iPhone 16 battery drain bug is affecting users for reasons unknown

I covered iPhone 16 battery life extensively since Apple unveiled the phone, so I know all four models should offer decent-to-great battery life. Battery life has been one of the main reasons I got the iPhone 16 Plus in late September. The phone lasts more than a day on a charge. I don’t have to charge it overnight, and I’m not worried about battery life.

However, it looks like unexplained battery drain issues have plagued some iPhone 16 users. They took to forums and social media to detail the problems affecting their devices. Even people who purchased the iPhone 16 Pro Max model experienced problems. That’s the iPhone 16 flavor that should give you the best possible battery life.

According to MacRumors, multiple people complained about the iPhone 16 battery issue on its forum in a thread dedicated to battery issues in iOS 18.

These aren’t the regular battery drain issues you’d expect when updating iOS to a new release, nor are they related to running one of the early iOS beta releases.

The iPhone 16 ships with a stable release of iOS 18. Apple recently updated the operating system to iOS 18.0.1 to fix some issues. As for running the latest iOS 18.1 beta on the handset, it’s very stable. I’m not experiencing significant battery drain with it, or I haven’t paid attention to it.

Instead, affected users offer clear examples of the battery draining faster than it should.

Here’s a detailed account from an iPhone owner who updated from the iPhone 15 Pro Max to the iPhone 16 Pro Max:

I’m getting horrible battery life with my new 16 Pro Max. I upgraded from a 15 Pro Max – upgraded to iOS 18 and with battery health of 99% when I sold it. With Apple quoting better battery life spec for the 16 I was excited to see how much more run time I would get. The answer? I now get 50 to 60% of time between charges vs what I got with my 1 year old 15 Pro Max. Really disappointing. All Settings the same including background refresh globally disabled, screen max refresh set to 60Hz and data locked to 4G (because for my use I see absolutely no difference in how my phone functions when I set all those settings so I might as well set them for optimal battery life). I got my 16PM on launch day so it’s 19 days old now; any early days indexing and other background setup stuff should be well and truly over by now.

Other iPhone 16 users took to Reddit and Apple’s support forums to complain about similar issues.

It’s unclear how many iPhone users are experiencing the battery drain bug, but a quick check on Apple’s forums shows that older iPhone models might be impacted.

Also, it’s unclear what in iOS 18 might be impacting battery life, as there can be plenty of reasons that could explain it. However, one user said a few weeks ago that Apple was aware of the battery issue:

I contacted Apple support as I’m having the same issue with iOS 18 update with my iPhone 15 Pro Max (which has a brand new Apple certified battery with 3 cycle count). I was told that Apple knows about the issue, is working on it and will fix it in the coming iOS 18 (18.0.1 or 18.1….) update.

iOS 18.0.1 has come out since the comment above, but iPhone users have kept complaining about battery issues. Hopefully Apple is indeed aware of problems and will issue fixes in the coming weeks. Apple should release iOS 18.1 with Apple Intelligence for the iPhone 16 and iPhone 15 Pro models by the end of the month. Bug fixes should also be part of the software update.