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localhostrulez
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Ridiculous iPhone 5S battery drain

Mon Jul 25, 2016 9:30 pm

OK, wondering if anyone has any ideas. We went to LA a few days ago, and mom's iPhone has been draining REALLY fast as of late. Seems worse when we're away from home, even though cell service was perfectly strong (and no one else had an issue). We're talking an AT&T MVNO in a major metro area, after all. Go throughout the day, oops, it's almost out. Leave it unplugged overnight (when it was full before), oops, it's dead. Etc. Seems to have a fair bit of "usage" as well (keep in mind that Android only counts screen on, but iOS is different and counts more; I could be misinterpreting it).

But I plugged it into a Mac with CoconutBattery, and it has 92% of design capacity. She keeps things simple, doesn't have many apps installed, mostly uses it for texting, taking pictures, and looking a few things up (uses her iPad or laptop for more than that, doesn't play Pokemon Go, etc), and has been keeping Battery Saver on as of late. Still drains like mad, the rest of our phones are working just fine (i.e. I ran Google Maps/nav on my SE for a few hours, played with it a few hours, etc, and it still has a good bit of charge left).

Is it worth factory resetting the phone? Could it be a hardware defect?
 
synthtel2
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Re: Ridiculous iPhone 5S battery drain

Mon Jul 25, 2016 10:54 pm

I had a similar issue once that turned out to be Opera hogging all the CPU time. Does it use less battery on a fresh boot, before apps are started? (That assumes iOS doesn't have too much stuff auto-start.) Alternately, is there a way to kill apps to see if one is misbehaving?

Does iOS expose graphs of charge level versus time? If so, that could be useful. A consistent drain could mean different stuff than a bursty drain, for instance. CPU use would also be a relevant thing to know. Seeing if airplane mode changes anything could also be relevant if CPU use is low (is something abusing a radio?).
 
localhostrulez
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Re: Ridiculous iPhone 5S battery drain

Mon Jul 25, 2016 11:20 pm

iOS does list apps by battery usage, but that doesn't show anything odd. And like I said, there are very few apps installed on her phone to begin with.

That said, we HAVE had the messaging app on that phone misbehave in other ways as of late. I.e. I try to iMessage it, and it rejects it (despite it being enabled, I'm not blocked on her phone, etc). Or I try to see her location through the iMessage/family feature, and it doesn't respond. Etc. I left it alone for less than an hour (on wifi), and it ate 6% doing nothing. Assuming iMessage is one of the few things battery saver doesn't affect - maybe that's doing strange stuff, and constantly eating some CPU?
 
synthtel2
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Re: Ridiculous iPhone 5S battery drain

Tue Jul 26, 2016 1:12 am

Yeah, at least on Android, I've never found the battery usage rankings by app to be that accurate. For a start, it didn't show anything out of the ordinary when Opera was intermittently maxing out a core while backgrounded, to the extent that the phone would sometimes get warm while theoretically idle. :-? I had to either kill it or not start it after a reboot to see the difference.

Is there a way to kill or otherwise disable iMessage for long enough to see if things get better? iMessage weirdness still makes me think radio shenanigans aren't much less likely than CPU use, so Airplane mode would be my next thing to try.

This is difficult since iOS doesn't offer much for this sort of debugging, and I'm not familiar with the bits it does offer.

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