Does it feel like your iPhone’s battery life isn’t as good as it was since installing iOS 13.6? Is it not making it to the end of the day without having to recharge? Or do you feel like your battery has been getting progressively worse in recent months?

Fear not. It’s unlikely that your battery has gone bad overnight and you need to replace it (or your iPhone), and it’s much more likely to be down to the update.

Here’s what you can do to diagnose and fix the problem.

Must read: iPhone iOS 13.6 battery draining fast for no obvious reason? Try this fix

CHECK YOUR IPHONE’S BATTERY

Is the problem down to your battery? If your iPhone is more than a couple of years old, it could be and might be a good time to carry out a quick battery check. 

Go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health. If this screen shows Maximum Capacity over 80 percent and Peak Performance Capability is showing “Your battery is currently supporting normal peak performance” then you are OK.

Anything else then you may have isolated your battery issue and you may be looking at replacing the battery.

CHECK FOR UPDATES

Bottom line, if you’ve not downloaded and installed the latest updates, it’s time to do so! 

Head over to Settings > General > Software Update and download the latest iOS 13 update.

RUN APP UPDATES

The problem might not be an iOS issue but more a problem with an app, especially when new versions of iOS have been released. That means it’s a good idea to make sure all your apps are updated before you go spending a lot of time trying to diagnose what’s going on.

Fire up the App Store app and click your profile icon in the corner then scroll down to Available Updates to look for updates (I like to pull down this screen to refresh it so I see all the latest updates).

IS YOUR IPHONE CHARGING PROPERLY?

Your iPhone logs battery usage over time, and this can be a very useful diagnostic tool. Head over to Settings > Battery, and you’ll see a chart called Battery Level that looks as follows:

There’s a lot going on here, so let me break it down for you. Green shows when the iPhone was running normally off of its own battery power, while yellow shows when your iPhone was in Low Power Mode. The hatched green areas shows when your iPhone was on charge.

Last Charge Level shows how much charge was put into the battery during the last recharge, a good way to quickly see if the battery was fully charged or not.

You can use this to see what your battery drain is like, and whether the iPhone is actually charging when you think it is. If you’re not seeing those green hatched areas, then test your charger, and if you are using an older cable, check the Lightning connector for corrosion.

IS AN APP DRAINING YOUR BATTERY?

Underneath the Battery Level chart is another one called Activity.

This chart logs how much time apps were running on the screen (the dark blue bits of the bar) and when the screen is off (shown in light blue).

If you are seeing a lot of background activity then this could signify a problem with an app. The table below this chart breaks down battery usage by the app, and you can choose to view data buy battery usage, but by clicking on the blue Show Activity link you can get a breakdown of on-screen and background time.

While some apps legitimately need a lot of background time to function (such as the Tile app in the image above), this can also signify a problem, and could cause battery drain. A way to test this is to disable an app’s ability to run in the background by going to Settings General > Background App Refresh and turning that off for any apps that look to be heavy users.

NO LUCK? TRY THIS

I know, this seems like a simple fix, but you’d be surprised how often it works!

• iPhone 8 and later: Click and release the volume up button followed by the volume down button, then press and hold down the power button until the Apple logo appears on the screen.
• iPhone 7 and earlier: Hold the power button and volume down until the Apple logo appears on screen

THE NUCLEAR OPTION

This is the nuclear option, but it can help you ascertain if the issue is a hardware issue or software. I only recommend this as a last resort because it is very time-consuming.

To do this, go to Settings > General > Reset and choose Reset All Settings or, if you want to delete all the apps too, Reset All Content and Settings.