Users, like myself on my iPhone 13 Pro, have continued to complain about a rapid battery drain since switching to the most recent version of iOS, which was published for iPhone 8 and higher.
The most recent version adds widgets to the lock screen, allowing you to add things like a weather widget or a countdown widget, which when you tap will start the associated app while letting you customise the fonts and colours.
However, practically every app and menu have also been improved. For example, in Photos, you may now remove an object from an image and move it to a different location.
Instead of when I’m watching a documentary on Netflix in the evening, my iPhone has been reaching 20% by the time afternoon rolls around ever since I installed the update.
And it appears that I’m not the only one (opens in new tab). While waiting for a response from Apple, I’ve been investigating potential causes for the rapid drain that are not bugs.
Batteries are not included.
iOS 16’s lock screen displays the battery level
The haptic keyboard toggle, which causes a slight vibration with each press, is one feature of iOS 16 that I really like. But it makes sense to infer that this is contributing to the quicker battery loss, so I turned it off.
There are various lock screens you can create with iOS 16, but some, like the Astrology and Weather screens, require location tracking or a regular refresh to display the most recent temperature on your iPhone’s lock screen.
I removed these and replaced them with a static image and a few widgets from Things 3 and Obscura (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab).
The drain persisted even after turning these features off and making my iPhone reflect how it was on iOS 15, so it appears to be a bug.
A number of bugs have been fixed in iOS 16.02(opens in new tab), including the persistent Paste prompt that would appear whenever users attempted to copy text to another app.
However, because iOS 16.1 has already been released as a public beta for testing, we should see a fix for this issue address in this most recent update, and hopefully I’ll be charging my iPhone once a day once more.
