iCloud sucks. Literally.
I’ve struggled over the last month with the battery life on my iPhone 4S. I haven’t been able to make it through the day without having to recharge. And I couldn’t figure out why.
When I traveled to CES last week, I was with my brother-in-law and throughout the day we would compare battery life to see if mine was draining faster, and the difference was incredible. Luckily, he had told me about the ZAGG Sparq 2 which allows me to easily recharge my iPhone or iPad, so I wasn’t in any trouble. However, he has the iPhone 4 vs. the iPhone 4S, so I wasn’t able to do a true apples to apples comparison.
This weekend I went golfing with a friend and he also has the 4S, so I decided to see how our battery life compared throughout the round. I knew that over the course of a 4 hour period that my battery would be almost dead and I was curious to see how his held up.
I wish our battery life had been as consistent as our drives.
Sure enough, throughout the day my battery was draining much faster. In fact, it was draining THREE TIMES FASTER. I checked his location services and he had almost 20 more of those running than me. Then I checked his notifications and again, he had at least a dozen more notifications running. Both of us had Siri off.
And he was running a GPS-heavy golf app and I wasn’t. GPS is notorious for sucking battery life. Still, I was losing battery so much faster than him it was comical.
I started searching through his settings to see what could possibly be creating this difference in battery drain. We were thoroughly convinced that I must have an app or two that were running in the background somehow or pinging a server somewhere, when I found it – iCloud.
He didn’t have iCloud turned on and I did. I quickly turned off iCloud on my iPhone and we started comparing.
Over the next three hours (we had dinner that night with our families), his phone actually lost battery life almost TWICE AS MUCH AS MINE DID. So I went from a battery drain three times faster than his to suddenly my batter drain was only 1/2 of his. This is likely because he had so many notifications and location services turned on.
So iCloud, you’re killing battery life on iPhones everywhere. Unfortunately, there’s no way (that I know of) to adjust the settings on iCloud. So for instance, you can’t tell it to sync only every hour or once a day. My guess is it checks constantly and I’m pretty sure it was my photo stream that must have been the main culprit.
My next step will be to turn on and off certain settings to see if its just iCloud in general or if its certain elements syncing that drains the battery so much.
This is a great tip, Jeff. I have an iPhone 4s and I’ve also noticed that my battery drains pretty frequently. I’ll try turning off iCloud and see if it helps me too.
Cool, please comment back after the test and let me know how it goes. Changing that has allowed me to start using Siri again…I missed Siri :)
I have been using https://www.JuiceDefender.com/ I am sure there is a similar app. for iPhone.
Jeff I had the exact same problem with my iPhone4 (no S), I could literally watch the battery life drain right in front of my eyes… I turned everything off and eventually turned them all back on 1 at a time, my phone is fine now and I usually have about 50% or just a little less when I get home from work which is about 10-12 hours after I have unplugged in the morning. Not sure what or how but it fixed mine. Also: https://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/12/02/how-to-fix-bad-iphone-4s-battery-life-in-5-minutes/
I don’t know if it’s just me but I cannot find anything on icloud email when I search it. it keeps loading and loading and loading….. and loading.
iCloud doesn’t just suck battery life on the iPhone….it also sucks battery, memory, and internet speeds on the macbook pro. I turned it off, and my internet, speed, and battery life (went from 7hrs to over 12hrs) improved instantly on my macbook. I shouldn’t say iCloud caused it however, its the apple.photostream that is the culprit. It continuously hammers the wifi looking for updates to your photo album….which slows everything down. If Apple wants to fix these issues, just give us an option to turn off the photo stream, but as for now….just turn the whole thing off.
iCloud.com sucks too. Hard to find a browser that does not have some issue with it. Either its slow to sign in and load, or you get some dumb warning like in Chrome that iCloud does not support Zoom or something. Just read the Apple forums about iCloud and you will find its probably worse then MobileMe in its issues. Problem is that in fact iCloud is only supported by IOS5 and Lion. So you can’t blame compatibility because Apple does very little about that.
Like all former MobileMe users, I am forced to switch to iCloud. It already sucks because the hardware that the new OSX requires, I can’t upgrade my iMac to Lion.
I’m glad I found this post. I also have an iPhone 4S & don’t need my battery to drain any faster than it already does. Based on the services that iCloud is offering, I don’t feel that I’ll be missing out on much. I won’t be able to use my email address through Apple Mail anymore either. They also cut us down to only 3 aliases from 5. Seems like Apple would rather us go elsewhere to find solutions to our needs.
Easy solution: sell your iPhone in Ebay and get a nice Android. Android doesn’t feature nasty-forced-in-your-face-Apple-limitations. I know I did.
I will definitely look into that option!
Skydrive is far better. Dropbox is good as well. Google Drive sucks, albeit not as bad as iCloud.
If you’re using iPhone, just use Skydrive. It’s the best Cloud storage service available.