iPhone iOS 13.6 battery draining fast for no obvious reason? Try this fix

Over the weekend, a reader, Keith, got in touch with me with what is these days is a common problem — rapid battery drain. And this was really rapid. So fast that a fully-charged iPhone drained almost completely overnight doing pretty much nothing.

Take a look at this scary screenshot showing the battery drain over a few hours.

It seems this problem had been ongoing for a while, and the reader had already upgraded, without any relief, to iOS 13.6.

This was one of those interesting yet annoying problems because iOS didn’t offer much in the way of insight into what was going on. The battery was in OK condition, and there wasn’t any sign that an app had gone rogue and was doing donuts in the background.

What do you do in this situation?

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The reader decided to try something — carry out a reset of the iPhones settings (Settings > General > Reset All Settings). This is not the complete nuclear option of wiping the whole handset and starting from scratch, but it’s still quite a reset.

Here’s Apple’s description of what it does:

Reset All Settings: All settings — including network settings, the keyboard dictionary, the Home screen layout, location settings, privacy settings, and Apple Pay cards — are removed or reset to their defaults. No data or media are deleted.

Did it work?

Yes.

Here’s a screenshot showing battery performance overnight following the wipe showing that the iPhone lost some 1% overnight.

What’s going on here? It’s hard to say, but a likely culprit is a network or Bluetooth setting gone bad.

Another similar fix I’ve come across is to do a full reset and then recovery from a backup.

If you’re suffering poor battery performance, it’s worth a try.

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