According to a recently published thread on Apple’s Developer Forums, users with older iPhones are experiencing a plethora of different battery-related issues such as horrendous battery drain, following the iOS 14.2 update.
While Apple has already copped to throttling and slowing down older iPhone models as time goes by, this iOS 14.2-induced problem is affecting a range of older models from the iPhone 6S up to the iPhone 11(!).
The issue is accompanied by the affected iPhones taking ages to charge — one user reported their iPhone X taking 7 hours of idle charging time to go from 20% to nearly full.
The excessive post-update battery drain is also causing some iPhones to heat up significantly (even when they’re idle, and especially when they’re charging!), which isn’t unheard of either.
According to reports from users, the battery drain is so bad that playing 2 minutes of Words With Friends takes away 10-15%, and leaving the phone unused for a few hours knocks the battery down from ~80% to 20%.
Taking steps to preserve battery life like killing battery-intensive apps, turning off 4G, or disabling background refresh for apps has been revealed as being entirely ineffective.
If you’re using anything older than the iPhone 12 lineup and haven’t updated your iPhone to iOS 14.2 already, it would be best to hold off until the bulk of these issues are resolved in coming updates.
