iOS 7.1 has been recently released, and numerous iPhone users have reported that ever since the update, their phone's battery life has decreased tremendously. However, more often than not, low battery life issues come from misuse rather than bugs, so let's see if we can fix your phone's battery issues with a few simple steps.

Determining the Issues:

The first thing you need to do is to determine whether or not your phone actually suffers from poor battery life. To do this, you simply need to do the math between "Usage" and "Standby" times. Just go to "Settings" > "General" > "Usage".

In a nutshell, "Usage" is how long you've used the smartphone, and "Standby" is how long your device has been dormant since it's been unplugged.

Unless you've used your device almost constantly since the last unplug, what you should be able to notice is a "Usage" time significantly lower than "Standby" time.

Next up, write the usage and standby time down, and press the "sleep / wake" button to put the phone to sleep. After 5 minutes, wake your phone and check the "Usage" and "Standby" times. Normally, the "Standby" time should now be almost 5 minutes higher, and the "Usage" time should have increased by less than a minute.

If your "Usage" time is significantly higher than that, then you're having battery drain issues, as something is keeping your phone active while in sleep mode. Here's what you need to do:

Disabling Background App Refresher and Location for Facebook:

Apparently, Facebook has a few issues under iOS 7.1, where it keep on appearing in the process list despite the fact that you may not use the application. To solve this problem, all you need to do is to go to "Settings" > "Privacy" > "Location services" and disable the feature. You should also disable "Background App Refresher" for Facebook, by going to "Settings" > "General" > "Background App Refresher".

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Much like the Facebook tip above, you can and should disable Background App Refresher for all applications that you don't care about. Basically, BAR keeps your apps up to date at all time, which is definitely a good thing, but it may also affect your battery performance, as third party developers might unknowingly sneak in a few bugs that can drain your phone's battery when using BAR (such as in the case of Facebook).

Do Not Quit Apps in Multitasking:

iOS 7 / 7.1 has introduced a new way to manage multitasking, and most iPhone users have the tendency to use the new multitasking screen quite often. All they need to do is to double-press the home button, and swipe up any app to close it.

On the face of it, this might sound like something that you should do often in order to save battery life. However, constantly quitting apps in multitasking can have a major negative impact on your device's battery.

To make the long story short, iOS 7 can cleverly freezes all applications in the background, so they're not actually running. More so, unless BAR is enabled, no app is actually allowed to run in the background, unless it's the music player, audio recorder etc.

However, when you constantly close applications, the phone's RAM needs to clear the space. Then, when you re-open the app, the phone will once again allocate a certain amount of RAM to the app. This process consumes a higher percentage of battery than when you leave an app running in the background, so learn to trust your device and allow it to close apps when it needs to, without your input.

Disabling Push Notifications for Certain Apps:

If you don't really need to check out every push notification for every application you're using, then I suggest you disable push notifications in order to increase your phone's battery life.

Fact is, whenever you get a push notification, your phone will wake up for a few seconds in order to power on your display.

Keep in mind that, while push notifications don't make a huge impact on your phone's battery performance, they can actually add up if you get a lot of them. The key here is not to worry too much about push notifications, but you should disable the notifications that you really don't care that much about.

Via Overthought


See More: iPhone 5 / 5S / iOS 7.1: Battery Troubleshooting Tips / How to Fix Battery Life Issues - Part 1