If you own an iPhone 6S or iPhone 6S Plus that mysteriously goes flat despite showing the battery still has a charge, it turns out you’re not imagining things: the phones have a bug.

Apple is “investigating the cause and a solution” to the problem, which reportedly involves the percentage of charge remaining on the battery indicator to freeze.

According to the Apple support page, the problem apparently only occurs if a user changes the time on their iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus manually, or alternatively change time zones when traveling.

In a thread discussing the problem, one user by the name of “jonboom” described what was occurring:

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 awhile. But eventually it gets stuck again.

In the 3 days since it was delivered on Friday, I’ve had to reboot my iPhone 6s Plus at least four times to fix this issue.

Although there is no proper solution to the problem as yet, the company says that as a temporary workaround users should reboot their iPhone, then make sure the date and time are set on the phone automatically by going into the General menu in iOS 9’s Settings app.

If the problem still occurs without changing time or time zones, users are advised to contact Apple’s support staff, although given the company itself doesn’t have a proper solution for the problem it’s not clear exactly what their support staff will be able to do.

Quality control

While the good news for those affected is that the problem would appear to be a software one versus a hardware one, this isn’t the first time Apple has had problems with iPhone batteries.

In October the company was forced to admit that battery life differed between iPhones depending on who manufactured the chip running the device, despite the fact they’re all supposed to have the same A9 chip, and in 2013 Apple also confessed to a battery problem with the iPhone 5S, which saw some users experience rapid battery drain.

Sadly this is yet another example of the same old, same old for Apple when it comes to its ever diminishing quality control; the company was built on its reputation for providing high quality devices that famously “just work” but as it has continued to grow a better statement for the company might be “devices that just work, some of the time.”

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