iPhone 16 Battery Drain Issues: Users Complain of Rapid Battery Consumption with iOS 18

iPhone 16 Battery Drain Issues: Users Complain of Rapid Battery Consumption with iOS 18Several iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro users have taken to online forums in recent days to complain about unexplained rapid battery drain issues on their phones. While many reports come from iPhone 16 users, older iPhones running iOS 18 may also be experiencing battery life problems

iPhone 16 Battery Drain Issues: Users Complain of Rapid Battery Consumption with iOS 18

Several iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro users have taken to online forums in recent days to complain about unexplained rapid battery drain issues on their phones. While many reports come from iPhone 16 users, older iPhones running iOS 18 may also be experiencing battery life problems. Affected users have noticed a significant battery drop even when they aren't actively using their iPhones.

One MacRumors reader, named T1aaj, said, Yep, I have the 16 Pro and battery life goes from 100% to almost 60% mid-day with no heavy usage. Definitely needs fixing, I should've kept my 15 Pro!.

Another user, JulianL, shared a similar experience: My new 16 Pro Max battery life is terrible. I upgraded from 15 Pro Max to iOS 18, sold it with 99% battery health. Apple boasts better battery life specs for the 16 Pro Max and I was curious to see how long it would last. The answer? Around 50% to 60% of the charge cycle I had a year ago with my 15 Pro Max. Extremely disappointing."

JulianL further added, "All the settings are the same, including global background refresh off, max screen refresh rate set to 60Hz, data locked to 4G (because for my use, I found no difference in functionality of my phone when I have all these settings on, so might as well set them for best battery life). My 16PM was acquired on launch day, so it's been 19 days now; early indexing and other background setup work should be done by now."

huanbrother shared their experience on Reddit: The 16 Pro has abysmal standby on sleep mode (no Apple Watch connected) and I can see from the graphs that it has tons of background activity. But guess what, I turned off AOD (which shouldn't be off in sleep mode) and turned on frame rate limit in accessibility mode (not low power mode) and turned off ProMotion, background activity went away! However, the battery drain issue didn't go away, 4 hours 20 minutes later the battery dropped 11%, from 70% to 59%.

kirbysmartdawg described an even more drastic battery loss: Clearly something is wrong on Apple's end. Idle battery drain is excessive. I unplugged my phone at 9 AM this morning, battery was at 95% (my charging limit) and it lasted for 20 minutes before it started a rapid decline. Every five minutes my percentage would drop by one percent until I finally picked up the phone and used it. It seems to have stabilized now, but I'm really puzzled by this behavior.

Across Reddit, there are other users reporting similar battery drain issues with both iPhone 16 models and older iPhones running iOS 18. While battery life concerns are often reported with every new iOS release, the number of affected users seems to be higher this time.

Reddit user Ok-Interest-6561 said, I upgraded from an iPhone 12 to the new 16 Pro. The main reasons for the upgrade were the battery and speaker issues, but in my experience, despite having better battery and longer battery life, the 16 Pro drains about 10-15% overnight when sitting idle on my nightstand.

Another Reddit user conducted an experiment with the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro, using them under the same conditions. The iPhone 16 Pro reportedly dropped to 58% battery life after 36 hours compared to the iPhone 14 Pro, which was at 85%.

Battery drain issues are difficult to diagnose because iPhone usage patterns vary widely from person to person and day to day. Affected users have tried turning off ProMotion, disabling the "always-on" display, disabling background app refresh, removing widgets, turning off cellular data, and completely resetting their iPhones. Some have seen improvements after using some of these methods, but not everyone has experienced success, and many users still experience battery life issues despite troubleshooting.

Some users have reported that they are seeing improvement with iOS 18.0.1 and the iOS 18.1 beta, but software updates are not a silver bullet for everyone.

While the exact cause of the battery drain issue remains unclear, it appears there may be an underlying bug that Apple needs to address in future iOS 18 updates.