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My mother is having trouble with her new (few months old) iPhone 5s -- the battery needs to be charged multiple times per day. So she made an appointment at the Genius Bar at an Apple store. When all was said and done, she had talked to two or three different techs there. I figured they'd tell her to turn down the brightness, turn off WiFi, and other similar things.

Well, the Apple techs did tell her to turn off WiFi, but that's the only normal advice they gave. The techs also said that in iOS 7 it is important to *never* close apps, since 'it can ruin the software on the phone.' They also said that my mother had too many apps installed, which was hurting her battery life. I wanted to interject with, "maybe you heard wrong", but my mother said was confused by this advice and asked the techs if they really meant this, and they did.

The advice of the Apple techs seems counterintuitive, and I doubt it'll solve the battery issue. Is there any truth to it?

They didn't go into enough detail about the number of apps installed. It really depends on what the apps are doing. If she has a lot of apps that run tasks in the background and have the ability to create "push notifications" then I would say yes, battery life can be affected. The comment that they made referring to keeping the apps on and never closing out of them is utter BS. That makes no sense and they need to return to basic training.

There are a few things that drain battery, but none like a rouge application that gets stuck and doesn't sleep. You'd have to check the battery logs or something to find out which one is eating battery and she'd have to do without it, I mean if iOS has that, being an android user. Secondly, if she lives in a place with poor cell reception that can drain battery too.

An Apple "tech" is something ranging from a spotty, enthusiastic school kid with a dangerously small amount of actual product knowledge, and an overgrown manchild hipster with a load of RDF for brains.

This is why when something is broken in the Apple world it's either customer error or "hey, let's replace the whole device, it's 100% faulty"

Look at iOS-specific forums if you want a sensible answer because you'll not find one at an Mac store.

Having many apps "running in the background" may affect battery life slightly, mostly if they read lots of GPS data. But even then, what apps can actually do in the background is strictly regulated and a backgrounded app is *not* running full-speed, it is frozen and woken up periodically (rarely) by the system to do small stuff. Apps using Push-notifications should not degrade battery life noticeably either.

And as Techgoudy said: closing apps ruining software is complete nonsense. Go ahead and close as many apps as you like, it doesnt matter.

If the phone is just a few months old i suspect a hardware problem in the battery or the battery regulator. It does happen. iOS 8 allows you to monitor power usage statistics on a per-app level which would be useful for you but unfortunately iOS 8 is just early beta at the moment.

A PC hardware "enthusiast" on the other hand is something with no range whatsoever.
The name "enthusiast" is a funny instance of doublespeak because the specimen is most of the time exhibiting skepticism, disappointment and all around general bitterness.

The manchild description fits both in the fact that there are virtually no female specimens and that it is a condescending insult routinely thrown at it by females.

The logic behind not manually closing apps is that the suspend function works great 99% of the time. Once an app is suspended, it takes 0 power until to call it up again. If you kill it, the next time you open it, it has to restart the app and run it's start scripts. This takes much more juice than resuming a suspended app. That is taught to the Apple technicians. "Ruining the software" is definitely a stretch though.

Did they show here the battery life diagnostic chart? They should have run that when they remoted into her phone which would give what her expected battery life is. Remember, the battery is warranted for 3 years while the rest of the phone defaults to 1 year unless you buy the extended Apple Care.

"Genius"

windwalker wrote:

A PC hardware "enthusiast" on the other hand is something with no range whatsoever.

On the contrary. A PC hardware "enthusiast" like many on these forums ranges from the same base level of "enthusiastic yet inexpert and inexperienced teenager" all the way up to highly-paid and highly experienced industry professionals who are veterans of all types of computing, having soldered their own RAM upgrades into our ZX Spectrums or VIC20 computers over three decades ago. The very nature of their jobs means that they are cleaning up the mess left behind by people like these Apple "Geniuses" on a daily basis.

Not that I dislike doing that kind of work, but I find the Apple marketing and RDF to be a highly toxic substance when the people who hire me expect their iProduct to function as "promised".

Killing apps on iOS can never hurt them (when they aren't the active app), unless the app is badly written. iOS will randomly kill apps when it needs resources (typically memory), so an app that can't handle being killed at any given moment will eventually have problems under normal use.

iPhones are rated for 500 charge cycles (from 100% to 0% and back) before the battery will drop down to 80% of it's initial capacity. Unless she is doing something like heavy gaming 16 hours a day, there's no way she's anywhere near that limit.

If you want to test, do a backup of the phone via iTunes, then wipe it and have her use it for a day or 2. If the battery keeps draining then you have a hardware problem. iOS is so aggressive about killing and suspending apps it's virtually impossible to get that kind of drain unless you are actively using it constantly.

I'd chat with their online support before just grabbing a random 'Genius' at a busy store.

SuperSpy has the best advice with none of the typical superiority complex that other posters in this thread exude. Post of the year - no kidding. Do what he says, and it's a great way to establish at least to an extent what the problem is.

There are a few things that can have enabled that can drastically effect battery life.

- constant playing with apps of course
- unnecessarily long time to sleep settings
-wifi / bluetooth being enabled when not needed (the phone will constantly hunt for connections sucking more juice)
- marginal cell service where it has to flip from LTE to 3G to maintain a usable signal (LTE sucks battery life hard enough as it is compared to 3G and if she is not doing a lot of web activities off of her cell signal, she can then turn off LTE for far greater battery life)
- running unneeded notification or location services.

Deanjo wrote:

- marginal cell service where it has to flip from LTE to 3G to maintain a usable signal (LTE sucks battery life hard enough as it is compared to 3G and if she is not doing a lot of web activities off of her cell signal, she can then turn off LTE for far greater battery life)

My experience on Verizon has been the exact opposite, if the phone can get LTE, it's battery usage is greatly reduced, but if it's on 3G (keep in mind VZW's 3G network is very poor compared to ATT's 3G network -- they are vastly different wireless technologies) my battery consumption when the device is otherwise idle is 2-3 times higher. I think this is due to the 'race to sleep' phenomenon, where the LTE radio technically consumes more energy, but because its ~10-20 times faster at transferring data, it can complete it's request and drop down to a low power state much more quickly, saving energy in the long run.