HomeKit HomeKit Accessories Battery Drain

[Itinj24]

My wife has been getting severe battery drain from HomeKit Accessories. 48% worth.

Tried uninstalling and reinstalling the Home app but no better. Tried removing her from the Home and it shows on my end that she’s gone but on her end, the Home app opens fine and shows both of us as part of the Home. Not sure what’s going on there.

Tried uninstalling the Home app and leaving it uninstalled but she’s still showing 48% battery drain from the Home app, about 15 hours later. lol. Of course there’s no option in iCloud to delete Home app data.

Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[dotme]

Random thought, but could it be a sync loop of some kind?

Is "Home" still visible under Settings -> UserID -> iCloud on her phone? If so, try turning it off. Reboot phone. Turn back on.

 

[Itinj24]

Random thought, but could it be a sync loop of some kind?

Is "Home" still visible under Settings -> UserID -> iCloud on her phone? If so, try turning it off. Reboot phone. Turn back on.

That’s what I’m thinking too, some sort of sync loop. Maybe from a previous Siri Homekit request. A hard reboot of the phone didn’t fix whatever is going on

I tried toggling off HomePod in her iCloud (it is still there) then opening HomeKit hoping it would go to the welcome screen but it just says iCloud needs to be toggled on to use HomeKit. Didn’t try rebooting after toggling off. I’ll give that shot. Worst case scenario probably will have her sign out and back into iCloud.

Thank for your reply.

 

[Itinj24]

This absolutely maddening… tried signing her out of iCloud, re-booting, uninstalling Home app. Went back to check battery stats and Home still there chewing through battery at 54% now. The topper is this is what happens when I open the Home app on her phone no matter how many times I delete it and reboot the phone.

Just a blank screen:

 

[dotme]

Love how Apple is so confident their stuff just works that the end user has no logs, no error messages, no warnings, and no insight into what's going on in these sort of situations. Might be backup/restore time on the phone. I assume there are no iPads/other devices running Home app on her login? Clearly this device isn't willing to accept that she's removed from the home and is still hung up somewhere trying to sync something...

 

[Itinj24]

Love how Apple is so confident their stuff just works that the end user has no logs, no error messages, no warnings, and no insight into what's going on in these sort of situations. Might be backup/restore time on the phone. I assume there are no iPads/other devices running Home app on her login? Clearly this device isn't willing to accept that she's removed from the home and is still hung up somewhere trying to sync something...

Yeah she’s gotta be stuck somewhere within the HomeKit parallel universe lol. The good news is, she’s dropped to 20% battery usage for HomeKit now so not chewing through battery anymore. The bad news is, after signing back into iCloud, she also lost half her business contacts which is a huge deal. By the way this is an iPhone 13 Pro on 15.3.1 (the latest and greatest ?‍♂️)

I was thinking about rebooting every HomePod in this house. Think it may have come from some kind of query on one of the HomePods. Just spitballing because I’m dumbfounded. Next course of action I recommended, like you said, is a restore from factory. I have a feeling though that it’s something with her iCloud account and a hardware restore won’t do much, since signing out of iCloud was all for naught.

Kept telling her to get a backup device but she refused, lol so funny you mention. I, myself, have a MBP and an iPad Pro. Might also try logging myself off one of our other devices and logging her in to see what happens before we do a restore.

On a side note, she recently dropped and cracked her screen. You don’t suppose something like that could affect one single app like HomeKit, do ya? It’s just so coincidental, the timing of both incidents.

I appreciate you chiming in.

 

[Kaffebreak]

This absolutely maddening… tried signing her out of iCloud, re-booting, uninstalling Home app. Went back to check battery stats and Home still there chewing through battery at 54% now. The topper is this is what happens when I open the Home app on her phone no matter how many times I delete it and reboot the phone.

Just a blank screen:

View attachment 1963548

if you have family sharing, try logging in on your iCloud account on her phone, let it "load in" a few minutes than log out and finally try log in with her account again. That fixed my issue with a blank home app.

 

[Itinj24]

if you have family sharing, try logging in on your iCloud account on her phone, let it "load in" a few minutes than log out and finally try log in with her account again. That fixed my issue with a blank home app.

Great idea! Didn’t think about doing that. So you’ve seen this before?

Last night I logged her iCloud into an older iPad we had lying around and after several minutes of “Loading Scenes and Accessories” it finally came to life. Was hoping that would’ve fixed the app on her phone too but no dice. Hopefully your fix works. Thanks for the suggestion, regardless.

I got this other weird occurrence for her that I’ve never seen before. I just added my kids to the Home the day before and this didn’t pop up but for my wife it did. Wonder if it’s because she’s listed as an admin. It’s basically all the devices that were not online at the time of the invitation.

 

[B/D]

@Itinj24

Its a known bug that only happens with thread enabled devices in the house (that is, HP minis and Apple TV´s 4K 2 gen). Apple is aware of the issue and working on a fix. They keep sendings pings to IOS devices, thus preventing them to sleep properly.

 

[Itinj24]

@Itinj24

Its a known bug that only happens with thread enabled devices in the house (that is, HP minis and Apple TV´s 4K 2 gen). Apple is aware of the issue and working on a fix. They keep sendings pings to IOS devices, thus preventing them to sleep properly.

I assume you’re talking about just the battery usage issue, right?

 

[B/D]

I assume you’re talking about just the battery usage issue, right?

Correct.

 

[B/D]

@Itinj24

The IOS devices are constantly sending requests to openthread.thread.home.arpa. If I unplug the HP Mini and the Apple TV 4K the battery drain stops.

Try it for one night to isolate things.

 

[Itinj24]

@Itinj24

The IOS devices are constantly sending requests to openthread.thread.home.arpa. If I unplug the HP Mini and the Apple TV 4K the battery drain stops.

Try it for one night to isolate things.

Thanks. My wife’s phone is already far gone lol. The Home app is frozen on a blank screen. Started out as just bad battery drain but then snowballed into a slew of issues. Gonna try restoring it using Kaffebreak’s suggestion above.

 

[B/D]

The Home app is very buggy in general, at least for me.

 

[Itinj24]

The Home app is very buggy in general, at least for me.

Absolutely. Always been but this is beyond buggy. This is completely useless. It’s a blank screen! Haha

 

[B/D]

Absolutely. Always been but this is beyond buggy. This is completely useless. It’s a blank screen! Haha

For me its been literally acting on its own for the longest time. IOS 15 has made it worse. For example, if I disable a toggle of a particular setting, it tends to enable itself back on. I have to force quit the app, re-open it, and disable it again.

?

Apple software is getting on my nerves. If I werent so invested in the ecosystem, since many many years ago, I would have left already.

 

[Itinj24]

For me its been literally acting on its own for the longest time. IOS 15 has made it worse. For example, if I disable a toggle of a particular setting, it tends to enable itself back on. I have to force quit the app, re-open it, and disable it again.

?

Apple software is getting on my nerves. If I werent so invested in the ecosystem, since many many years ago, I would have left already.

Oh my goodness… the toggle issue!!! Gonna drive me to a mental institution. I can’t even delete or change the time of an alarm. When I delete, it comes back on its own and if I set a new time, it reverts back in a few seconds.

 

[Itinj24]

if you have family sharing, try logging in on your iCloud account on her phone, let it "load in" a few minutes than log out and finally try log in with her account again. That fixed my issue with a blank home app.

Unfortunately it didn’t work. Same result. Do appreciate the suggestion though.

It’s gotta be… I mean, could it possibly be???… a hardware issue? This is absolutely mind blowing.

Next order of business is probably wait for iOS 15.4. Hope that rattles something up in there.

 

[dotme]

I can’t even delete or change the time of an alarm. When I delete, it comes back on its own and if I set a new time, it reverts back in a few seconds.

Ah I remember your post about this now... so this ALSO feels like a sync issue to me. It's like another device is in a constant state of updating HomeKit in iCloud, stepping on your changes.

It shouldn't be necessary to nuke everything, but what I would think about doing next is unplugging every HK hub from power, and powering down every iPad/iDevice that has HomeKit enabled for both you and your wife. Your iPhone would be the final thing to power down, and then wait 30 mins after everything is dark before turning things back on, one at a time.

If you have the Controller app, backing up HomeKit first wouldn't be a bad idea either. You don't have any old iOS devices (running older 12.x or 10.x software) do you?

 

[Itinj24]

Ah I remember your post about this now... so this ALSO feels like a sync issue to me. It's like another device is in a constant state of updating HomeKit in iCloud, stepping on your changes.

I’ve had this issue for a while even while everything seemed to be running smoothly. Started with iOS 15 and oddly, it only happens with HomePod Minis. iCloud is a mess with iOS 15.

It shouldn't be necessary to nuke everything, but what I would think about doing next is unplugging every HK hub from power, and powering down every iPad/iDevice that has HomeKit enabled for both you and your wife. Your iPhone would be the final thing to power down, and then wait 30 mins after everything is dark before turning things back on, one at a time.

That’s a great idea. I’m gonna give that a go but I’m probably gonna have to nuke it all anyway. Got a couple GCs running ethernet in my house as we speak and wanted a fresh start with my network. I’m hoping this will create a stronger network and prevent sync issues and such. For some reason though, I don’t think it will help with my wife’s Home app. It’s just frozen in space lol.

If you have the Controller app, backing up HomeKit first wouldn't be a bad idea either. You don't have any old iOS devices (running older 12.x or 10.x software) do you?

I do have the Controller app but I’d rather just do a fresh start at this point.
Funny you mention. I had a iPhone 4S that I signed into (this was a few years back) and it completely corrupted my HomeKit setup, as soon as I signed into it. Last time I did that lol. Everything I have now is on 15.3 or 15.3.1. Watches are on 8.4.2. Latest MacOS too. Forget what the number is (12.x?).

 

[Kaffebreak]

Took a working trip outside of town (away from home wifi) for almost 24h and the background drain went down from over 2h to about 40 mins ?

 

[Kaffebreak]

So 24h since iOS 15.4. Never felt the back of my iPhone 13 Pro so ”cold” since the unboxing ?

23 minutes of background use last 24h is the lowest I’ve seen. Hope this is it.

(My two HomePods and atv are also updated) ??

 

[Itinj24]

So 24h since iOS 15.4. Never felt the back of my iPhone 13 Pro so ”cold” since the unboxing ?

23 minutes of background use last 24h is the lowest I’ve seen. Hope this is it.

(My two HomePods and atv are also updated) ??

Not being sarcastic are ya? lol

 

[Kaffebreak]

Not being sarcastic are ya? lol

Haha, no sorry for the confusion. Just happy that the problem seems to be solved

 

[Itinj24]

Haha, no sorry for the confusion. Just happy that the problem seems to be solved

Well that’s good to hear. Hope has been restored. I have yet to update.