For iPhone users, it looks like iOS 11 will end up being a mess until the very end. There’s precious little question at this point that iOS 11 has been Apple’s most problematic mobile software release in many years. Right out of the gate users noticed serious issues with performance and an exorbitant amount of bugs. Memory management issues caused noticeable performance issues with iPhones and iPads, and a surprising number of security holes have been discovered over the past year. What is perhaps most surprising about iOS 11 is that even now, nearly a year after the software was first released, there are still new problems that pop up left and right with the release of each new update. iOS 11.4 is the latest mobile software release from Apple, and users have flooded social media and Apple’s support forums with complaints that their iPhone battery life has been decimated by Apple’s most recent software update.
It’s no wonder that Apple reportedly chose to delay a number of big new features in iOS 12 in order to focus more closely on ironing out all of the wrinkles in iOS 11. After nearly a year of dealing with buggy iPhones and iPads, iOS 12 is already a breath of fresh air in is current beta state. In fact, we recently went as far as to recommend that everyone install the public beta on their iOS devices because even as it stands now, it’s already more stable than iOS 11.
People have found that installing the iOS 12 beta on their iPhones brings huge improvements to performance, and even battery life improvements have been noted by many users. This could be of particular interest to the many, many people out there who have complained that Apple’s recent iOS 11.4 update has resulted in excessive battery drain on their iPhones. This thread on Apple’s support forum has reached a whopping 35 pages at the time of this writing, and it’s just one small sampling of all the complaints we’ve seen out there.
In a nutshell, iPhone users have found that the iOS 11.4 update is drastically reducing their battery life. Some users say their iPhones only last half as long on each charge compared to the battery life they had experienced prior to installing the update. Making matters even worse, the reason for the excess drain is completely unknown and some users are even being misled by iOS’s battery tool. For example, one user in the thread linked above said that Personal Hotspot was showing up on his battery page as being responsible for nearly 50% of his battery usage, but he never even enables the iPhone’s Personal Hotspot feature.
If you haven’t already installed Apple’s iOS 11.4 update, you might want to wait for iOS 11.4.1 to be released in the coming weeks. It’s unclear if it addresses the battery life issues people have been having though, so you also might want to just skip straight to iOS 12 instead.
