Julie Clover
Some iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro users are experiencing excessive and unexplained battery drain, according to complaints on Reddit, Apple Support Communities, and the MacRumors forums. While many of the reports are from iPhone 16 users, older iPhones running iOS 18 may also experience battery life issues.
There's a long-running iOS 18 issue The MacRumors battery life complaint thread was started while the update was still in beta, but after iOS 18 launched, the issue has since been resolved. and the debut of the iPhone 16 models has seen a new wave of complaints.
Affected iPhone 16 owners have noticed significant battery drain, even when the iPhone is not in use. From MacRumors reader T1aaj:
Yes, I have the 16 pro and the battery life drops to almost 60% from 100% within half a day, with no heavy use. Definitely needs a fix, should have kept my 15 pro!
From JulianL:
I’m having terrible battery life on my new 16 Pro Max. I upgraded from a 15 Pro Max — updated to iOS 18 — and had 99% battery life when I bought it. Since Apple was touting better battery life for the 16, I was excited to see how much longer I’d get. The answer? I’m now getting 50-60% of the time between charges compared to my year-old 15 Pro Max. Really disappointing. All the settings are the same, including background refresh turned off globally, the screen refresh rate maxed out at 60Hz, and data locked on 4G (because for me, I see absolutely no difference in how my phone performs when I set all of those settings, so I might as well set them for optimal battery life). I got my 16PM on launch day, so it’s now 19 days old; all initial indexing steps and other background settings should be completely completed by now.
In some cases, most of the battery drain occurs in standby mode when the iPhone is not in use, suggesting that background activity may be causing issues for some users. Using the phone seems to reduce the battery drain in these cases.
From huanbrother:
The 16 Pro has terrible battery life in standby mode while sleeping (it's not connected to my Apple Watch), and as you can see from the graph, it runs background processes like crazy. But guess what, I disabled AOD (which shouldn't be happening when it was off in sleep mode anyway) and enabled frame limiting in Accessibility (not in Low Power Mode) to disable ProMotion, boom, background hype is gone! However, the battery drain was not fixed, in 4 hours and 20 minutes it was discharged by 11%, from 70% to 59%.
From kirbysmartdawg:
There's clearly something wrong on Apple's end. The standby battery drain is too much. I turned my phone off at 9am this morning and it only lasted 20 minutes at 95% (my charging limit) before it started dropping rapidly. I was losing a percentage every five minutes until I finally picked it up to use it. It seems to have stabilized a bit now, but I'm really puzzled by this behavior.
There are similar complaints about the iPhone 16 and older iPhones running iOS 18. on Reddit, and while we always see reports of battery issues whenever a new version of iOS comes out, there seems to be a definite uptick in the number of people experiencing issues.
From Reddit user Ok-Interest-6561:
I upgraded from my iPhone 12 and bought the new 16 Pro. I upgraded mainly because of battery and speaker issues, but I noticed that while the 16 has a “better battery” and longer battery life, it drains about 10-15% overnight when I'm not doing anything other than leaving it on my nightstand.
On Reddit, one user did an experiment with the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 14 Pro, and claimed to have used both equally well. iPhone 16 Pro The battery dropped to 58 percent over 36 hours, compared to 85 percent on the iPhone 14 Pro.
Battery drain issues can be difficult to diagnose because iPhone usage habits vary widely from person to person and from day to day. Affected users have tried disabling ProMotion, disabling Always On display, disabling background app refresh, removing widgets, turning off cellular, and completely resetting their iPhones. Some people saw improvement with some of these methods, but not all, and battery life issues persist for many despite troubleshooting.
Some users reported improvement with iOS 18.0.1 and the iOS 18.1 beta, but the software updates did not work for everyone. It's unclear what exactly is affecting the battery, but it appears there is some underlying bug that Apple will need to fix in a future iOS 18 update.
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