Some iPhone Users Report Significant Battery Drain Due to Music App Background Activity in iOS 13.5.1

[diamondsw]

Confirmed on my iPhone X as well - I had been noticing for the last few days the battery life was terrible and the phone was frequently warm/display dimming. I show iTunes with 10h47m in the background with 2m on screen, and I manually quit apps constantly (leftover habits from classic MacOS...). I had an Apple Music subscription until last week and then switched to iTunes Match - which would seem to be when this began.

 

[rehkram]

Question: Is this related to how large your music collections are? Reason I mention this is when iTunes morphed to become Apple Music months ago on macOS & iOS I experienced a major spike in background activity at that time. I have a pretty huge music library of all my CDs & iTunes & Amazon etc purchased albums.

I noticed it pretty quickly and let it run over several days. Eventually it completed doing whatever it was doing (uploading my ripped CDs to the cloud was my guess but I didn't investigate in detail) and I've had no issues since. I'm on the current versions of both macOS & iOS. I subscribed to Apple Music last December and use the app a lot while working.

Is anyone having this problem with very small music libraries?

 

[Paulroberts123]

Just came off the phone to Apple support. Engineering suggested to make sure that automatic date and time was on. I remembered that in my privacy settings I had toggled off Setting Time Zone years ago. I logged out of the iTunes and app stores, toggled it back on, rebooted the phone, logged back into iTunes and turned sync on and now everything is downloading perfectly.
I’ll keep an eye on the background battery drain as that was a massive issue but it seems to have fixed it. I can now download matched and purchased songs. Also my iPad , which was experiencing the same issue is now downloading songs fine. Weird but it’s worked after 5 days of trying everything else!

 

[Aston441]

It’s not only the Music app, since 13.5 a lot of apps suffer of constant background activity. You can check this subject on Apple forum.

I'm so glad I got off the update train at 13.4.1.

Y'all are suckers 😂
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Overall, even on non beta ios i find it infuriating how the music app starts whenever connected to bluetooth on cars and other devices on it’s own. I do not like anything just starting without explicit direction from the consumer.

Download the AAAsilence song, or make your own. Problem solved. I did this 7 years ago.
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Interesting no one has brought up the virus contact tracing that was added in 13.5


It's the big change from 13.4

 

[topdrawer]

yeap. just checked mine. i haven't even listened to music. it says 59mins of back activity 39% of battery gone.


news is pretty crappy too. i only read the headlines in the shortcuts and it took 22% battery for 10 mins of screen time.
now they cna't tell me closing apps doesn't save battery

 

[d-m-z]

I had this problem back in April 2020. Apple Music and iTunes Match. The issue started when I replaced a computer. On the old computer, signed out of my iCloud/iTunes account, and deauthorized the computer. (And then wiped the computer.) On the new computer, signed into iCloud/iTunes, and authorized the computer. It would never properly sync my library. I got a message "Genius results can't be updated right now. An unknown error occurred (18004). Please try again later." And the "For You" section of Music (on the Mac) didn't load.

Shortly thereafter, I noticed my iPhone X would die in the middle of the day. Traced it to the issue described in this story. Music in the background was draining the battery. The only way I could get the battery drain to stop was to sign out of iTunes on my phone. Related: on a spare iPad that I fully reset, I tried signing in with my iCloud/iTunes. And it immediately started experiencing the battery drain. Another data point: on music.apple.com, the "For You" would often break. Another data point: my wife's devices with family sharing apple music were fine. No battery drain.

I didn't have time to troubleshoot beyond that. What fixed it for me was: cancel iTunes Match (which I had planned on doing anyway), and cancel Apple Music. The subscriptions don't stop immediately, so I waited until they expired. Then waited a few more days. Then signed up to Apple Music again. Everything worked fine after that. I was prepared to lose my library, but it all came back.

 

[Aston441]

Similar after updating to 13.5.1 -- went to bed and the next morning, phone was at 1% (normal is for a few percent loss overnight). No particular app was listed that seemed to be the culprit (usage was distributed over a group of apps), but I did learn that 16GB of cellular data was used despite the phone being on WIFI. Oddly, the cellular statistics on the iPhone showed 9.3GB (which is an accumulation of many months since I last reset the statistics), yet AT&T showed 16GB of using in that period. How can the iPhone not count the cellular data usage when it is (obviously) using it?

I just restarted my iPhone and it hasn't happened since.

Maybe virus tracing data is being sent off somewhere, and carriers have agreed not to count that data?

 

[dubvulture]

iPhone 11 Pro Max. 13.6 public beta. iTunes Match, no Apple Music.

View attachment 931897

Update:

I turned off iCloud music library. Then signed out of iCloud completely. Restarted phone. Signed back in to iCloud and iCloud music library. Let everything sync. So far that seems to have fixed the issue.

 

[Squuiid]

Update:

I turned off iCloud music library. Then signed out of iCloud completely. Restarted phone. Signed back in to iCloud and iCloud music library. Let everything sync. So far that seems to have fixed the issue.

Yep. That does work. #2

 

[Mt44]

I do.

I do, and am having the issue.
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Maybe apple are doing this deliberately to make people think they need a new iphone.

Maybe apple are not selling enough iphones and think now is the time to start draining everyone’s batteries.

Maybe people will discover this and buy an android instead.

🙄

 

[Donald Bridges]

I do not use Apple Music much on my phone. I use it on my laptop to make playlist to use on my HomePod.
However, I use Mixcloud on my phone for streams when out walking. It has been a major background app refresh drain on my phone if I do not swipe up to close the app.
Now, here’s the interesting part, I have background refresh turned off for Mixcloud. So why would it have 15+ hours of background app refresh in a day if this is disabled?

 

[Southshore]

I picked up a replacement Xs phone (cracked back screen) on Sunday at noon and began the update on the new phone around 12:30. By 11 pm music was loading painfully slow, about 1gb of the 15gb that i normally keep on the phone.

Spent an hour the next day with Apple support and noticed that the library on my iMac was not being recognized by iTunes. Fortunately, that fix was direct, but it took another 12 hours for the library update to cycle through.

On day 3 I got another Apple support rep to continue the process and after logging out and back into iTunes on the mac and the phone, the process began to work.

I did have a little over 2,000 downloads that never went through -until I saw this original post and went through the additional steps of cancelling all pending downloads, then going to each play list and downloading again from the cloud.

The battery never drained beyond a normal amount - phone was running 13.5.1.

 

[llamahunter]

Nah, it was 100% the music app.

It's not just the Music app. If you fix it (via force kill or reboot), it may switch to some other app. It was definitely Music originally, but now I've seen at least 3 other apps get into this tailspin. It seems to have something with smart charging (where it gets to 80% and then holds that level). The battery usage appears to peg shortly after it enters that state.
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something is definitely worse since 13.5.1. My 3rd gen iPad air battery is getting murdered by Overcast background activity. Sounds like an OS audio bug.

I've seen it on non audio apps, too. Some background activity OS bug, for sure, tho.

 

[4487549]

Step 1: Delete the Music app

 

[NapoleonIV]

I noticed this on my phone the other day. It happened after I synced my phone with a computer running Catalina rather than Mojave for the first time. I thought it was just because of the sync, but it happened a number of times. Normally I get all day better life.

 

[mi7chy]

iOS has historically severely limited background tasks to avoid battery issues. Wonder if this means they're finally relaxing the restrictions and trying to find a balance.

 

[DaveMcM76]

Looks to me like this is still an issue in iOS 14 - I'm running developer beta 2 and showing that the Music app has over 16 hours of "background activity" (52%) in the last 24 hours despite me having not used it at all during that time.

 

[RedBear]

Mine started in the same time frame, but before I’d updated to 13.5.1. Two apps affected, Music and a home security app. Tried updating iOS, tried hard restarts, tried booting all apps from memory, tried turning off background activity permissions for the affected non Apple app, tried low power mode & airplane mode—all no change.

What finally worked was logging out of iCloud and back in, which took care of Music, and updating the home security app (which sucks because that update is total crap with major bugs of its own, hence why I hadn’t updated it). 24 hours so far and counting, drain has not returned yet.

iPhone 6s+, no Apple Music

Same! 6s Plus has been going nuts, getting hot and apps locking up for several days, and it started before I applied the 13.5.1 update, which I had to manually download the multi-gigabyte full IPSW and apply with iTunes because the phone couldn’t complete the 299MB update after multiple tries and even leaving it to finish overnight. Kept getting stuck on “Preparing update” forever, but before that it would also take forever to try to download the relatively small update. Even applying the full update over USB cable with iTunes was a nightmare as it kept having problems getting through the part where it backs up the phone locally. I was surprised the update ever succeeded at all.

Certain apps like YouTube have been virtually unusable during this time period, acting as if I have a super bad connection but I’m on wifi and other iOS devices have no issues on the same network/internet connection. Many soft and hard reboots haven’t changed the problem. Turning Airplane Mode on and off fixed nothing. The phone even seemed to have unusual difficulty reconnecting to the wifi network while no other computers or devices in the house have any such issues. Phone so hot all the time whether it’s unplugged or charging. Only cools down when it’s completely powered off. And it all started suddenly a few days ago. There were no symptoms of battery issues or performance loss or apps locking up prior to that. Left the phone fully charged but unplugged one night and woke up to a dead phone that started charging at 1%. I assumed the battery was going bad but that kind of thing normally doesn’t just suddenly happen overnight.

If all this is fixed by something as simple as logging out of iCloud or reinstalling the Music app, I’m going to be extraordinarily irritated with Apple.
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I’ll ask again and re-phrase. Does everyone with this issue subscribe to iTunes Match?

I have the issue and have iTunes Match.

 

[jimwraith]

I am 99.9% sure this happened with my 7th Gen iPod touch. It went from 100% to completely dead in about 4 hours.

I ended up going into recovery mode and restoring from backup. It's been a couple days and it seems to be better.

 

[Zaren]

This is why I'm still sitting on 13.4.1 (and not just because I'm lazy about updates). I heard about this last week, and I'm not going to 13.5 until this gets resolved.

 

[Mrs.G]

Nice to know that it wasn't just my iPX!

Come one Apple - please fix this ASAP!

 

[KoenGeorge]

Both my wife and I have the same issue on our devices. One’s an iPhone Xr which seems to be fine after a power cycle. The other’s an iPad Pro 9.7” which I had given up on and already ordered a new iPad. So now I can send that one back and hope that Apple releases a fix very soon. My sweet iPad Pro is unusable since it’s super hot and super slow. Problems started last week, on Thursday 2nd of July if I remember correctly. The issue could not be resolved by restoring from iCloud backup or setup as new device.
And for completeness: no Apple Music subscription but I do use iTunes Match.

 

[johnnylarue]

iTunes and Hassle Music have been a goddamned garbage fire for well over a decade now. Perpetually half-broken nanny software from hell. A total embarrassment for a company that essentially brought the concept of non-physical music collections to the masses in the first place.

Other than that it’s pretty good. 😝

 

[diamondsw]

Interesting no one has brought up the virus contact tracing that was added in 13.5
It's the big change from 13.4

Because this is an issue with 13.5.1, and specifically implicates the Music app. Unless you think the Music app is using the contact tracing API?

 

[scottish]

I’m experiencing this but still on 13.4.1