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How can I improve the battery life on my device?

Does the new flat iOS 7 design translate to lower battery consumption? Does iOS 7 improve or worsen battery life? Does iOS 7 use more battery power than iOS 6?

  • I realize that it's only been a couple of days since most people have been able to download it and test it, but with the significant improvements in multitasking technology that Mavericks and presumably iOS 7 have, it seems to me that battery life should be better. As people get acquainted with the new face of iOS, they may spend more time with their phones, but have early users noticed a change (either way)?

  • Answer:

    We can't tell yet. There's no way to appraise the battery performance of iOS7 from any beta. Beta software is filled with additional debugging code, and will have other overheads. Beta software is generally not fit for use as a primary device.  It certainly is not possible to draw any conclusions from the first beta. I had excellent battery life from iOS6.13 - often getting two days of light use on an iPhone 5.  6.14 seemed worse. Which was odd, and might represent a bug. With the new beta release, I literally can't stop playing with it. Which means that even if power consumption was down, I'd be draining it more rapidly. Why it might be worse. 1. iOS7 extends multi-tasking, and wakes apps which would otherwise be inactive. Apps will be woken, given a chance to update data and so on.  Under iOS6 they would have remained inactive.  This additional cost might increase power consumption by a few percentage points. 2. Animated wallpaper & parallax. Running animated wallpapers,and servicing the parallax effect means the GPU is doing more work.  The GPU is pretty efficient, but this might also bump up power consumption. Why it might be better. Apple seem to be learning a lot about reducing power consumption. OSX 10.9 is aggressively managing applications that are wasteful of power and using new strategies to limit their abuse of resources. The system "lies" to backgrounded apps about the passage of time, thus throttling back their consumption of resources. If this same philosophy is extended to mobile apps, we could see power consumption fall across the board. What will probably happen The final version of iOS7 will probably be very similar in its battery consumption to iOS6. Not substantially worse, not substantially better.   Bugs in early versions of the system may occasionally trigger conditions which result in power-hogging.

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Other answers

The http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/have-apple-questions-ask-them-here/?hpw&_r=0 Q. Will the new iOS change the battery life of a 4S or 5 iPhone? A. We can’t be certain until more people try it. People who have been using the beta on an iPhone 5 say anecdotally that there is a slight battery performance decrease. I would expect it to affect the battery life of the iPhone 4S significantly because it has full multitasking capability and other new features that will be intense on the older processor.

Marc Bodnick

All the white space decreases battery life, and so do the new effects like parallax. The iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c are designed for iOS 7, so it is different for them. But for existing devices, battery life is decreased. It is likely the 5s and 5c would get more battery life if they ran iOS 6 also, but I can't do more than speculate that.

Timothy McSwain

No. If it happens at all this year. Ive may very well have had some designs sitting in a drawer waiting for when they would finally dump Forstall, but it's still a big project to finish in 6 months.

Matt Wasserman

Now that the beta versions of iOS 7 have been released to the developers, I can't help but feel like there's no way iOS 7 won't have increased battery consumption: -The 'frosty glass' translucency effect (which does update in realtime) would mean increased energy consumption by the GPU. -The parallax effect would mean increased power consumption by the accelerometer/gyro (Granted this was already in use on iOS 6 to small degree). So while even though the design is now flat (Which as mentioned above, PROBABLY doesn't translate to increased battery life), given the number of advanced new rendering features in iOS 7, it's quite possible battery life may be affected in some way.

Tim Oliver

We don't even know what iOS 7 will be like yet. The 'flat' design is still a rumour, despite the fact that we all know that it'll probably head in that direction eventually.

Darryl Young

I'm using the iPhone 5 and whereas I used to get 6-8 hours, I'm now getting ~5 hours per full charge. It runs hitter and there are times when you loose a lot of battery life randomly just from having it sit in standby. Interestingly shutting it off when it has 1% left, and then turning it on after half an hour if so increases the battery percentage to around 5% hinting at a BMS issue, so I feel there will be an increase in battery life in future updates.

Jack Dagmy

I wouldn't be able to answer this, but I'd imagine that most users of iOS 7 right now would report sub-par battery life, since historically, betas aren't the greatest source of evaluation of the final product.

Kareem

Here are few tips to improve battery life of iOS 7 device. http://www.shoutpedia.com/improve-battery-life-ios-7-iphone/

Aamir Usman

iOS7 definitely encourages more battery drain than IOS6. However, you can minimize some of the increase by closing pages that you have visited when you are finished with the page. Do not wait until you shut down your iPad as the previously viewed pages will continue to contribute to your power drain. When you double click the bottom button, you will see pages that are still open and these need addressing to minimize power drain. After double clicking bottom button, you will open the pages and simply wipe them UP and off your screen. Now they are closed and no additional power drain noted. This does not make you lose the pages as they are still in your computer, albeit inactive until re opening them. You will still experience extra power drain but not near as bad as with open pages".......remember, do not delete or wipe the basic page!!! I have computed that wiping the pages will reduce power loss by 25 minutes per page closed......my iPad now stays above 50 percent with constant use for about 3.5 hours.......one other issue is that some will see an increase in battery percent remaining after shutting down phone/iPad, etc but this is due to the fact that the battery temperature will read differently when cold versus warm.

Daniel Craig

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