iOS 14.1 Battery Life Drain Test on iPhone 11, iPhone XR, and iPhone SE

BY Rajesh Pandey

Published 21 Oct 2020

Apple released the iOS 14.1 update yesterday for all compatible iPhones. This is the first major point release of the OS from Apple and it brings a number of bug fixes and stability improvements. With the iOS 14 release, testing showed that it did not do anything to improve the battery life on iPhones which had taken quite a bit of beating with the later releases of iOS 13.

With iOS 14.1 bringing a bunch of bug fixes and stability improvements, has Apple also fixed battery life issues with it? YouTuber iAppleBytes has conducted an exhaustive iOS 14.1 battery test on the original iPhone SE, iPhone 6s, iPhone 7, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, and 2020 iPhone SE. Sadly, the results are not good. The iOS 14.1 update seems to have a slight impact on the battery life of all the iPhones that were tested. Depending on which iPhone you are looking at, the difference is either a few minutes.

The original iPhone SE and the iPhone 6s lasted 4 minutes less in the Geekbench battery test while running iOS 14.1 than what they did on iOS 14.0.1. The iPhone 8 also dropped a somewhat reasonable 6 minutes. However, the iPhone 7 and iPhone XR dropped by 20 minutes and 11 minutes, respectively. It is actually one of those rare occasions that an iOS update has led to a decline in the battery life of all the iPhones tested.

All the iPhones tested above performed much better when running iOS 13.3 or lower. However, their battery life has declined notably with the release of iOS 13.4 and newer builds. In fact, for the iPhone 11 lineup, the decline in battery life is over an hour compared to initial iOS 13 builds.

How has the battery life of your iPhone been on iOS 14? Drop a comment and let us know!