How do you fix battery life problems with your iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone SE, or any iPhone? Here are our top power-saving tips!
Apple currently offers the standard iPhone 6s, the big-screen iPhone 6s Plus, and the smaller iPhone SE. Between them, they're rated for 10 to 12 hours of battery life while browsing the web, checking email, and chatting. But sometimes that isn't quite enough. And sometimes, things go wrong and your battery life goes wrong with them. Rather than cursing and throwing your iPhone — as much as you might want to! — here's what you can do to fix battery life and get on with your life.
Update: We're six months into iPhone SE, a year into iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s plus, and two or more years into older iPhones. Batteries seldom behave better over time, so I've updated these tips to help you keep your older devices lasting longer as well.
Wait for it

Whether you restore from backup or set up as new, your new iPhone or new version of iOS could expend up a lot of power downloading apps, games, mail, photos, and other content. That's because the Wi-Fi radio stays on for a long time, and Spotlight — the iOS search system — has to index everything. When radios and processors can't sleep, power consumption goes way up.
If you've just upgraded the hardware or software, or restored, give things a day or so to finish up and go back to normal. If you're fine after that, great. If not, keep reading!
Test on standby

In addition to the system taking a while to really finish transferring everything over, we also tend to spend a long time playing with new phones and new features. That's especially true with things like Live Photos, 12 megapixel cameras, 4K video, iMessage apps, Siri integrations, and more. So the screen stays on, storage gets written to, WI-Fi and maybe cellular radios stay lit up, and power gets consumed.
In other words, if you're battery feels like it's only lasting half as long, the first step to fixing it is figuring out if you're using it twice as much.
So, note down how much battery life you have left. Then put your iPhone down for 20-40 minutes. When you pick it back up, note down how much battery life you have left again. If there isn't a big change while in standby, you're probably okay, and your battery life will return to normal when your usage returns to normal (after the novelty wears off).
If your iPhone continued to drain and drain fast, even when you weren't using it, keep reading!
Reset

Rebooting, restarting, or resetting is the oldest cliche in troubleshooting. Because it works. Sometimes a good reset is all that's needed to kick bad bits loose.
- Press and hold down both the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time.
- Keep them held down until you see an Apple logo.
Let go.

Once your iPhone SE has rebooted, repeat the previous steps and see if battery has returned to normal. If not, keep reading!
Check usage

iOS 9 contains a terrific battery usage — aka battery shaming — utility that lets you know exactly which apps and services are using your battery and how.
- Launch Settings from your Home screen.
- Tap on Battery.
Wait a moment for Battery Usage to populate.

- Tap on the Show Detailed Usage button to get a breakdown of foreground and background power usage.
Tap on Last 7 Days to get a broader look at power consumption over time.

It can be tricky to understand, but here's the deal: If you see iCloud Photo Library there, and you've just upgraded, it's a sign you're downloading thumbnails and things should return to normal when you're done. If you see Facebook there and it says 4% on screen and 40% on background, it's a sign something has gone wrong.
At that point, you can force quit a rogue app and likely get your power consumption back to normal.
- Double click the Home button to bring up the fast app switcher.
- Swipe to the app you want to force quit.
Touch the app card and flick it up and off the screen

If an app appears to be consistently misbehaving, you can try re-installing it or even switching to an alternative app or a service's website for some of your activity.
Restore as new

Sometimes restoring from an old backup, especially a backup of a different device like an iPad, can be less than ideal. Cruft builds up and things just don't run like they used to. Sometimes your once-fresh setup also goes stale.
If you suspect that's the case, you can suck it up and set up your iPhone as new. Yes, it can be an incredible pain in the apps, but if you have a significant and continual problem, and nothing else can fix it, setting up as new can be a solution.
It's the nuclear option, no doubt about it. You will have to set up almost everything again, including passwords and settings, and you will lose all your saved data like game levels, health, and activities, but in most cases your battery life will be better than ever.
Contact Apple

Every once and a while you get a problem you just can't solve. Like any electronics, sometimes things go wrong. If you have AppleCare or AppleCare+, and you should absolutely book a Genius Bar appointment and avail yourself of it. If you don't live close to an Apple Store, you can call 1-800-MY-APPLE in order to set up a mail-in repair.
Low Power Mode
If your battery life is normal but you want to get even more out of it, you can always get a battery case or power pack. If you don't have one handy, you can use Low Power Mode.
- Launch the Settings app from the Home screen.
- Tap Battery.
Toggle Low Power Mode to on.

You can tell when Low Power Mode is enabled by looking at the color of the battery icon — it turns yellow. It will automatically turn off any time you recharge above 80% or more, so if you want to keep it on, you'll need to switch it on every time.
You can also switch on Low Power Mode quickly by using Siri. Just say "Hey Siri, turn on low power mode!"
Extending battery life
If even Low Power mode isn't enough — you're stuck in the wilderness, at a conference with poor reception and no power — there are a few other hacks you can try.
- Turn down the screen brightness.
- Set Auto-Lock to 1 minute.
- Use headphones instead of the speaker if you have to listen to audio or music.
- Hide the Clock app in a folder. That animation uses GPU cycles. (Okay, silicon geeks only.)
More tips!
If any of these power-saving tips worked for you, let me know! If you've got any tips of your own, let me know that too!
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Reader comments
How to fix iPhone battery life problems
Rene, how much of a problem is Photos in the initial setup? My SE got very warm and the battery was draining faster than I expected and it seemed to be due to using iCloud Photo Library...so much so that I turned it off and am just using My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Sharing, which seemed to resolve the issues.
What am I losing by not using iCloud Photo Library [I have the 1 TB iCloud plan]? And how long would I have to wait for the initial setup to finish [I have about 13,000 images]?
thanks.
sk
A lot of that depends on your internet speed in downloading / syncing with iCloud. I've started backing up / restoring using iTunes when I switch iPhones because it is so much faster. I still have iCloud backups, but I go to iTunes first when switching devices.
Rene, KING of lateral thinking, rationale and detailed, common sense advice. I think you should work for Apple, Rene - you'd be invaluable to them, and a perfect match :)
Thank you for these tips, perfect sense again. God bless you from England :)
The iphone 6 battery is bigger than the previous veersions but it has to power a larger and brighter screen plus all the processing power and memory. We need to find ways of charging the iPhone 6 faster and here they are: http://www.webproeducation.org/how-to/iphone-how-to/how-to-charge-your-i...
The iPhone 6 battery is bigger than the previous versions but it has to power a larger and brighter screen plus all the processing power and memory. We need to find ways of charging the iPhone 6 faster and here they are: http://www.webproeducation.org/how-to/iphone-how-to/how-to-charge-your-i...
So, what if Low Power Mode IS showing great improvement...what next since I don't want to live that way? Would next step be not LPM but just turn off Background App Refresh? If that works, then start removing one app at a time from BackGround app to identify the one or more apps that are draining the battery most.
For me LPM yields dramatic improvements, but since I can't permanently leave it on it's a big hassle. Now I need to find out what part of LPM is making the difference.
Turn off Background App Refresh, and also go into Settings > Privacy > Location Services, and make sure apps are only set to use location "whilst using the app" and not "Always"
hello my name is Osama i have recently bought an iphone 6s plus i have a problem my phone keeps turning off and when i try to turn it on it gives the sign that i need to put the charger even thought that some times battery is over 50% the phone does not open until i put the charger
You need to contact Apple, that's not normal.
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That's not normal, you need to contact Apple.
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I found some social apps caused issues that the Settings Battery list did not mention. Specifically, I tried out Snapchat for a week, and found it drained my battery twice as fast as usual. After uninstalling it, battery life was better.
Be careful when restoring as new. I did a encrypted backup but when I tried to restore it stated my backup was corrupted. I lost over 19 gigs of photos along with other data. I was lucky that a 3rd party software was able to restore all of my data.
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I thought apple "just works"?
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Most of the time, not always, no software is perfect
Low power mode is superb. I have it on almost exclusively. Even on iOS 10 beta it's showing great battery even when you factor in some gaming. Easily besting my g4 with significantly more battery by 6pm.
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What's even more worrying me is that's the same cuppa of coffee in all the photos :)
For nine years, I have never had iPhone battery issues, except after a new version of iOS is released, and app developers are releasing a lot of updates. To combat the battery issues from all of the updates running, I just shut off the auto-update feature for a while. I never turn off anything else. Maybe I get great battery life because I don't spend a lot of time on my iPhone playing games.
You might as well leave auto-update on, apps only update when they need to, and also updates to apps can provide fixes for the new OS update, which could solve battery issues
Easy. iPhone 6s Smart Battery Case - Charcoal Gray
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