Widespread Battery Issues with iOS5

iPhone users everywhere are complaining about much weaker battery life in the iPhone since upgrading to iOS 5.

There’s been many theories as to why, but it seems that Apple is either avoiding or not willing to give a definitive answer to the actual issue. It is generally understood that iOS5 is going to use more battery than iOS4 based simply on the nature of the upgrade and all the things it’s doing in the background that never happened before. Things like backing up data and documents to iCloud, automatically downloading apps, music, and books, the notification center running, iMessage services running. There is a lot of new stuff going on in iOS5 and it seems to be impacting batteries everywhere.

The strange thing is – it’s not happening to everyone. I have personally worked on at least three devices where people complained about bad battery life. I’ve done things like start with removing the email profile and re-adding it, leading all the way up to completely wiping the device and manually piecing it back together, still get less life. I even deployed a brand new 4S on a Friday and on Saturday the executive spent time at the Apple store getting it replaced.

Apparently it’s quite a problem. A thread on Apple’s message board is up to more than 2,300 messages and 160 pages. It’s been viewed over 160,000 times, and it’s full of people getting noticeably terrible battery life. Some people even report actually being able to watch the drain and every few seconds the percentage drops.

The latest report I got from one of the higher ups says that my most recent fix seems to have fixed the problem completely. I disabled location services, and disabled the iPhone from being able to back up documents and data over 3G. This seems to have significantly improved battery life. Yesterday he got about 20% drain in 2.5 hours, today he’s only lost 4% after the same amount of time.

Looks like Apple decided to copy something from Android this time. “Terrible battery life: a new feature of iOS5!” (jokes.)

Source: Computerworld