iOS 18.5 causing battery drain and heat on my iPhone 14 Pro

My 16 pro gets warmer too after the update. Its been weeks now, same issue.

Amrithamohanan wrote:

Thanks for your input, but this has been going on well beyond 72 hours, and I’ve already tried everything — reset, erase, clean setup, and turned off all background features.

The logs may be technical, but they clearly show persistent background activity from system processes even when the phone is idle.

So I’m confident this isn’t normal adaptation 

Logs are not meant to show anything clearly and so straight-forward. For example, if you also look in analytics you will see your iPhone as a different model number, that is simply the internal identifier that Apple uses. Please take a screenshot of your battery usage, both by percent and background app usage for the past 24 hours.

Hello! Have the same issue here . I ve also noticed that my VPN app uses a lot of battery when it runs in the background. I deleted it and due to the ai advice I fully reset settings. I guess it worked ,but I cannot use any vpn now as it immediately drains the battery.

Amrithamohanan wrote:

I’ve already checked both app-level battery usage and system analytics.

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/3ebf6b09-35fc-4e82-bbc9-daa530125c07

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/64ca5f36-a268-49b2-888d-e32666e4d270

Home and Lock Screen and Photos are big indicators that your iPhone is still completing post-update processes. Photos is indexing and sorting all your photos to be searchable by key terms such as location and people. Home and Lock Screen is also sorting all your data such as for Spotlight Search.

After updating your iPhone, it has to re-index all of your data and complete other post-update background tasks such as installing new features, as such it will work much harder and as a result exert more heat and drain more battery. That is normal and it usually takes 36-72 hours to fully sort out, but can take longer depending on the amount of data you have.

By the way, trying to understand the analytics logs on your iPhone are futile. The logs are not meant to be understood by us users, and even the ones that do use it, Apple Employees, use special software to decode the meaning.

You can read more upon this phenomenon in my User Tip: Addressing Common Increased Battery Drain & Thermal Temperature Conditions iPhone May Face After Setup & Updates - Apple Community

I am having the same issue since the day of the update (well over a week now). Phone is draining really rapidly every day and gets really quite hot.

14 pro also. Also not getting cellular signal really often! Which is a new one. I can be next to someone on the same network, with an iPhone 16e and they have full strength and I have literally no service.

i have tried:

background refresh off

closing all apps

updating apps each day they are available

turning on and off again (many times!)

low power mode

turning Siri off

turning WiFi off and Bluetooth when not using

battery capacity has been at 85% for some time (phone is 2y old), so not at the state where it would be recommended to replace.

storage: 91.05gb of 128.

did anyone get a resolution to this issue yet, as I feel we are now beyond the typical ‘phone is indexing etc’ explanations. It’s rendering the handset almost useless at this point.

thanks

once I update the IOS 18.5 after i couldn’t get the proper network signal for my phone getting NO SERVICE