Battery Drain on iOS 26 and iOS 26.0.1.

I like, many of the others have the battery problem after upgrading my iPhone 16 pro to iOS 26. I've tried all of the suggestions here and elsewhere, and they make no difference whatsoever. As far as the supposed excess battery use for a few days after installing, Apple could have had a pop up alerting the end user to that. Since Apple makes it impossible for 3rd party apps to run something like the System Activity Monitor (on mac OS) on the iPhone, they could have monitored it themselves, but chose not to. Another bit of strangeness is the reports from the Battery monitor in settings. For example, 3 times a week I make a 1 hour facetime call. After the call ends I check Battery and sees that it reports that it has used 11 or 12 percent (which sounds reasonable). The FaceTime app is then terminated and not used again, but by the end of the day, Battery reports that it's used 30% (see attached screen shorts). I've turned off all background refresh. At one point I thought that FaceTime had gotten itself into a corrupted state so I deleted the app (not just from the home screen, but a full delete), and then reinstalled it from the App Store. At the end of the day Battery reported that a Deleted App had used 30%.

This is happening to me also. I tried to find a way to uninstall the new iOS 26.1 because it’s so frustrating. I’ve already forced a restart and checked my settings. But today as an example, I glanced at my phone for 10 minutes this morning. And glanced again for 2 minutes around 1 pm and my phone died at 2 pm. After being charged all night mind you. Before this update my phone battery would die after 13 hrs of CONTINUOUS use. This is ridiculous

What's using your battery?

I have a 17 Pro Max and at the end of a long day my battery is rarely below 70%.

Note also your signal strength affects battery life; if you only have one or two bars of battery signal you will use a lot more as it struggles to remain in contact with your local cell tower(s).

It really has nothing to do with either of our credentials, it is simply an explanation of what each setting does. There are 3 of them that do different things. Most users have Find My turned on and even a larger percentage have the Location Services setting turned on to assist with tracking other devices on the Find My network, without any battery drain issue.

It is a simple test anyone can do and switch it off to compare, but as suggested it may have been something else that contributed to the problem and an App Update is a more likely reason where you saw improvement. All that matters is that you now see improvement and that is a win.

I don't think it's low power mode causing that - I think, based on my own experience with this issue, that once the battery level gets to a certain point, drain accelerates; or, some process accelerates the drain. I could be wrong, but that is what I have been thinking as I observe my phone performance (13 mini, older and smaller phone, 85% battery health). Sometimes I've left it on low power mode for a long time, and it stays close to the same level for hours. I haven't figured out which apps are causing the biggest drain. I thought it was Facebook, but that conclusion doesn't seem to hold over time (after I removed it from my phone).

It’s an issue deeper inside the OS when native system apps and menus are chewing up the battery.

This is on a clean iPhone 14 Pro Max with a brand new Apple account (no restores) Battery at 87% health & IOS26.2

👎

Millions of users worldwide have Find My enabled, including me, and do not have this issue.

However, in combination with other factors, like say having only one bar of cell signal so your phone must use full power transmissions to keep in touch with a cell tower and report your device position may well use more battery than expected.

Thats not a bug, it's what is required to provide the functionality in question.

I see no "drain" on any of my devices.

Yes definitely. I have a iPhone 14 Pro. When I did an update a month or so ago. My battery started to drain ridiculously. I had no open spots and did everything. In fact, I kept the phone on low battery power. From when I get up at 7 until I leave before 8, my battery goes from 100 to 87 with little use. I’m disgusted because whenever I’ve I talked to Apple Care they look at everything and it say my phone’s battery is fine. However, I know differently.

I always update apps when prompted, and I update the versions when prompted as well. I just updated to 26.2 and the battery drain is even worse than on 26 and 26.1, which I may add, never got better after a couple of days of installing unfortunately

bailey324 wrote:

Barely use the phone and by early evening I had 20% battery left. A friend is reporting he’s not getting emails!!!!!

Since you posted in a iOS 26.0.1 forum is that the version you are using? You may want to create a new post with your information and include your Battery Health percentage at Settings > Battery > Battery Health > Maximum Capacity, and the screenshot at Settings > Battery that shows the green battery graph along with the top apps consuming the battery at that location.

Not many people are going to be looking to offer support on iOS 26.0.1 anymore and this topic will not likely receive very many eyes on new posts here.

Do you have any cards in your Wallet app?

The cause is clear. iOS 26 is 100% a battery drain. I’ve been on ios26 for two weeks maybe, the day I upgraded I noticed the how bad the batter was on my 15pro.

I am having the same issue and all my apps have been updated. It’s definitely the IOS26. If there’s a way where I can get back the old one I would. Because my battery health has really been terrible.

You can diagnose it using the steps described several times in this thread.

Wait another day. Mine was the same way but now It's running perfectly. I even bit the bullet and downloaded macOS 26.1 on my Mac. Everything is back to normal. Apple was right.