iPhone 5S battery drain causes and solutions

The iPhone 5S is one of the most popular Apple flagships at the moment, even though two newer smartphones from the company, the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus were already released in September. There are Apple fans out there who would rather keep their iPhone 5S because it is still an up to date phone that can guarantee a long life expectancy and with the addition of iOS 8 it remains as future-proof as other phones in the Apple portfolio. The iPhone 5S is also cheaper since the successors were released, which might be a pull-factor for new customers or people with older phones to upgrade to last year’s flagship instead of the new offerings. All that being said, it doesn’t mean that the iPhone 5S is without its own problems, seeing as users are reporting battery drain issues even after the iOS 8 update. We’ve gathered some reports and analyzed them so that we can offer a few handy solutions that might help you out if you are having unexplainable battery drain on the iPhone 5S.

Even after updating to iOS 8.1.2, iPhone 5S users are reporting abnormal battery drain which they didn’t experience with iOS 7. Fact of the matter is that not all iPhone 5S owners are experiencing battery drain or any bugs after installing the latest version of iOS, which leads us to believe that Apple’s battery replacement program was indeed more than just warranted. In case you are having these issues and others since installing the update, follow our quick guide to find out what you could do to improve your battery life.

First off, if you’re not an advanced user, you could easily omit third-party apps from your calculations, which means that there might be an app that you’ve installed that is just not right for your phone. iOS 8 lets you check which apps are draining your battery, so verify if a third-party app is at the top of the list with the most battery consumption and get rid of it. That’s the easiest and most obvious fix you can come across, but it may make a huge difference if you were unaware of an app that was causing your issues with the iPhone 5S battery drain.

One useful tip to find out what’s draining your iPhone 5S battery and how to address it so to compare the Usage time to the Standby time. Your Usage time should be significantly lower than your Standby time, since the latter shows for how long your phone has been unplugged. If these two markers are identical, you have a battery drain problem. A secure way to determine that is to turn your phone off for 5 minutes and check back to these statistics. If your Usage time has increased by more than a minute, you are definitely confronted with a serious battery draining issue that won’t allow your phone to sleep properly.

The next step you should try is installing Xcode, a developer tool from Apple that monitors every process your iPhone 5S is running at a given time. You will see readings of how much each process is using up in terms of battery, processing power and memory. The apps that constantly keep jumping to the top are your problem. The most common third-party app that can be seen in Xcode is Facebook, because it runs in the background and keeps refreshing, thus not allowing your phone to go into standby. You should disable background app refresh for Facebook as well as location services and check back to Xcode to see if the process keeps jumping to the top of the list. You should do the same for any other application that keeps using your memory and battery, if you don’t need the apps as much.

Another step that might impact the iPhone 5S battery drain positively is you refraining from quitting apps in multitasking. By quitting these apps, you force your phone to unload the application from your RAM and when you open it up again later, it starts the whole process all over again, putting more strain on your battery and memory. If this doesn’t work out, try disabling Push Email or reconfigure it so that it doesn’t check for new emails every minute. Try setting it to half an hour and see if that helps your phone last longer.

If none of these suggestions helped, you could try using Airplane Mode when in areas with poor service, disabling push notifications for various apps and ultimately learn to not check your battery so much. When constantly waking your phone up to check for the battery meter, you are actually bothering your phone a lot and keeping it from going into standby. We hope these easy tips help you, but if nothing works and your iPhone 5S battery drain keeps getting worse, the only choice is to take it back to the Geniuses and have it fixed or replaced. Good luck!