iPhone 16 Users Complain About Excessive iOS 18 Battery Drain

Some iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro users have been experiencing excessive and unexplainable battery drain, according to complaints on Reddit, the Apple Support Communities, and the MacRumors forums. While many of the reports are from ‌iPhone 16‌ users, older iPhones running iOS 18 may also be experiencing battery life issues.

There is a long-running ‌iOS 18‌ battery life complaint thread on MacRumors that was started while the update was still in beta, but there have been a fresh wave of complaints following ‌iOS 18‌'s launch and the debut of the ‌iPhone 16‌ models.

Affected ‌iPhone 16‌ owners have seen significant battery drain even when the iPhone is not in use. From MacRumors reader T1aaj:

Yes I own the 16 pro and battery life goes down to almost 60% from 100% halfway through the day, through no heavy use. Definitely needs to be fixed, should've kept my 15 pro!

From JulianL:

I'm getting horrible battery life with my new 16 Pro Max. I upgraded from a 15 Pro Max - upgraded to iOS 18 and with battery health of 99% when I sold it. With Apple quoting better battery life spec for the 16 I was excited to see how much more run time I would get. The answer? I now get 50 to 60% of time between charges vs what I got with my 1 year old 15 Pro Max. Really disappointing. All Settings the same including background refresh globally disabled, screen max refresh set to 60Hz and data locked to 4G (because for my use I see absolutely no difference in how my phone functions when I set all those settings so I might as well set them for optimal battery life). I got my 16PM on launch day so it's 19 days old now; any early days indexing and other background setup stuff should be well and truly over by now.

In some cases, much of the battery drain happens in standby mode when the ‌iPhone‌ isn't in use, suggesting a background activity could be causing problems for some users. Using the phone seems to cut the battery drain in these instances.

From huanbrother:

The 16 Pro has horrible standby battery life when sleeping (it is not connected to my Apple Watch), and as you can see from the graph, it runs background activities like crazy. But, guess what, I turned off AOD(but this shouldn't be the case when in sleep mode it was off anyways) and turned on frame limit in accessibility (not low power mode) to turn off ProMotion, boom, the background craze disappeared! However, the battery drain wasn't fixed, 4hours and 20minutes it drained 11%, from 70% to 59%.

From kirbysmartdawg:

Clearly, something isn't right on Apple's end. The idle battery drain is excessive. This morning, I unplugged my phone at 9 a.m., and it held at 95% (my charging limit) for only 20 minutes before starting to drop rapidly. Every five minutes, I lost a percentage until I finally picked it up to use it. Now it seems to have stabilized a bit, but I'm really puzzled by this behavior.

There are similar complaints about the ‌iPhone 16‌ models and older iPhones running ‌iOS 18‌ on Reddit, and while we always see reports of battery life issues when a new version of iOS comes out, there seems to be a definite uptick in the number of people having problems.

From Reddit user Ok-Interest-6561:

I upgraded from my iPhone 12 and got new 16 Pro. I upgraded mostly because of battery and speaker issues but I observed that even though 16 has "better battery" and more battery life, it drains around 10-15% overnight doing nothing just laying on my bedside table.

On Reddit, one user did an experiment with an ‌iPhone 16 Pro‌ and an iPhone 14 Pro, and claimed to have used both in the same way. The ‌iPhone 16 Pro‌ dropped to 58 percent battery life within 36 hours, while the ‌iPhone 14‌ Pro was at 85 percent.

Battery drainage issues are difficult to diagnose because ‌iPhone‌ usage habits vary so much from person to person and from day to day. Impacted users have tried turning off ProMotion, disabling the Always On display, turning off background app refresh, removing widgets, turning off cellular, and entirely resetting their iPhones. Some people have seen improvement with some of these methods, but not all have, and the battery life issues persist for many despite troubleshooting.

Some users reported improvement with iOS 18.0.1 and the iOS 18.1 beta, but software updates have not worked for everyone. It is not clear exactly what's going on to impact battery, but it's sounding like there is an underlying bug that Apple will need to fix in a future ‌iOS 18‌ update.