iPhone 5s iOS 8 battery life

The iPhone 5s is the last flagship from Apple before the iPhone 6 fiasco and while millions have already turned to the newer phone, there are still a lot of Apple fans out there who would rather keep their iPhone 5s. Yet another segment of the population was affected by the iPhone 6 launch: Android users. Even though most Android users are loyal to their OS, there are some who would like to try Apple’s offerings. Those people might be wondering about the iPhone 6 or the iPhone 5s as a good, cheaper alternative and we’re here to let them know about the iPhone 5s iOS 8 battery life findings, since battery life is one of the most important traits of a smartphone.

With the launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Apple also released a brand new version of iOS, iOS 8, which isn’t very different on the surface than the previous version, but it does bring quite a few features Apple fans had been asking for for a long time, such as widget support and third party keyboards. Even though the software was entirely new at the moment of its release, Tim Cook made it clear that most of their iPhones and iPads will be getting it, and since their devices are high-end and nicely specced, most of them can support iOS 8 without a problem. Still, there are concerns about iOS 8 and subsequent iOS 8.1 versions impacting devices negatively.

One of the most worrisome things among tech enthusiasts wanting to buy an iPhone 5s is the iOS 8 battery life, meaning performance and stability, as well as resistance to heavy use when using a combination of an older flagship with a newer OS. Even though Apple made it clear that iOS 8 was optimized for each device in particular, including the iPhone 5s, users still started experiencing issues with the handset. To be fair, there were users who reported massive battery drain even before the update.

The iPhone 5s battery life in most reviews is below average, but there are occasional users who report extremely bad battery life and we’ll talk about that, too. First off, let’s see the average battery life for the iPhone 5s. Our battery tests report that the iPhone 5s will keep up with you for about a day. That is not very impressive, but you can bypass the bad battery life by turning off extra features that involve animations in iOS 8. Even though the new operating system from Apple is supposed to be optimized for the iPhone 5s, it still manages to drain the battery more heavily than iOS 7 did. With that in mind, you might have to think twice before choosing to go with the iPhone 5s and iOS 8 combination.

iPhone 5s battery life results are not impressive, but subsequent updates did improve it a little bit. To be fair, your battery life will depend very much on how you use your smartphone. If you use a 3G network a lot, your iPhone 5s will give the struggle up after about 4 hours, sadly. There are better reports, but 4 hours is the worse it can get. Otherwise, if you stay on Wi-Fi and don’t abuse your apps that much, you will survive until nightfall with your phone still alive. Even though we would have expected iPhone 5s battery life to be much better than it turned out to be, there are fixes you can use to make your experience better.

iOS 8 actually adds a new feature that can help you with battery draining issues: battery usage. You can check which apps use your battery the most and if you find something is hogging power, you should get rid of that app and find an alternative. To get to the new feature, you can go through settings, general, usage and then battery usage, where you can view daily and weekly statistics about  iOS 8 battery optimization. One other fix that is linked to third-party apps is background app refresh, which you should turn off if you’re just not getting a day of use out of your iPhone 5s. You should also turn off Push Email, unless you really need the feature. It could help quite a lot when it comes to battery life on the iPhone 5s running iOS 8.

Naturally, using your phone at a lower brightness level will definitely help with preserving your battery life, but that notion is valid for any kind of smartphone on the market. Display is the one to use up most of the power on your phone, so the less you use it, the more battery life you will get out of your device. If none of these fixes worked on the iPhone 5S battery life problems, you should try restarting your device and if that fails, perform a settings reset. If that fails once again, you should try restoring the iOS 8 update, but be sure to backup your data beforehand.