iOS 11 has been obliterating the battery life of iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch. This has been tangibly measured at scale by data analytics company Wandera with those affected seeing their battery life fall by as much 60%. iPhone owners in particular have been reporting battery life that only lasts a few hours in standby (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, etc)
While Apple has not publicly acknowledged any of the iOS 11 battery problems, tests of iOS 11.1 betas show the company is well aware of what has been going on. The breakthrough came in iOS 11.1 beta 4 which suddenly saw battery life jump 40-50% across multiple models, from the iPhone SE to the iPhone 8 Plus, and these improvements have been carried over to the final release of iOS 11.1.
Like all iOS 11 releases, iOS 11.1 is compatible with iPhone 5S or later, iPad mini 2 or later and the 6th generation iPod touch or later.
Compatible devices will receive an automatic notification to download and install the iOS 11.1 update, but if you haven’t had this it can be triggered manually by navigating to Settings > General > Software Update. Tip: many tried iOS 11.1 as part of Apple’s beta program (where iOS 11.2 is now testing - more later), so if you only want the final release of iOS 11.1 then you must unroll your device for it to show up.
The size of iOS updates varies depending on device, but surprisingly iOS 11.1 is little larger than the ‘minor point’ releases (approximately 300-350MB) given how much it packs in.
Note: Apple has now released roughly 3.5GB of iOS updates since iOS 11 was released on September 19th, so watch out if you have a metered broadband connection.
