The Apple Music streaming app may be causing some iPhone users to suffer disproportionate battery life drain – even when the app is not in use.
Hundreds of complaints have sprung up on Apple’s support forums and Reddit, suggesting a potential issue with the latest versions of iOS 13. Some are reporting hours of unconscious background app activity is drinking down up to 95% of battery life even though they had not even opened the app.
The threads are littered with similar, albeit less extreme stories from users with iPhones running iOS 13.5.1, experiencing upwards of 50% drain when they are not using Apple Music.
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Another user, Mojo06, wrote: “I just purchased a new iPhone 11 a few days ago, and my battery is crashing so fast. I haven’t even used the Apple Music App yet and it says that it has been running in the background for over 18 hours and has used 95% of my battery. My phone is also getting very hot from this. I am concerned this will kill my battery on my new phone.”
u/ritty84 on Reddit
MacRumors points out that this isn’t a new issue, but there has been a surge of new cases in the last week, according to the reports. That suggests its something within iOS 13.5.1, or a server-side change Apple has made, causing the issue.
Some users have managed to rectify the issue by force quitting the app, restarting the iPhone, turning off the background app refresh in settings and even turning off mobile data. Some of those are more sustainable than others and, for Apple Music subscribers, deleting the app permanently certainly isn’t.
Apple usually has a response when these issues become widely reported, so we expect the company to clean up whatever’s going in with the next iOS update or with a back-end change that achieves the goal quietly. So far the firm has not acknowledged the issue.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.