How iOS 10 Doubled my battery life
It is true, I updated to ios 10.0.1 and my battery life more then doubled!
Well, at least not at first. When I upgraded from iOS 9 to iOS 10, I saw a significant loss of battery life. In a typical day with iOS 9, my battery would almost always end with 20–30% battery life; Turning on “Low Power Mode” was a daily ritual.
Prior to upgrading to iOS 10, I heard rumors that battery life had suffered. I assumed that people were just looking into it too much. I assumed wrong.
After upgrading to the fresh new iOS, my battery would plummet and I would end the day with 5 to 10% battery life and some times it would just die. Even with “Low Power Mode” on, the phone would consistently lose energy.
Losing battery life wasn’t the worst thing to happen so I just accepted this. I accepted that additional responsibillity of charging the phone in the middle of the day. When I used iOS 9 I typically only charge my phone while I sleep; I believe many people do. After iOS 10, not only do I need to charge it at night, I need to charge it again in the afternoon!
Again, the low battery and frequent charging I could live with. But there were issue. UI issues. Screens freezing, apps crashing. If an app crashed I assumed it was the app’s code that was the problem. However, I started finding flaws in Apple’s apps and finding flaws in iOS Operating System features.
Problems like this, I could not accept.
I considered doing a fresh install because (maybe there were errors that I had accumulated). If you search for how to do that on google, most sources will tell you to go to Settings-App>General>Reset>Erase All Content and Settings
But I got to thinking…Wouldn’t that only clear the data? If there were serious bugs in the OS then those bugs would remain! doing the above command is more similar to a User Account getting deleted and then recreated, yet the operating system remains intact.
So if the above method is not a real clean install, how would I do that?
Well, If the iPhone were a real computer, you would need to find an os disk and install the OS through that disk. We don’t have disks for iPhone, but we have IPSW of which you can get from https://developer.apple.com/download/
Once you have the file (I used the one for 10.0.1) open itunes and plug in your computer. Click on the iPhone icon on the upper left. At the top you should see two buttons, one of them will say, “Restore iPhone”
Hold down option and then left click “Restore iPhone”.
A window will open up and you should search for the IPSW file you just downloaded.
Your iPhone will be completely wiped clean.
In conclusion, here are the steps I took:
- Erase All Content and Settings
- Download IPSW file
- open iTunes, hold down option and left click “Restore iPhone”
I was able to get back to 20 to 30% battery left by the end of the day. It was consistent for about 3 days. I noticed that during those three days I had blue tooth on. So I turned it off.
I was able to end the day with 70–80% battery life!
I also enabled “reduce motion” and disabled the blur effects but I’m not sure if they helped.
[iOS 10.1]
So then I updated to iOS 10.1 and my battery started to drain once again. I updated the iOS wirelessly. I’ll try a clean install again to see if battery life improves if it does they it is possible that wireless updating has some flaws.
