Apple has released iOS 7 for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. We have detailed guide on how to update to iOS 7. After updating to iOS 7, some users are facing battery drain issues on their iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. All the major iOS releases comes with battery life issues, and iOS 7 is no different. If you’ve updated to iOS 7 on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and now its battery is draining too fast, or not lasting long enough on standby, here are some workarounds you can try to fix battery drain issue on iOS 7…
In all the major firmware releases, the culprits behind the battery drain issue usually relates to the new features and control mechanism in the new iOS. Here are some quick settings adjustments that may result in significant battery life improvements.
Reduce Motion and Parallax
iOS 7 comes with a new motion and fancy 3D parallax wallpaper effect. Thought motion is an eye candy feature in iOS 7, but uses system resources to work. For iPhone 5S, which comes with a dedicated M7 motion chip, handling motion features won’t have much impact on battery, but for older iPhone 5C or older devices motion sensing is done by the primary CPU, thus potentially resulting in faster battery drain.
Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion – ON
Avoid Dynamic Wallpapers
Dynamic wallpapers are also considered as a battery hog feature. Yes, a moving background image (live wallpaper) is another eye candy feature found in iOs 7, but has not utility other than draining battery faster. Disabling dynamic wallpaper improved battery time.
Settings > Wallpapers & Brightness > Choose Wallpaper > Stills > (Use any static wallpaper as your background)
Turn off background app and content refresh
iOS 7 comes with background app refresh feature that allows app updates in the background even when you’re not using them. There’s no need to waste power downloading the thing when you don’t explicitly need to. You can disable background app refresh from:
Settings > General > Background App Refresh – OFF
Settings > App Store > Automatic Downloads > Updates – OFF
Alter Location Services
Location services has always been battery hog, same goes for iOS 7. These days, almost every app wants to track your location. It makes sense for app like Maps, weather, Siri but if you have authorized other apps, such as Twitter and Facebook, to track your location without actually using the in-app feature, you better turn it off to save you battery life. Go to:
Settings > Privacy > Location Services > and turn OFF everything you don’t use.
Frequent Locations service also periodically retrieves your location to provide estimates of things like how log it will take you to drive to work, and like another other location services, it can impact your battery life.
Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services > Frequent Locations > OFF
Close power hungry background apps
closing the apps running in background can help improve the battery life, though turning “Background App Refresh” OFF makes it less important. Still, closing mapping, GPS, directions, and fitness related apps running in background may help in improving battery life. Closing apps on iOS 7 is a bit different, here’s how to:
Turn down screen brightness
Keeping your screen brightness high uses a lot of power. turning down the screen brightness is one of the single most effective tricks to fix the battery drain issue on iOS 7 running on iPhone, ipad and iPod Touch. Control Center in iOS 7 has made it very easy to adjust the brightness.
Simply swipe up from the very bottom of the screen and move the brightness slider to the left or set the brightness to Auto for optimal brightness level for all modes.
Kill AirDrop
AirDrop is another new feature for iPhone found in iOS 7. If you don’t use this handy Dropbox-style feature from time to time, you should turn it OFF when it’s not in use. This can easily be done through control center.
Simply swipe up from the very bottom of the screen and from there you can turn off/on AirDrop.
Note: AirDrop feature is not available on iPhone 4S or iPhone 4.
Other fixes for battery drain
Here are some generic battery saving tips that also applies to iOS 7. Most of these settings can be accessed via Control Center with a single swipe-up from the bottom of the screen:
- Turn off Bluetooth when not in use.
- Turn off WiFi when not in use.
- Turn off 4G LTE
- Set auto-lock to 1 minute. Develop a habit of locking the phone when not in use.
- Turn off keyboard clicks sound.
- Use headphones to listen to the audio/music instead of speaker.
- Use Fetch for Mail rather than Push
- Restart the iPhone or iPad
- If none of the above helps, restore to factory defaults or fresh restore iOS 7 with iTunes.
We tried to cover all possible tips to fix battery drain issue on your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch running iOS 7. If know any other battery life improvement tip(s), feel free to suggest us in the comments section below.