Battery Drain on iOS 26 and iOS 26.0.1.

After turning off Find My, I went from 120% usage to 40% usage in 1 day.

Why aren’t you charging the battery at night? Are you also turning your iPhone off at night? A best practice is to charge your iPhone overnight and to leave it on. A lot of background processes run at night and when the iphone is not plugged in or turned off it does them during the day. This is why your battery drained so quickly in the morning.

What are the apps running on your iPhone? Here’s mine,

I’ve got 5 ½ hours of usage and I’m at 50% battery capacity remaining. But I’m not using Meta apps, TikTok or Google apps. I understand your usage is different but until those companies update their apps, your battery usage will not change substantially (unless your usage changes). Sorry.

…did you READ what I wrote?

going from 47% to 10% is not normal. And it gets worse: this morning it went from 100% to 10% instantly. That has nothing to do with battery health and EVERYTHING to do with the software.

but for those curious it was in the upper 80s for battery health before the update, and now it’s down to 66% battery health…AGAIN, because of the SOFTWARE!

The problem is 100% a software bug.

[Edited by Moderator]

This is expected after each major iOS version, let alone a once-in-a-while UI language update like iOS 26. The last time this happened was iOS 7 in 2013, and the exact same thing occurred to battery life. Over time and over the next updates (note the plural "s", not just the very next update), Apple will be obligated to improve battery life

Because the Facebook and YouTube apps update every few days and there may be bugs in an update that seriously burn power.

For example, there was a Facebook app update not long ago that had a bug that continuously checked with Location Services, something that takes a fair amount of power to check GPS even if you haven't moved. It was burning through power at a rate that was almost visible.

Its unacceptable behaviour even after a week it still drains like crazy. I have reported this issue to Apple, they seem to be aware of it and will fix eventually. I have no timelines. There are other users too, please use the feedback app and let Apple know.

crhymes wrote:

My battery health was 100% before updating to ios26. I even checked before installing ios26, while installing i slept and checked it in the morning and It dropped to 90%. Its an iphone 13 with a brand new battery replaced by the apple store.

Take it back to Apple, they warranty their service for 90 days. Since you said the Battery Health was 100% before updating, you are clearly within the 90 days. Problem solved.

I see a lot of messages blaming this on third party apps, and doubtless there's truth to that. I don't think its the whole story though. Two things:

1. I've seen drain with no or minimal third party app use - frequently I'd see always on display as using 20% of the battery usage in a day (ie, 100% to 20% or less battery status), or Apple Music (playing via air play to HomePod)
2. Looking at the battery graph, it would show a more or less straight line decline throughout the day. If it was due to using third party apps I'd expect to see a less uniform graph. It's more like something in the system is applying a constant drain

My phone is a 14 pro. On the positive side though, I think it's getting better. It's been three or four weeks since I did the update. Today its been off charge for three hours and the battery is only down 9%. I've not used it for very much this morning, but then the same was true for days when it did discharge quickly. Hopefully whatever it was doing has now settled down. Oh, and I've not updated any apps in the last few weeks, so this is not due to third party apps being updated

Apple has never and will not support downgrading.

Just because you've updated apps doesn't mean the apps are properly using iOS 26, causing excessive battery drain.

What does the battery settings pane say is using most of your power?

I am another user with dismal battery life…it started for me with iOS 18 and got worse with 26. iPhone 13 mini. Looking at daily battery usage I see Facebook is significantly more of a hog than other apps. I use WhatsApp but it is not using much battery. I’m going to try deleting Facebook from my phone. Good experiment. Will report back with results

Apps are updated for basically two reasons, a new feature and to fix bugs. In the last month there have been 13 updates to WhatsApp. Why the need for so many updates? Have 13 new features been introduced in the last month? No, not that I’ve seen.

Jim’s point is valid, delete the app, review the battery usage over several days and analyze the results. The results will tell you two things. If consumption doesn’t drop a lot, the app and the features you use just consume a lot of CPU and graphic performance. The developer needs to optimize those features to use less battery. It could show a large drop in battery consumption. In which case the developers need to locate the cause of the issue and write the code to resolve the issue. A bug fix is generally not a single line of code. It can involve hundreds, even thousands of line of code. In all those lines of code could be a dozen other bugs that affect users because of the hasty patch and release of an update that has not had time to be tested in a beta format. It impossible to properly beta test 13 updates in a month.

sk8gal wrote:

Removing Facebook from my phone has helped. However, battery life is still poor. Battery health is 85%. Apps are up to date. Apple needs to address the issue.

We can investigate further if we could see what is happening on your device by posting a screenshot of Settings > Battery, that shows your green battery graph with the last 24 hours option and the top apps consuming your Battery.

The Battery Health on your iPhone 13 is OK, but not great. I would expect that you have about another 6-8 months before it would drop below 80% and need replaced. It is literally telling you the capacity is 15% less than what it was when new. You are going to get less usage time, just like if you put 15% less gas in your car, you will not be able to travel as far and will have to fill it up more often.

Having your Apps up to date does not mean it is a problem that Apple has to fix. You have proven that by removing Facebook and seen improvements in your battery performance. Facebook may have been fully updated, but certainly causing your battery to drain more than it should. Yes, it is important to keep your apps updated, as that is how developers can address bugs in the apps that affect battery performance, and is also true for your iOS updates too.

What other Meta apps do you have and how much more battery usage time would you get without them? I only call out Meta because their apps in the past have been significant battery drainers across all device manufacturers, which is why Google also called them out for the poor performance on their devices and you see the same posts on the Samsung/Android support sites.

There is nothing in those apps that would require heavy CPU use like you would see in a 3D Graphics game, most are basically web portals into their service and WhatsApp is a messaging app that you do not see the same battery draining when using Apple Messages. They could do better and they should. What makes it difficult for them is their business model for revenue generation requires them to harvest information about your activities to sell the data to advertisers and they are using the battery on your device to do that.

Please share a screenshot of your battery capacity and usage during the time frame you’re referring to. What you’re experiencing is not normal and it could be hardware or software (or even both) related. The screenshots are crucial for understanding the issue.

Please start by doing a forced restart, (see Apple Support article below), and observing what daily battery capicity is doing and which of the apps you’ve installed are using excessive capacity, if any.

Force restart iPhone - Apple Support