This article has some excellent suggestions for steps you can take to improve your battery life under iOS 7. I’ve played around with these for a few days and can tell you that these have made a huge difference in my battery usage.
The two changes I think made the most difference for me (your mileage may vary) were setting my brightness to 50% (still plenty bright) and reducing the motion of the user interface.
With the latter, I do lose the parallax effect, which I do miss, so I’m going to turn that setting off so I get parallax back, see how that affects my battery life. Note that this is the same setting that addressed Shawn’s motion effects post from yesterday.
When I heard 7 would finally bring background apps, I knew these sort of articles would come. It is expected to have worse battery life with more than one thing running.
This would be more interesting if each of these was tested. While some are valid (screen brightness – which is obvious and standard for and tablet/phone), some probably have little to no effect. For example, turning off Spotlight if you are low on memory to avoid thrashing? Spotlight indexes new items and doesn’t reindex everything normally. And assuming that memory management is effective, this should hate no real battery Impact.
There’s certainly more potential for runaway apps. Downcast currently has a bug that causes it to check for new podcasts multiple times an hour even though I have it set to check once a day. It’s these types of bugs (or rogue developers) that will cause bad battery life.
Shame it’s the same old stuff all over again – to improve your battery life you have to turn off almost everything remotely useful or pretty.
I honestly wish Apple would stop obsessing about thinness and weight so much and put a big battery inside. I’d much rather carry 2mm thicker phone that lasts whole day without any problems. Right now I have to plug my iPhone 5 at least once during the day.
Yep. This was the problem with Android for years.
For years iOS pundants didn’t believe it…now they’d have to be in denial to ignore it.
I don’t agree. I’ll take the thinner phone over larger battery. I don’t have any trouble getting through the day on an iPhone 5 with iOS 7 (>50% by end of day). Maybe that’s all due to usage patterns.
I did some tests with XCode’s instruments, and the parallax effect only uses the CPU in the lock-screen, home screen, multi-tasking or when a system dialog is displayed.
All of those should normally only last a few seconds and represent a small amount of the overall usage of the device and as such should not make a big difference in battery life.
Now I think that some iOS 7 installations have some bug that leaves parallax computations running even when their not needed in apps, something that should be fixed in the next update. Someone mentioned that turning parallax off then on once fixes this issue.
People like to blame every new feature for bad battery life.
They get bad battery life in the first few days after the update (probably because of battery recalibration, increased usage and multiple updates) and want to fix it by turning things off, and when the battery life seems to improve they think they identified the problem.
I did not turn anything off on my 4S and I’m having great battery life (1.5-2 days without a charge, been running the GM since the 10th), better than what I was getting on iOS 6.
One thing I did is lower the brightness, which is one of the only sure way to noticeably improve battery life, all the rest is speculation unless people do serious tests.
This makes sense; I can’t imagine that parallax itself would use that much battery power.
FWIW, my battery usage (4s) seems to have gone back to normal after a few days of being maybe 30% lower than usual. I attribute this to the fact that: (1) it is no longer updating 25+ apps per day; and (2) I turned off background refresh for a lot of apps – it seems that the default is to allow background refresh for every app that permits it, which is probably why I found over 20 apps set for background refresh, including ones I hadn’t used in over a year.
Turning off location services entirely, or background refresh for apps I use regularly, or keeping the phone less bright than I would prefer, might help with battery life, but are unacceptable tradeoffs. I can live with turning off background refresh for apps I haven’t used since summer 2012.
In apps with a white background screen looks noticeably inferior at 75% brightness, never mind 50%.
I’ve always kept my display set to ~40, 45. only time it goes higher is in the sun.
I don’t know what’s up but previously I charged once a day, now iOS 7 it’s draining quickly and I have to charge twice. usage screen has me at only 3-4 hours of usage after last full charge.
Funny how battery issues arise with new generations of iOS/device – mostly because we are all excited with the new features I believe.
Anyway, they wane as we get used to them.
I had terrible battery life on the first day, when I upgrade iPhone 5 from 6.1 to 7. It was worse on wifi than on cellular. And that clue me in – the reason are app auto-updates. Huge number of apps was updated right after launch and this continued for several days. So wifi was constantly working (I limited updates just to wifi) and that kills the battery the most.
Turning that single feature off (for now) extended battery life from half a day to whole day.