You’re not alone: many users are reporting iPhone 16 battery life issues on iOS 18
If you’ve noticed excessive battery drain on your iPhone lately, you’re not alone. There are numerous reports of this issue on the internet, with the vast majority of complaints concerning iPhone 16 family phones running iOS 18.
As noted by MacRumorsthere are long threads left Redditthe Apple Support Communityand elsewhere they complain of massive battery drain, in many cases even when the phone is in standby.
Most messages seem to concern the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro Max, but the standard iPhone 16 and the iPhone 16 Plus are also mentioned.
Additionally, some users have claimed that iOS 18.0.1 or the iOS 18.1 beta has improved things, but not everyone has found that these updates have solved their problems.
So it’s possible that one of these updates will fix things for you, but if not, you might be waiting a while for a fix, especially since Apple hasn’t even acknowledged the problem yet. That said, it’s not clear how widespread this particular problem actually is, and if you’re not already experiencing unusual battery drain on an iPhone 16 model running iOS 18, then you’re probably safe.
Short-term ointments
But what should you do if your battery is deflate quickly? For now, you can try disabling the Always-on Display feature, disabling ProMotion, disabling background app refresh, or deleting widgets.
All of these features drain the battery, so turning them off would obviously help improve things, but that’s not ideal as it also limits what your phone can do.
It’s also possible that factory resetting your phone will help, with some users saying the same thing, but others haven’t been so lucky.
If that doesn’t help, you should probably wait for a patch that will fix the problem properly. So hopefully we’ll see one soon.