If you have recently upgraded your iPhone to iOS 7.1 or later you might have noticed a decrease in battery life. This is a very common issue and is caused by many different factors, but how do you know if your battery is broken and whats causing it? Lets take a look at how you can troubleshoot your device from home and find the cause (and fix) the issue.
Step 1: Finding the problem.
Lets start with finding the problem, there are a few very easy steps you can follow to find out, and it doesn’t require any installation of an app.
On your iPhone, navigate to Settings > General > Usage where you will be able to see how long your battery will last. You will notice that there are 2 tabs one indicating “Standby Time” and the other one “Usage Time”, you must look at the difference between these as your Usage time should be lower then your Standby time. Another test you can performe takes a little longer but is worth the time
- Write down the Usage and StandBy time
- Put your device to sleep (not turning it off)
- Wait for approximately 5 minutes
- Unlock your device and navigate to settings > General > usage
- Your Stand By time should have increased by 5 minutes and usage time by 1 minute.
Has your Usage time risen more then 1 minute? Then your battery has an issue. Not the case? Then your iPhone is fine and doesn’t have any battery related issues, there is also no need to continue the following steps.
Step 2: Fixing the issue
Now that we know your iPhone has an issue, lets see how we can fix it. This issue is caused by software and not hardware so there is no need to replace any components. When your iPhone is on stand by there are many apps and other programs running in the background making sure everything on your device keeps working and running properly, but we don’t use most of these apps all the time so there is no need for them to be running on the background.
- Disable background app refresh. Navigate to Settings > General > Background app refresh (right under “Usage”) and disable it for any App you don’t use all the time, specially for Facebook
- Disable Location Tracking. Navigate to Settings > Privacy > Location Service and disable any app that shouldn’t need your location (pretty much all of them, if at any time they do request to access your location a popup will be shown when opening the app that will ask you to re-enable this feature) Again, specially disable this feature for social networks like Facebook or Twitter
- Disable push notifications. There are many apps like Mail that will send you constant push notifications, this is something unnecessary and also something that consumes a lot of battery life, we recommend you disabling this feature for any app for which it isn’t necessary (you might want to keep it on for IM apps like Telegram and Whatsapp)
- Disable any unnecessary features like Bluetooth, Airdrop and Wifi.
Bonus: Don’t close any app in multitasking, you might think these apps drain battery life if they are open in the background and don’t get me wrong, they do, but very little. It is the moment you close them and then re-open them that will affect you battery dramatically, decreasing the usage time. This is because apps are stored in the RAM and can be accessed from there without much processing power, but if you close the app from the multitasking menu, your device will have to completely reload this app on to the RAM, something that requires much CPU power.
Step 3: Still experiencing battery issues?
Solution 1: It might be time to look for an iPhone Case that can improve your battery life. If you are a fan of cases and covers that keep your device protected then this might be a good solution. We recommend you check out the Estilo battery case and uNX case
Solution 2: If you have tried out the instructions mentioned in Step 2 and are still experiencing issues, it might be time to get your battery checked. Apple does “Extended Battery Life Test” at their retail stores, we suggest you make an appointment at the Genius Bar from your local Apple Store and let them run one of these test, if it turns out your battery is broken, it will be replaced for free.
All credits of this guide go to the guys over at Overthought
