto-Brightness. So why does turning off Auto-Brightness save battery life? Whenever you use your phone, you’ve got a little sensor asking, “How bright is it now? How bright is it now? How about now?”, etc., and not surprisingly, that drains your battery. When Apple released iOS 7, life became a lot easier for people who choose to leave Auto-Brightness turned off. To adjust the brightness of your iPhone, swipe up from the bottom of your screen to reveal Command Center. You’ll see a brightness slider right below the top row of icons – it’s the slider with the sun icons on either side. Try moving it back and forth. You might be surprised by just how bright or dark your display can actually become! I’m going to be honest: I leave Auto-Brightness turned on on my personal iPhone. Since I’ve implemented the battery saving tips above, my battery has been just fine and I haven’t needed to turn Auto-Brightness off. If you’re having trouble getting a full day of battery life out of your phone, try turning off Auto-Brightness and you should see a difference. 11. Turn Off The Fancy Visual Effects iOS 8 includes some very nifty animations that make the iPhone look very visually appealing, but those effects put extra strain on your iPhone’s graphics processor and can cause the battery to drain more quickly. If you don’t care about the fancy visuals and you’d like to save some extra battery life, head to Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion and tap the switch to turn them off. 12. Don’t Use Dynamic Wallpapers or Perspective Zoom If you head to Settings -> Wallpaper and tap Choose a New Wallpaper, you’ll see Dynamic and Stills under the Apple Wallpaper section. The dynamic wallpapers use the accelerometer and the graphics processor in your iPhone to animate the bubbles in the background, and that uses more battery life than a simple still image. Apple has some great options under the Stills section, or you can use a photo of your own! What’s Perspective Zoom? And How Do I Turn It Off? Perspective Zoom, or the effect that’s more commonly referred to asParallax, is the effect you see between the home screen icons and the wallpaper when you rotate your iPhone. You’ll notice that the wallpaper moves slightly behind the icons and creates a 3D effect. Like the dynamic wallpapers (albeit to a lesser extent), Perspective Zoom uses the graphics processor of your iPhone, and turning it off can save some extra battery life. 13. Don’t Restore From An iTunes Backup – Use iCloud Instead! So you’ve exhausted all of your options, waited a day or two, and your battery life still hasn’t improved: It’s time to restore your phone. If you can avoid it, don’t restore from an iTunes backup. Very often, the same glitch that your phone is experiencing right now gets backed up to iTunes, and after you restore your iPhone the same problem comes back. You think you have to broken phone, but what you’ve done is simply restore the same problem you began with. How do you avoid this? Use iCloud Backup! (And Restore from iCloud Backup) If you’re getting the “Not Enough Storage – This iPhone cannot be backed up because there is not enough iCloud storage available. You can manage your storage in Settings.” alert or if you’re not quite sure what iCloud Backup is all about, I wrote a follow up post called Why Does My iPhone, iPad, or iPod Say There Is Not iCloud Storage Available For A Backup? in response to the many emails and comments asking for help on this point alone. After you plug your phone into your computer to restore and it reboots, unplug it from the computer as soon as you see the ‘Hello’ screen. (That’s absolutely OK to do.) Next, use the menus on your phone to connect to Wi-Fi and restore from your iCloud backup. But Aren’t iCloud Backups and iTunes Backups Essentially The Same? I received some great feedback on this point from people who were unsure why I would recommend using iCloud to backup and restore your phone when both should be just fine! Yes, iCloud backups and iTunes backups do contain essentially the same content, but here’s the problem I’ve seen with iTunes backups. The problem isn’t with the backup itself, but occurs during the transfer of data between your computer (especially with PCs) and your iPhone. Any number of things can go wrong – a bad cable, anti-virus software stepping in, firewalls, bad USB ports, etc. Using iCloud eliminates the need to restore your data from your computer, because all your apps and personal information are downloaded directly from Apple. Having an iCloud backup and restoring your device from iCloud is worth it, and the process is very simple once you understand a couple of key points. If you’re interested in learning more about what iCloud really is or if you’ve run out of iCloud storage space, check out my new article, iPhone / iPad Hasn’t Been Backed Up In Weeks? Fix iCloud Backup! for the ins and outs of iCloud backup. 13. Last Ditch Effort – Restore Your Phone Again And Set It Up As New It’s okay to turn on iCloud and redownload your contacts, calendars, reminders, bookmarks, etc., but if the glitch is too deep and it’s in all the backups, sometimes you just have to start fresh. And let’s be honest here – if you’re going to go to the Apple Store to have a technician take a look at it, make sure you’ve done all of these steps first because they’ll just send you home to do them anyway. Apple techs are trained to never believe a battery issue is an issue with the physical battery – and it’s true. There’s a quick test that diagnoses your battery and in all the time I worked for Apple, I think I saw two iPhones fail the battery test. If the iPhone doesn’t fail the test, your battery isn’t going to be replaced. iPhone 6 and iOS 8: Time Will Tell I’ve updated this article for the release of the iPhone 6 and iOS 8, but these battery saving tips will work for the iPhone 5S, 5, 4S, iPads, and iPods, whether they’re running iOS 8 or a previous version. If I’ve mentioned a feature that you don’t see on your device, chances are it’s part of iOS 8 and you’ll need to update your iPhone software to see the new features. Apple has said that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will have better battery life than the older models. Since the phones themselves are bigger than previous iPhones, there’s more room inside of them to fit a larger battery with more capacity. On the other hand, those 4.7 and 5.5 inch displays on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, along with many of the new features introduced with iOS 8, will place more of a burden on the iPhone battery. Time will tell if the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, and iOS 8 actually do improve upon the historically meager battery life of the iPhone. Checking Battery Usage In iOS 8 iOS 8 includes a helpful new feature within Settings called Battery Usage. It doesn’t tell you how to fix battery issues, but it can provide some valuable information about specifically which app is causing your battery to drain. Check out my new article, iPhone 6 Battery Draining Fast? How To Check iOS 8 Battery Usage if you’d like to learn more.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 12:11:24 +0000
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