iOS Update Killing Your Battery? It May Not Be What You Think

It seems like we go through the same routine every year: a new iOS is released and large numbers of people claim that the new operating system is killing the battery life on their iPhone or iPad. Bad battery life is usually the number one complaint of any new iOS and this year is no different with iOS 10. The difficulty is that for all the reports of bad battery life, they only represent a tiny fraction of all devices upgraded with the new iOS. So usually this means there is not an large-scale battery life problem caused by an iOS update. Occasionally there has been a legitimate bug that affects the battery life of a fairly large numbers of users. Apple is usually pretty quick to acknowledge those problems and has an update released soon afterwards. However, normally there is not a systemic bug that is causing widespread bad battery life issues with new iOS updates. So if the new iOS isn’t directly causing bad battery life, then what could it be? I have a theory that the timing of the iOS updates may contribute to a variety of factors that correlate with people complaining about battery life issues.

Troubleshoot the Simple First, but Avoid Old Wives Tales

If you are experiencing a battery issue after upgrading your iOS, the first thing you should do is to review the guidelines Apple recommends for maximizing the performance of your battery life. The recommendations are pretty simple and likely are things you would have already tried. Still, you should review them in case you’ve missed something. Especially important is to look at battery settings as Apple describes to see what apps are using the most power. Sometimes there may be a rogue app that is running in the background eating up your battery. If that is the case then it is easy to identify by looking at the battery settings. As an aside, usually if there is an app or other process that is eating up your battery you will notice that your iPhone is unusually warm, like it would normally be after playing a game or talking on a long phone call. If you haven’t been using your iPhone, it is unusually warm, and the battery life is suffering, then you likely have an app or background process “misbehaving.”

Part of the yearly routine we go through with iOS battery life issues are the numerous articles that are written about how to “fix” the battery life problems with your iPhone. The problem is that most of these articles are simply re-hashes of the advice Apple gives, or they offer what I like to call “old wives tale” solutions. These are suggestions that may or may not have been legitimate at one time, but now are often pointless or counterproductive. In regards to battery life, some suggestions I would not recommend (except as a very last resort) are to reset all settings or clean install the iOS. Both of these suggestions are fairly intrusive to your productivity as you will need to spend a lot of time resetting all your settings and/or reinstalling all your apps. This is a serious pain for most people and as I will explain, often is NOT the cause of battery life issues. Additionally some articles suggest turning off certain features of your device as a way to save battery life. That’s all well and good but those are really just workarounds. We should not need to sacrifice features of our devices just to get decent battery life. In normal usage, people should be able to leave on all the features of their iPhone or iPad and still get good battery life.

Occasionally, there are some articles that do shed some light on possible reasons why a new iOS upgrade is seemingly causing battery life issues. For example, this article from Forbes talks about reviewing the battery settings as Apple recommends, but then suggests that perhaps the cause for some users may be a third-party widget on the new Home and Lock screen of iOS 10. So it may be that certain new features of an iOS upgrade may actually drain the battery faster, possibly due to a problem with a third-party app. Again this can often be determined by looking at the battery settings so start there.

It May Be Hardware, Not Software

So with all that being said, what do I think might be happening if every year people complain about the new iOS killing their battery life? I think it may be a combination of several things that conspire around the time of a new iOS release. If enough users correlate battery issues with the installation of a new iOS, then the prevailing thought becomes that the new operating system is the problem, even if that is not the actual cause.

First there may be some “legit” issues like an actual iOS bug or third-party apps misbehaving as I described above. Depending on the severity of the bug or the popularity of the third-party app, this might be enough to seem like it is a widespread issue. However, this by itself isn’t the full story.

Allow me to play amateur psychologist for a moment. A lot of us tend not to pay a lot of attention to the technology behind our devices most of the time, but when a new update comes out we may end up playing around with our phone or tablet a lot more while we are testing out new features. This may last for several days or weeks as we figure out the new things we can do with our gadgets and how they work for us. Possibly one of those new features is actually something we now use regularly. The bottom line is that we may be using our phones a lot more than we realize and simply working the battery harder than before. Combine this with the fact that if we start looking up stories about the new iOS and we see that people are having battery life issues, suddenly we may start to pay more attention to our own battery life. We also may start to think that some issues we’ve had with our battery must be the fault of the new system. The more people that complain about their battery life after an iOS update contributes to a snowball of potentially misleading information. This vicious cycle might partially explain the high number of battery-related complaints seen around the time of an iOS update, but again this isn’t necessarily the whole truth.

The real culprit just might be the battery in your device itself. Let me explain a little bit about the technology behind the batteries that power most of our rechargeable devices.

You Might Get a Charge Out Of This

Batteries are rated by the amount of charge capacity they have when brand new. This is often measured in milliampere hours or mAh. For example, the batteries in an iPhone 6S is rated to hold 1715 mAh when new. In reality, this usually isn’t an exact capacity depending on differences in manufacturing, but an iPhone 6S battery should hold at least 1715 mAh capacity when new. As we use our phones and wear our batteries, this original capacity starts to diminish resulting in shorter battery life, even when charged to 100%. So for example if an older iPhone 6S now only has 1600 mAh, 100% of 1600 mAh will result in less real-world battery life than 100% of 1715 mAh.

This is true of devices from all manufacturers and unfortunately there is little we can do about it. Usually this is not such a big deal as most batteries are also designed to keep a relatively high charge capacity for the reasonable life expectancy of the device. For example, iPhones are designed to keep at least 80% of their original capacity for 500 charge cycles. A charge cycle is basically the measurement of a complete charge and discharge of a battery. So in simple terms, the more you use and recharge your phone, the higher the charge cycles go. Practically speaking, 500 charge cycles can be two or three years of usage for many people. So if an iPhone still has at least 80% of original battery capacity after two or three years it should still have reasonably good battery life.

Bad Batteries, One Year Later

The reality is that batteries are not all manufactured perfectly. So it is very possible for a battery to lose capacity faster than it should. Often this is a gradual process and we may not realize that our battery is losing capacity until many months into the ownership of our phone. It is very possible it could take about a year before we start to notice. Now when does Apple tend to release iOS updates? Usually right before the release of a new iPhone, which they usually do around September/October of every year. When do a lot of people tend to buy new iPhones? Immediately at their release or a few months after. So every year there are large numbers of people who are updating the iOS on their iPhones right about the time that their phones are 10-12 months old. If a significant number of people have batteries on their iPhones that have been slowly losing capacity excessively, the iOS update might be just enough to make the problem more noticeable, especially if, as I explained above, people starting paying closer attention to their phones to try out new features.

I can personally attest to this problem as I just experienced it with my own iPhone recently. As many people do I purchased my iPhone 6S last year within a week after it was released, approximately the last week of September 2015. I started to notice a problem with my iPhone battery literally 3 days before iOS 10 was released on September 13th, 2016. If I hadn’t been paying close attention, I could have easily correlated this problem with my installation of iOS 10 a few days later. Sure enough, soon after installing iOS 10, the problems with my battery escalated. Yet I believe that to have been purely coincidental since I first noticed the problem with my battery days earlier. Likely the battery had been slowly going bad for some time and I just hadn’t yet noticed. Lucky for me I was able to convince Apple to replace my phone because I had proof that the battery was going bad as I’ll explain below.

Is Your Battery Healthy?

Unfortunately, while we have a easy way to tell how much battery life we have left before we need to charge our phone again, there is no built-in way to determine the health of our battery (as measured in percentage of original capacity). Luckily there are third-party apps that can measure battery capacity of which I’ll recommend a couple. First I want to mention that ironically with the release of iOS 10, Apple has changed the operating system to no longer allow apps to read as much information about the battery as they could. For example, apps can no longer show the charge cycles of a battery in an iOS device. Fortunately viewing the charge cycles isn’t really all that necessary as compared to viewing the actual capacity number. Also ironic is that as I was writing this article, I discovered that my favorite battery app (Battery Life – https://www.batterylifeapp.com) has been removed from the App Store for the time being. Even more ironic is that the reason Apple chose to remove the app was that users were complaining that the app was “missing” features even though this was Apple’s change, not the app developer’s. Hopefully they’ll get the app back up sooner than later, but in the mean time I found another app that will suffice for now (Battery Care – https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battery-care-check-your-battery/id1130216129).

Whatever app you use, if the capacity of your battery shows less than 80% and your device is less than two years old, likely the battery is not in good health. Hopefully you still have warranty left on your device so you can get a replacement (a good reason to buy AppleCare so you get an extra year of warranty). Take your device to an Apple Store or call the AppleCare support line to have the battery tested. If it is under 80% it should be eligible for a replacement under warranty. If your phone is no longer under warranty, then the good news is that there are many places that can replace an iPhone battery quickly for a reasonable price. Just make sure you find a reputable business or technician as iPhone battery replacement has become a cottage industry and there are many questionable operations out there.

For me, it was not so simple to prove my battery was going bad. Using a variety of apps to test my battery over the course of about a week, the capacity readings were all over the place. I would get readings anywhere from the low 90% mark (which would have been great if that were true) to the mid 70% range. Usually they were just above 80%. At one point I recorded getting 56% capacity and this was when I knew that things were really screwy with my battery. Maybe a 5-10% capacity fluctuation is reasonable given that measurements may not always be exactly precise, but showing a reading in the 50% range I knew was seriously abnormal. So I took my phone to the Apple Store and explained my situation.

Be Gentle but Firm When Dealing with Apple

As I figured would happen, when they tested the battery it showed over 80% capacity so at first they did not want to replace my phone since the battery was reading within operating specs. Then I showed the Apple tech screenshots of the wild fluctuations my battery capacity read over the previous week. I tried to convince her that since the battery was already in the low 80% range after only a year, it was clearly headed towards the replaceable range very soon. While the Apple tech said that she couldn’t officially acknowledge my test results since they weren’t Apple tools, apparently I was convincing enough to get a replacement iPhone. A few weeks have gone by and my replacement iPhone has shown no battery issues whatsoever. I’m VERY glad I didn’t try wiping my iPhone and going through hours of reconfigurations just to prove that the problem wasn’t software related since the problem was clearly with hardware.

In my years of experience helping my family and clients with their iPhones, most chronic battery-related issues that are not fixable with simple troubleshooting steps are in fact due to the battery itself – NOT because the iOS needs to be reloaded or have all settings wiped. The moral of the story is to arm yourself with knowledge and don’t be pressured into extreme measures that will cost you hours of time when they aren’t likely to work. I’ve found over the years that when dealing with Apple, they are usually very accommodating. However, often a little persuasion is needed to convince them to acknowledge a legitimate battery issue. It is best to be cordial when dealing with customer service people in general and Apple is no exception, but simply remain firm and calmly explain the facts.

Does your iPhone or iPad appear to have shorter battery life after an iOS update? Have you checked your battery capacity with a third party app? If your battery shows less than optimal charge capacity, let me know your story by commenting below.