A battery indicator that decreases slowly would normally be a good thing, indicating the power is going to last a long time, but this isn’t the cause of the problem on the iPhone 6s. The battery continues to drain at the usual rate but the status bar never updates to reflect this, giving users no idea of how much charge is actually remaining.
The problem appears to concern Apple’s iPhone 6s and 6s Plus handsets running iOS 9. A thread on the company’s support forums running all the way back to the September launch of the devices now has over 170 replies from users who are all experiencing the issue.
Apple forum member jonbonn, the original poster in the thread, explained: “My iPhone 6s Plus battery percentage gets stuck frequently. Like for example, it will say 87% all day, and then I’ll plug it in for an hour, and it will still say 87%. The only fix I’ve found is to power the phone off and then turn it back on. Then the percentage will update correctly, and will usually continue to update properly for a while. But eventually it gets stuck again.”
Apple has now created a support page for the issue and says it is investigating the cause so a fix can be developed. The company suggests the bug is related to changing the system time or time zone, saying: “If you change the time on your iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus manually or change time zones when traveling, you might notice that the battery percentage doesn’t update.”
It advises users who run into the bug to first restart their iPhone and then go to the system time settings and enable the “Set Automatically” feature to get the current time from the Internet. The solution is similar to several posts by forum members who had already linked the bug to manual time settings. Some iPhone users fiddle with the clock to get past time barriers in games that make you wait to play again.
This isn’t the first time the iPhone 6s has been hit with a software issue since launch. In October 2015, widespread user reports of the phone randomly rebooting itself began to circulate. The device has also been faced with previous battery issues as some users allege iPhone 6s units with a TSMC processor stay charged for much longer than handsets running Samsung-built silicon. Apple later called the claims “misleading.”
