iPhone 12 Pro Allow Siri When Locked causing significant battery drain

[Wizec]

Ever since installing iOS 14.3, my iPhone 12 Pro battery started to experience severe drain and the battery app indicated that the second highest drain was being caused by Siri background usage. The top battery consumer was of course Safari because I use my phone for most web browsing.

Anyway, I disabled Siri, then re-enabled Siri features one by one until I found which setting was causing the background battery drain. It turned out to be the “Allow Siri When Locked” setting. Once I enable that, my battery craters if I simply lock my phone and put it on my nightstand overnight.

Disabling “Allow Siri When Locked” has restored battery performance to pre 14.3 levels. I just thought I’d share in case anyone else was also having this problem. I can live without this feature, though I‘m perplexed as to why this occurred with iOS 14.3 and would rather be able to have the feature on because I do use it occasionally.

 

[ericwn]

So with and without the features enabled what was your measured battery drain?

 

[Wizec]

With “Allow Siri When Locked”, Siri was reported as taking about 21% battery over the course of a day, all reported as “background” usage. The battery graph looked like pretty much like y=-(1x/2), even “idling” overnight sitting on a nightstand.

With “Allow Siri When Locked” disabled, my battery graph overnight is almost flat and over the course of a day uses about 3%, averaging the last 4 days. The range is 1% to 5%. This is a much more acceptable battery budget for the feature given that I use it about once per day. 21% is way out of line, both for how much I use the feature, and compared to how much battery it used to consume before iOS 14.3.

 

[Wizec]

I also just checked my iPad Pro 11” 2018. It’s been on iPadOS 14.3 since it was released.

It still has “Allow Siri When Locked” enabled, but does not experience anywhere near the same amount of battery impact from Siri.

 

[The Cockney Rebel]

Update to the 14.4 beta.

It fixes the battery drain.

 

[Apple_Robert]

You might want to reconsider allowing Siri while locked. That is a security risk, in my opinion.