14 DAY TRIAL // Battery drain reports are constantly cropping up on Apple Support Communities (1,2,3) as well as on our own web site. Varying mileage is not something that Apple is necessarily responsible for, but a severe drop in battery life may need more attention from the Cupertino giant.
As Apple works up a patch (presumably), there’s an easy way to check whether or not your poor autonomy is your own fault or Apple’s. And the tip comes straight from a former Apple employee named Scotty Loveless. He proposes the following test:
“Write down your usage and standby time, press the sleep/wake button (or lock button, as some call it) to put the device to sleep, and set the device down for five minutes. When you come back, take note of the change in time. If your device is sleeping properly, then the Standby time should have increased by five minutes and your Usage time by <1 minute. If your Usage time rises by more than one minute, you have a drain problem. Something is keeping your device from sleeping properly, significantly shortening the time it will last.”
See “How to Test Your iOS Battery Drain” for the full scoop. Loveless says if you don’t see the drain problem from your Settings pane test, then you should try other fixes proposed in his post.
However, another potential fix comes from a user up on Apple Support Communities who claims to have addressed the problem with a hard-reset/restore of the phone. He’s not the first to report success with this method, so maybe it holds some water.
Elessar213 writes, “I hard-restored the phone, installed iOS 7.1.1 using iTunes and set up the phone as new, of course after backing up important data (photos, music, whatsapp messages, etc.). The battery seems ok now, definitely not draining as fast as it was.”
“This was from observing my friends who are using the iPhone 5S and having no issue. The underlying reason could be that I first installed iOS 7 beta version (long ago, when there was the developer loophole that allowed installation before the public release). My good friend and I did the same thing, and had been installin [sic] the latest iOS using THE SAME old backup from beta version. This could have led to some problem in the software being passed on to this current version.”
Elessar213 asks fellow users who are experiencing battery drain under iOS 7.1.1 if they once used a beta of iOS, as it may help test his theory.
However, given the limited availability of these betas to the general population, it’s very unlikely that everyone who is reporting poor battery life on iOS 7.1.1 has had a beta installed on their device. But it can’t hurt to try his hard-restore method nonetheless.