iOS 12 iPhone Battery Life

TidBITS Talk
61

I haven’t made it to the Apple store yet but it’s a priority now. Battery health is still at 91% but twice this week the phone has shut down at 20%. Tonight it rebooted, last night it may have shut off even though it was on the charger (it could have been rebooting, I’m not sure). I am making it through the day for the most part (but not riding as much so Glympse is not using battery).

The other night I went to bed with it at 20% and watched it quickly drop to 8% by just checking the temp and opening Safari.

@schinder I meant to come back and tell you how Connect and Glympse but I forgot. I’ll try to remember when the phone is back on!

Diane

62

Here I am complaining about my old phone and the new battery again! I am pretty sure by the end of the year I’ll have a new phone, so that will keep me quiet for a couple of year :wink:

I had the battery replaced - again - just before Thanksgiving. I paid full price for it and honestly never felt it was a big improvement. I am still at iOS 12.

Worse, the phone started randomly rebooting within a week of the battery install. In mid-use, it will give the “plugged in” beep, and I’ll see the little white hash circle, then it’s back in the regular screens. I was once on hold for 90 minutes when it happened and miraculously it didn’t boot me from the call, but it does typically boot me from whatever I’m doing if I’m in an appl.

I tried to go back to Apple in the first 30 days but they had shut down again due to covid and there were never appointments available in my area (I think they book 2 weeks out). I tried again after the first of the year, same thing.

Early last week it rebooted twice while on the charger, and it had a good charge too. I logged back into Apple and got an appointment for yesterday. My battery is still showing 100% for health.

The guy I worked with was fantastic, but couldn’t find any reason why it’s rebooting. He can see that it is in diagnostics but that’s as far as it gets. His suggestion was to reset my settings to see if it helps any of the little issues I’ve had. It’s kind of a pain and 24 hours later I’m still struggling.

It did not solve the fact that Siri is no longer wanting to dial numbers. Hey Siri call Sue. “Calling Sue.” “I’m sorry I can’t call Sue using that number”. This used to happen when I didn’t have area codes in local numbers, but now it’s happening with numbers I call frequently. I wasn’t able to return a call yesterday without opening the phone and hitting the actual number.

My biggest issue though is space. I had about 8gb free, the bulk of my space is in photos and music. The 3+gb software update downloaded yesterday and I deleted it. Today I am under 3gb free and it seems to be in messages. In the past I’d see that some photos in my messages said “tap to download” so they were somehow offloading but not deleting. Since I now have 5gb in Messages, it appears everything is there. Will these go away eventually?

I do not believe I had “auto delete old conversations” turned on, because if I did, they wouldn’t have come back, right? In the meantime I’m back to cleaning out photos.

I was able to get an SE2020 and 12 Mini in my hands together finally! The Mini is sweet! Though I’m hearing rumors of a 13 Mini now… :wink:

@schinder I do have Connect and Glympse set to “while using” and they seem to be working fine.

Diane

63

A few years ago when Apple was offering iPhone battery replacements for $30 I took my iPhone to the Genius Bar. He recommended that I backup and then do a complete wipe of the phone. He said (me paraphrasing) that through iOS upgrades some old gunk sticks around. He provided a reference for the complete wipe (it is more than just selecting an option in iOS but I can’t find my notes). It free up some space on the iPhone and battery performance improved a lot but within a month had worsened and I replaced the battery.

So I am wondering if you might have a software issue that might be resolved by a complete wipe of the iPhone and restore from backup.

64

The guy I worked with felt that resetting settings (which reminds me of deleting INI files way way back) would do a similar enough thing with less of a time investment. Well, as far as weird things. One of the things that got changed was my password. Since I upgraded from a 4s, I still had a 4 digit password. Resetting the settings forced me into a 6 digit one which I’m trying to type enough to not forget 13 years of muscle memory (since the Touch)

I am truly on the fence. I’ve had to restore in the past and don’t think I had to re-enter so many little things as I went about my day.

I am open to trying a wipe and backup at some point, but the other day the phone wouldn’t even back up to iTunes. I’ve deleted more photos and will try again. I just know I didn’t have over 5gb of messages showing in the space chart and that’s pretty much the free space I lost. I am guessing that somehow older messages were offloaded prior to resetting everything, even though “delete old conversations” seems to be the only option when I look at settings now.

Diane

65

A friend of mine was in this same Catch-22. Her iPhone was full but she didn’t want to lose anything, it was mostly full of images that came in over iMessage. Upgrading iOS would give her the tools to manage storage (it would let her put photos and messages on iCloud). But she couldn’t install. One day she told me the Apple Genius took care of it.

Now that I think about it, backup to a Mac or PC, preferably more than once, both encrypted and non-encrypted, wipe the phone, install the new OS, restore from backup. The backup will get installed before the apps get reinstalled so it should work in terms of space. Encrypted backups will do a better job of remembering your passwords.

66

So therein lies the catch - I don’t want to go to iOS 14. I don’t think that will do this poor phone any favors. :frowning: I am pretty sure I can wipe and restore my own backup, but I also assume that will just bring any weirdness back over?

One of the other downfalls that happened, was when the settings were wiped one of the stock settings were to automatically update apps. So a number of my apps that had been working fine were updated before I caught that. I suspect a few may have taken up more space than the versions I had been running.

The good news is, apparently 3gb free is enough to backup, so I got that done today. I’ll continue with the photos cleanup.

Diane

67

If you wipe you have to be sure that it doesn’t really wipe the phone or you will probably be forced to upgrade to the latest iOS. But a restore to factory settings might do what you want.

Your problems might be due to a corrupted cache or other temporary file. In that case those files wouldn’t be backed up and should be recreated after a restore.