Category: iPhone

One day my wife mentioned that her iPhone was dying halfway through the day. It was odd because she wasn’t using it during work, but by lunch the battery was dead. This wasn’t the case before, as she would usually have 80% or more by the time she would get home.

So I checked her settings, went through all the typical steps such as disabling background app refresh, disabling location settings, and so on. Yet none of that worked – her iPhone was still dying after only five hours. I then took the iPhone to the Apple store where the Genius staff took a look. Unfortunately, they said the battery was healthy so it must be something else draining the battery. I had already gone through all the steps they recommended to preserve the battery life to no avail days before even going, so they too were at a loss of what the issue could be.

At the same time, news was coming out of the Facebook app killing iPhone battery life due to media still playing even after the app was closed. Eureka! At least so I thought. I removed the app immediately from her phone and was pleased that we found the issue. Except that wasn’t the issue and the battery continued to die in hours.

I then recalled a separate issue where my wife had her e-mail entered into the phone twice. This had been that way for some time due to the difficulty in fixing it but never caused an issue. Yet I began to wonder if there was a change that resulted in the e-mail account causing a data loop.

Now why was the issue a difficult one in fixing? Simply remove the duplicate entry, right? Well the problem was that removing one of the duplicate e-mails would remove all of her contacts from the phone – a very frustrating problem since they are the same e-mail account. It did not even matter which one was removed, all the contacts would disappear either way. When re-adding the email back into the phone the contacts would remain gone, so even though they were attached to the e-mail account, it was not actually syncing to that account. Ever see what happens when you lose over two hundred of your spouse’s contacts? Many hours were lost having to keep restoring the phone from an iCloud backup.

Despite the duplicate e-mail never having been an issue before, I decided it was time to fix this issue. After all, I was strongly suspecting that it was now causing an issue with the battery dying so quickly.

First I made sure her contacts were synced to her Gmail account on the phone. But when I logged into her Gmail account on her laptop, I could see that her contacts were not actually synced with Gmail at all. Why they were synced locally and not to the cloud remains a mystery, but I had to figure something out and I sure wasn’t going to go through and manually add over two hundred contacts to Gmail. After some quick digging, I had found and downloaded an app which took all of her contacts in the phone and exported into a CSV file. I then e-mailed that file to herself. Once I had the file on her laptop, I imported the file into her Gmail contacts.

With that done, I was then able to remove both entries of the duplicate e-mail address and then re-add the account. Success! All her contacts were there (all two hundred-plus of them) and now her phone just had the single Gmail e-mail.

A couple of days since doing that, it became clear that my theory of a data loop was correct – her battery life went back to lasting an entire day. She would come home from work and still have over 80% of her battery life.

It was an odd case for sure, but I’m glad (and so is my wife) that I was able to take care of it AND keep her contacts intact.