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james_b

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 19, 2020
27
37
Hello, this is what happened to me today on my iPhone 13 running latest iOS 15.1.1. So far my iPhone had a phenomenal battery life. But yesterday I went to sleep and the battery had more than 50 % which i thing is normal. In the morning i woke up and my iPhone was completely dead. I connected it to my charger and after a while iPhone booted up. I went to settings and looked to Battery section to look what happened and this is what i found. Battery was completely drained by Siri according to the battery section even when Siri is completely off. Can anyone tell me please if this is some kind of bug or what is going on here?
 

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H264

macrumors newbie
Oct 21, 2013
17
5
New iPhone 13, iOS 15.1.1. Over 90% battery drain.
Both "Listen for Siri" and "Double-click for Siri" have been disabled.
I think we can conclude iOS 15 and Siri have issues.

IMG_0665.jpeg
 

Samdh90

macrumors 6502a
Apr 26, 2021
997
812
At this time I am not sure what will fix it(Hopefully 15.2 will) but you are not alone on this one. I have only seen it once myself and a force restart seemed to quell it. I have read others on this site with the same complaint though. Somewhat of a silly thing, but try turning Siri on(Just leave the "Hey" off if you prefer it) and see what happens. Only reason I say this is that I could not reproduce this issue once I actually turned the siri option on.
 
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JM

macrumors 601
Nov 23, 2014
4,086
6,381
WTH, Apple?

Get your **** together.

Siri is the number one battery user? It’s not doing ANYTHING on my phone except Siri requests with a button press once today.

- all Siri functions on apps is off except “show App in Search”
- hey Siri off

(anything else to try?)

Did Apple really code Siri to continue to run it’s stupid Learning in the background with no way to turn off, and the toggles only let you choose whether to see the Suggestions or not?

?
 

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JM

macrumors 601
Nov 23, 2014
4,086
6,381
Like this? This should not happen. See photos.

Siri using more than Safari.

?
 

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JM

macrumors 601
Nov 23, 2014
4,086
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More stupidity. 29 minutes of Messages uses more battery than 52 minutes of safari?

Yay Safari efficiency?

And Siri still using the most.
 

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JM

macrumors 601
Nov 23, 2014
4,086
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I did a itunes backup, and erased the phone, and restored from the itunes backup. We'll see if it's any better.
 

JM

macrumors 601
Nov 23, 2014
4,086
6,381
BTW, I did put all the SIRI settings back on to see if it made any difference to the battery life. The abysmal Siri usage screenshot was from today. I'll go another day with it everything on, and then try a day of All Siri learning off, with only Hey Siri enabled since that's pretty useful.
 

cynics

macrumors G4
Jan 8, 2012
11,959
2,156
A lot of app task, background functionality, and spotlight (big one since its databasing all your data) will fall under Siri. Apps that now use the SiriKit API will also list that battery usage as Siri instead of the app when the app is completely closed.

While I haven't monitored the activity I believe a lot of additional stuff is falling under the Siri category, again nothing to support that.

Also, if you are looking for what is draining your battery you CANNOT select a signal hour. Look at the entire day, make a mental note of the highest usage apps, do this for a couple weeks. A sample size of one hour (even a week) especially with battery usage isn't a useful datapoint for several reasons and these are just examples not calling anyone out...

1. If Siri uses 90% during a single hour you can only compare to that hour, so if the total battery life dropped 2% we can only look at 90% Siri usage for 2% battery which is 1.8% overall usage aka nothing.

2. Battery drain isn't linear. 60% to 50% total battery isn't going to be the same amount of energy as 70% to 60%. iOS uses algorithms to TRY to get this as close as possible but its rarely the case because the battery process of storing and discharging energy is a chemical process that can only be precisely monitored not precisely controlled.

3. Variables with the battery. Wear and temp being the most important. It only takes a couple degrees Celsius to have measurable impact on battery life. While extreme variations in temps are blatantly obvious minor variations are also noticeable under a microscope. The colder a battery is the higher is resistances to current flow becomes.

4. Specific usage for the specific window of time. If you restore your iPhone and it has to rebuild its database Siri usage will be increased. On battery power this process will take an incredibly long time.

5. The battery screen only shows accessible software in a percentage. It doesn't list background OS software task at all nor does hardware usage get its own category. If the Phone app used 50% battery because cell reception was weak that is 2 functions, phone software and radio hardware power usage. While 'low reception' is noted it doesn't list an increased percentage. The Phone app used a higher percentage of overall battery but so did every app because the overall battery storage was decreased by excessive power usage.

Just food for thought.
 
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cynics

macrumors G4
Jan 8, 2012
11,959
2,156
I did a itunes backup, and erased the phone, and restored from the itunes backup. We'll see if it's any better.

Might have made it worse until Siri/Spotlight re-indexes the iPhone. Leave it plugged and lock for the next couple days if thats not too inconvenient for you.
 
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JM

macrumors 601
Nov 23, 2014
4,086
6,381
Might have made it worse until Siri/Spotlight re-indexes the iPhone. Leave it plugged and lock for the next couple days if thats not too inconvenient for you.
Doh.

lol oh well

Thanks. I was hoping that it was some jetsam in the code that needed a complete reinstall.
 
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JM

macrumors 601
Nov 23, 2014
4,086
6,381
A lot of app task, background functionality, and spotlight (big one since its databasing all your data) will fall under Siri. Apps that now use the SiriKit API will also list that battery usage as Siri instead of the app when the app is completely closed.

While I haven't monitored the activity I believe a lot of additional stuff is falling under the Siri category, again nothing to support that.

Also, if you are looking for what is draining your battery you CANNOT select a signal hour. Look at the entire day, make a mental note of the highest usage apps, do this for a couple weeks. A sample size of one hour (even a week) especially with battery usage isn't a useful datapoint for several reasons and these are just examples not calling anyone out...

1. If Siri uses 90% during a single hour you can only compare to that hour, so if the total battery life dropped 2% we can only look at 90% Siri usage for 2% battery which is 1.8% overall usage aka nothing.

2. Battery drain isn't linear. 60% to 50% total battery isn't going to be the same amount of energy as 70% to 60%. iOS uses algorithms to TRY to get this as close as possible but its rarely the case because the battery process of storing and discharging energy is a chemical process that can only be precisely monitored not precisely controlled.

3. Variables with the battery. Wear and temp being the most important. It only takes a couple degrees Celsius to have measurable impact on battery life. While extreme variations in temps are blatantly obvious minor variations are also noticeable under a microscope. The colder a battery is the higher is resistances to current flow becomes.

4. Specific usage for the specific window of time. If you restore your iPhone and it has to rebuild its database Siri usage will be increased. On battery power this process will take an incredibly long time.

5. The battery screen only shows accessible software in a percentage. It doesn't list background OS software task at all nor does hardware usage get its own category. If the Phone app used 50% battery because cell reception was weak that is 2 functions, phone software and radio hardware power usage. While 'low reception' is noted it doesn't list an increased percentage. The Phone app used a higher percentage of overall battery but so did every app because the overall battery storage was decreased by excessive power usage.

Just food for thought.
Thanks for the helpful and Thorough explanation. It’s been a real busy and draining week of work so every little thing is bothersome
 

JM

macrumors 601
Nov 23, 2014
4,086
6,381
Doh.

lol oh well

Thanks. I was hoping that it was some jetsam in the code that needed a complete reinstall.
Whelp. Today went pretty well. There was no ridiculous Siri battery usage today.

Looks like erasing and “reinstalling” the backup from iTunes did the trick.

(Maybe it was also the auto-sync with iTunes that offloads the crash logs, helped too. No idea.)

Anyways… let’s see if the next few days keeps it up.

(*the pretty much barely draining during the day was from busy day at work where I only listened to downloaded Apple Music, and never really picked phone up. The super drop in battery at the end was editing on iMovie. Expected.)

**and sorry for cutting off the top of the battery charts. I wanted to show the Siri barely using battery.
 

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Sam Dalton

macrumors newbie
Aug 5, 2022
1
0
Hi all.

I’m using an iPhone 13 mini that I just bought two weeks ago, running iOS 16 beta. The first week of usage was fine, but this week, my battery is draining from 100% to 10% in under 4 hours. The phone is also getting dangerously hot whilst idling. Battery health is 100%, and the main culprit is… Siri!
I really don’t want to reset my phone which I just hassled to set up (my e-sim moved from my old phone to this phone, then got stuck ‘in between the two’ leaving me with no internet to finish setting up…) and Apple wants me to downgrade to the ‘official’ iOS 15 and that will ‘probably fix the problem.’ Thanks Apple.
I have a suspicion that a third party app might be using the SiriKit API and messing with me, but I don’t know any way to trace that…
Not sure if anyone can help, but knowing other people have the same problem is a slight comfort…
Have a Great Weekend ya’all
 

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PhantomSoul

macrumors newbie
Feb 8, 2013
7
4
Sometimes certain activities will cause a spike in background system processes that show up in the battery usage reports as Siri. Often, you won't even think about this until you maybe do something around bedtime that triggers a large system update and wake up the next morning to a dead phone, despite being on your trusty wireless (Qi) charger all night. Then when you plug in your phone and get enough of a charge to boot it back up, you see that Siri ate all your battery overnight.

Did you do something that triggered a download of massive amounts of information, that you could potentially interact with using Siri? Examples could include music playlists - especially the super-high-quality spatial audio - or maybe some high-quality videos (TV shows, movies, etc.)? These types of downloads trigger indexing processes so that Siri can interact with the content in a timely manner, but the processes are designed to run slowly in the background and can take a longer time. The larger the content that was downloaded all at the same time, the more power this indexing will use, to try and make the content available to Siri as quickly as possible. Further, I don't know if this indexing can be prevented, even if you completely turn off Siri, other than just trying to limit how much you download at once. Indexes themselves take up space too, so this can be exacerbated further if you have limited free storage space on the phone and have various storage-management features enabled, like the one that offloads unused apps, etc. When such elements are offloaded, they can also trigger reindexing requests for Siri, and this along with the initial action can easily create a vicious spiral that can eat surprising amounts of battery, all while your phone is just sitting there as you sleep, screen off and all.

Many of us charge our phones overnight (and other places) wirelessly now, with an endless array of inexpensive Qi-based chargers. While they work well when the phone actually is completely idle - system processes and all - we have to remember that iPhone's support for the Qi standard is limited, only being able to consume the old-school 5w (5V, 1A) that way and cannot utilize the fast charge your Android friends might get over Qi-based wireless with higher-power USB sources. So if a process like the one described above spirals to consuming over 5w of power from your phone's battery, the phone will eventually drain, even if it is on a wireless charger.

The second thing to remember about Qi-based wireless charging is that I'm pretty sure your iPhone needs to be on in order to initiate and maintain charging - or at least I could never get a charger's "charging" light to come on when my iPhone is turned off. This means that once your phone drains enough that it shuts off, the Qi-based charger is done and won't be able to recharge your phone. Mag-safe-based charging may work even if the phone is off (I don't have one to try), but it definitely supports higher-power "fast charging," at least while the phone is on. Of course, lightning-based cable charging works with both the higher power and if the phone is off.

So again, a lot of this is really difficult to predict. Instead, you're more likely to wake up to a dead phone on your Qi-based wireless charger. But once you bring your phone back to life using a lightning cable, a little bit of forensic work in the settings might help provide some insights as to which of your activities on your phone the night before may have triggered runaway indexing, showing up on your battery usage reports as "Siri."
 
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