iOS 14 Battery Drain

I was a little hesitant to install iOS 14 on my aging, first-generation iPhone SE. That wariness turned out to be warranted—with iOS 14 I started seeing severe battery drain, to the tune of about 30% per hour even if the phone was idle.

I started tweaking things: I turned off background refresh, deleted a few apps, turned off Bluetooth—the drain slowed a tiny bit, but it was still quite drastic. If I fully charged my phone before sleeping, by the time I woke up it would be hovering around 30–40%.

Ultimately I decided to reset my phone. I backed up to iCloud, did a full reset and restore, and that fixed the problem. Restoring from iCloud was actually super-smooth—it took some time for all my apps to download and data to sync, but the only real downside was my Signal messages were wiped out.

I imagine this is the last major version of iOS that will be supported by my iPhone; I’ll likely replace it with a used iPhone Mini if that turns out to be the case.