Addressing the Common Increased Battery Drain and Thermal Temperature Conditions Your iPhone May Face After Setup and Updates

This User Tip will address the reason why many iPhone users face when setting up or updating their iPhone, which is an increased battery drain and thermal temperature.

The reason why this increased battery drain and thermal temperatures occur is because certain related tasks continue in the background. Your iPhone is mainly indexing, which is creating and sorting a searchable database of your millions of bytes of data. That powers certain features on your iPhone such as Spotlight Search, Search in Photos, and many more of your apps. That's another reason why immediately after updating you may not find certain things, little by little your data will be sorted out. Your iPhone is also incorporating new features with the update, the big ones include Apple Intelligence, etc. All these tasks can cause your iPhone to work extra hard and thus, cause increased battery drain and thermal temperatures.

You may think your iPhone is getting too hot to use, but this usually isn't the case. Your iPhone is naturally designed to exert heat when in use and charging, and it can be hotter and more noticeable after these tasks. If your iPhone really were "overheating" at a dangerous temperature, it would display a "Temperature Warning" or "Charging on Hold" message, and would shut down and prevent you from using it until it cooled down. Otherwise, you can continue to use your iPhone.

If you go to Settings > Battery on your iPhone. You will likely notice in the battery usage graph that a few things will be taking up a good amount of battery, such as "Device Setup and Updates", “Home and Lock Screen”, “Photos”, “Mail”, “Messages” and more. That’s all indexing.

You may even see an Insight in your iPhone Battery Settings, which will inform you of any tasks happening in the background that can affect your iPhone conditions. Below are the Insights you may see.

• Ongoing iOS Update: A recent software update is finishing in the background.
• Ongoing Device Setup: Your iPhone is completing setup steps in the background.

The general rule of thumb for these tasks is 36-72 hours, but it will also depends on the amount of data you have. You can quicken these tasks by keeping your iPhone plugged in and charged, on a strong Wi-Fi connection. You will also want to always Force Restart your iPhone after setting up or updating, so you don't see any abnormal behaviors.

Give it some time. If it still won't get better, your iPhone may have a hardware issue in which it would need to be serviced at your nearest Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider.

This User Tip also applies to most other Apple Products, such as iPad’s and Apple Watches.

This is my first user tip and I hope will benefit many users in the Community.