Battery Drain on iOS 26 and iOS 26.0.1.

After two months of this, having my phone run down completely every day in 6-8 hours, I finally caved, backed it all up, did a complete factory reset (except for eSIM), and restored from backup. Was avoiding this because it creates lots of knock-on work getting things working again, especially some 2FA that doesn't play nice with backups. Cost me about 4 hours including some IT support calls and I'm sure there's a long tail of stuff I haven't got to yet. But I am now getting through a full day with 30-40% battery left, like I was back before this saga began.

Followyoheart wrote:

1. Following can be tried depending on your risk appetite. May not be advisable from safety point of view and depending on how essential are these features to you but could be done until the iPhone stabilises after updates:

Set all mail accounts to fetch manual. New mail only arrives when mail app is opened.

2. Turn off Siri learning for as many apps as possible that is not essential to you. You will have to go Siri settings. I have a feeling that the Apple Intelligence and Siri are using lot of phone resources to learn from your apps and phone usage behaviour.

3. Background activity still happens even if you set background refresh off. You can see that in battery % used for apps. It shows on screen % and background activity %. Close apps on your drawer once done.

4. Location services off for all non essential apps. It can be turned off completely as well until required during navigation but this is risky and not advised (I believe ‘find my phone’ will lose access unless lost mode is enabled from other associated devices) and definitely not for people who tend to misplace their phones. I’ve seen location services running every time I unlock my phone. This does drain battery.

5. Lastly 26.1 seems to have improved the battery management. Not sure though. Do not forget to update all apps and do a force restart before these measures.

Yes, some may ask why bother buying a smartphone then but maybe as a temporary measure to save your battery performance until it’s fixed.

Disclaimer: At your own risk please.

Hello~ Have you tried this on your own device? Perhaps you should do so rather than post “Disclaimer: At your own risk please. “ Wow…

~Katana-San~

Kelster46 wrote:

Mine was updated today nothing but lag since and talk about battery drain I’m literally watching it go down in front of my eyes rapidly shocking I was on 99 percent and am on 11 within a very quick time and hardly any use please help This is shocking and to upgrade all apps how do I even do that all manually ?

Since you just updated today you are going to have to wait 3-5 days for the background processes to finish indexing files and performing object detection on your photos before you are able to make any battery usage comparisons. You should also expect extra heat being generated during this time and some lag on the screen when navigating.

About Apple software updates - Apple Support

Apps are updated independent of an iOS update and are done in the App Store. Most users have it set to update the apps automatically when they become available by the developer, but you can also update them manually.

How to manually update apps from the App Store - Apple Support

I would expect your Home & Lock Screen and Settings to be using more battery today after the update.

You still have not posted what apps are using your battery by scrolling down on your screen. Just because you aren't using an app does not mean it is not using power. The 2 you identified are the exact ones you would expect to be using your battery after an update for a short period of time.

In addition there is no word on your cell signal which is a major contributor to how much power is necessary to connect to your closest tower. The farther away it is the less bars you will have and the more power your device is going to use. The only thing that uses more power than a 1 bar signal is when it is searching for a tower.

If you post future screenshots, it is the green battery graph along with the apps consuming the battery that is the most helpful. The green graph shows rate of drop where the daily usage does nothing more than tell you what you have used. Leave it plugged in all night tonight and follow up tomorrow with your results.

Following can be tried depending on your risk appetite. May not be advisable from safety point of view and depending on how essential are these features to you but could be done until the iPhone stabilises after updates:

1. Set all mail accounts to fetch manual. New mail only arrives when mail app is opened.
2. Turn off Siri learning for as many apps as possible that is not essential to you. You will have to go Siri settings. I have a feeling that the Apple Intelligence and Siri are using lot of phone resources to learn from your apps and phone usage behaviour.
3. Background activity still happens even if you set background refresh off. You can see that in battery % used for apps. It shows on screen % and background activity %. Close apps on your drawer once done.
4. Location services off for all non essential apps. It can be turned off completely as well until required during navigation but this is risky and not advised (I believe ‘find my phone’ will lose access unless lost mode is enabled from other associated devices) and definitely not for people who tend to misplace their phones. I’ve seen location services running every time I unlock my phone. This does drain battery.
5. Lastly 26.1 seems to have improved the battery management. Not sure though. Do not forget to update all apps and do a force restart before these measures.

Yes, some may ask why bother buying a smartphone then but maybe as a temporary measure to save your battery performance until it’s fixed.

Disclaimer: At your own risk please.

Update

after the factory reset didn’t help me

( even after a week , to give it time to re-index recalibration nonsense)

a few days ago

i went thru all the apps

1- turned off background refresh on every app ( except GPS & maps + navigation)

2- turned off notifications on

all but a couple that I think I should leave on

( GPS + maps , etcetera )

3- set screen refresh to 60

my battery life is about 80% better

Today I’ve used

2 hr 41 minutes

at 6 am my battery was about 50%

it’s 2:21 pm. My battery is 25%

( battery health is 94% )

been on WiFi all day

this probably isn’t perfect but it’s way better than anything I’ve gotten with

iOS 26.xx.x

hi there friends,for me about battery drain,i have an iphone 16 pro max and happened the same to me....but the best solution for me was to update and restore iphone with Mac or PC with the full iphone firmware downloaded.....but remember to backup your stuff....from 5:00am to 1:30pm i was at work and started to use my iphone after work have 91 % and started to use on youtube,web search and whatever well at least not gaming and at 7:57 i still have a good 55% i hope it works for you 👍🏽

lippe92 wrote:

I may have found the solution. It worsens the user interface, but you need to go to Settings, then Accessibility, Display, and reduce transparency. Apparently, Liquid Glass is poorly optimized and requires significant effort from the GPU, causing the phone to overheat and accelerating battery degradation.

It does require significant GPU handling, but that doesn't mean it's poorly optimized.

Rather the combination of Liquid Glass plus the poor implementation of the apps you are using ends up in more CPU being used.

Mkrr24 wrote:

Same here, battery drained within an 2 hrs after updates. Apple fix it. Thx

I would suggest making a new post with your device details and include the Battery Health along with the screenshot showing the green battery graph and apps shown at Settings > Battery, that are consuming the battery. The thread you posted in is now over 2 months old and specifically titled for iOS 26.0.1, which is now no longer relevant and the current version that you may be referring to is iOS 26.2, but it is unclear.

We all now that immediately after the update everyone experiences battery drain, lag, and excessive heat on your phone and also explained in the Apple Support article that has been posted here. It is a problem if that continues longer than that. If it is 2 hours after the update, you are still having files indexed in the background and you should plug your phone into power for that process to complete quicker.

StereodarkX wrote:

4 min of YouTube draining 10% is for sure normal 🤣. I used to watch 45 min for 10% with iOS 18. I used my iPad 20 min today and it’s down 21%, if that not an issue I don’t know what is. Even if Apple fixes it in 1-2-3 months, the battery is also ruined by many more cycles than necessary. I think it should be looked into urgently and Apple should really focus hard on avoiding this on each update. It’s happens almost every time a new OS is released.

Your battery appears to be performing very well. Over the last 22 hours, your battery only lost 21%. Apps will continue to use the battery even without you viewing them on screen, such as when they receive a Notification. The app will wake up to process that Notification, and if you manually quit an app the battery usage is increased because the app has to launch instead. Your hourly graph actually looks fantastic. Are you also showing anything under Other Battery Usage?

For Youtube, make sure you are on version 20.4.3, Google has identified bugs in the app and fixes were provided in an update today. It is impossible to compare an app with previous usage or even earlier from another device because you are most likely not comparing the same version of the app. For example, YouTube has been updated 14 times in just the last month and of course the goal is to only provide improvements, but additional bugs can also be introduced.

It appears there is one charge cycle being used in about 4 days, that is not concerning. It also appears that this may be a recent install with Friday being your first full day usage day. You have to account for file indexing after the update as well as photo optimization including processing object detection algorithms that run in the background. This will consume more of your battery and usually resolved in 3-5 days, but to be sure, give it a week. That is why you see it happen almost every time a new OS is released and Apple documents that fact here:

About Apple software updates - Apple Support

Like many others I've had this problem. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I noted that I had 497 tabs in Safari (don't ask). So I saved them on my mac and nuked all but 3 of them that I use everyday. I noticed that the battery drain was markedly less today, though it's still not as good as it was before I upgraded to ios 26. I still notice that some apps (like Linkedin) still seem to use more than I would expect. For example I was on Linkedin for only 7 minutes this morning and that used 3% of my battery. All of my apps are updated. I fear that Apple has significantly changed some interfaces for ios 26 and things that worked ok for a a lot of apps (because there were a lot of different ways to accomplish them) now use some interface that wastes a lot of resources.

iOS 26 and iPhone 17 series has broken a lot of things. CarPlay and battery being my primary concern. That being said doing a hard/force restart is worth a try. It’s an old trick for sorting out charging and drain issues sometimes after certain updates. I’ve been doing this since 2009 for iOS devices. The first thing you would observe after force restart is there would be a sudden drop in battery percentage at least by 4-10 percent once the device restarts. I think this is because the battery management has finally got in sync with the correct percentage of the battery and now the charged percentage will show correctly possibly changing the battery to its full capacity now which earlier could have been less. And yes there would be an improvement in battery management. Just a theory. But I have seen it working. Not so sure with iOS 26 though.

phillip9 wrote:

I close apps religiously

I charge to 95-100% before bed

and I wake up and the battery is already down to

92%

battery health says 94%

• Phone should be charged all night, every night using Optimized Charging.
• Do not close your apps, it uses more power.

Do not close iPhone and iPad 'background'… - Apple Community

• On average your Battery Health will lose 1% for every 50 Charge Cycles. I suspect you are around 300 charge cycles, so a 94% reading would fit into that average. The iOS update does not change your Charge Cycles. The drops you see in Battery Health are never linear and some months it will not drop at all and other months it will drop more. Also the calibration of the battery only occurs when it is allowed to charge to 100%. Even when using a charge limit the phone will automatically charge to 100% for calibration at times if not manually removed from a charger. You will also see a larger than expected drop when it has previously been prevented to calibrate and a condition occurred where it was allowed to charge to 100%, since the previous calibration had been postponed.
• Use your phone normally and post a screenshot of the green battery graph along with the tops apps consuming the battery.
• There are 2 ways to troubleshoot if it is app related. Either Factory Reset and NOT restore from a backup, you would need to use a computer for this method to create an archived backup to be able to restore later. Or remove the top consumers one at a time to compare results. Don't ignore an app as a contributing factor. Some have been identified by users where battery performance dramatically improved when removed and others by the developer where they acknowledged the drain with an update. It is simple to test, so you can make an informed decision on what is more important, the app or the battery usage seen by the app.

It's not an issue inherent to iOS 26.

The most common reason is one or more of your apps wasn't properly updated for iOS 26 and is using excessive amounts of battery.

Check battery usage on your iPhone - Apple Support

life-is-exciting wrote:

It has nothing to do with a fresh iOS 26 installation, the issue still remains after more than a month. Feels like my almost new iPhone 16 Pro Max has changed into a very old iPhone although max battery is still at 100%

Then you are only left with a couple of options after reviewing the information provided.

• Wait for iOS 26.1 that is currently in beta and being tested. We cannot comment on the issues resolved in that release that pertain to the battery performance as it is a violation of the terms of use for being a beta tester. The release date has not been announced.
• Have Apple perform diagnostics on our phone. They can do it remotely or by scheduling an appointment with Apple. It is not clear if you have performed a factory reset, which has resolved the problem of poor battery performance for some, but that can be performed at Apple. It is best to use a computer so the iOS is reinstalled.