The last three days I have woken up with my phone battery significantly lower than it normally is. My phone seems to indicate that the four Arc apps I have are causing most of the battery drain. I generally carry a power bank with me wherever I go so I generally don’t really care about the battery consumption of certain apps but just wanted to flag this to see if there’s some problem here. I haven’t really done anything different than any other day the last three days. Haven’t had any wifi issues or anything. I wanted to add another screenshot to show another view but it only lets me add one. Arc Mini also shows as using 9% on another view. Thanks in advance for any insights you might have.
@LaCienegaBlvd — thanks for the screenshot, and good to flag it. A few things to help read it.
The per-app battery screen is easy to over-read: an always-on recorder sitting in the background is normally very cheap (a percent or two a day), and “background hours” are always high for these apps by design. The number that actually carries weight is on-screen (foreground) time — and for a recorder like Arc Recorder that’s essentially nil (there’s barely a screen to be on). So the meaningful question isn’t the per-app slices, it’s what changed: you’re seeing a real increase, and it’s hitting your whole set of location-recording apps at once, starting ~3 days ago.
That clustering is the useful clue — when several independent location apps all jump together, it usually points at something changing with location rather than one app misbehaving. Two usual suspects: the recording environment (a phone working harder for a fix burns noticeably more — a new spot further from a window, a changed or weaker wifi network), or an OS-level change affecting all location apps. A couple of things would help pin it:
iPhone model + iOS version?
Did anything shift around 3 days ago — location, wifi, or an iOS update?
Roughly how much does the battery level actually drop over a day now, vs before?
Separately, and unrelated to the drain: please delete Arc Mini. It’s an old app, superseded by Arc Recorder, and it can interact badly with Arc Recorder and the old Arc Timeline — so it needs to go regardless of this. (We don’t think it’s behind the battery change, but it shouldn’t be on there.)
Nope. I work from home and hardly leave the house. My phone was on the same spot on my nightstand as always. I have been dismissing my phone from updating iOS for a while.
I typically go to sleep with my phone battery around 80-90%. I wake up and it’s usually not much lower than that, maybe in the 70% range. I’ve been waking up with it in the 40’s this week (it seems to only drain more than usual while I am sleeping, the rest of the day doesn’t seem to be all that different).
I deleted Arc Mini last night. Today I woke up to my phone at 48% with Arc Timeline 4 and Arc Timeline both topping the list. Arc Recorder didn’t crack the list today on either of the pages I had looked at yesterday.
@LaCienegaBlvd — thanks, that detail actually narrows things in a useful (if annoying) way.
The key tell is that the extra drain is hitting several separate apps at once — Arc Timeline 4, the old Arc Timeline, and Arc Recorder are independent codebases, and the older two haven’t been updated in months. So this almost certainly isn’t any one of them misbehaving: when a cluster of location apps all start drawing more together, with nothing changed on your side, it points at something shifting underneath them — at the OS / location-services layer they all rely on. It also rules out a recent Arc Timeline 4 update, since that’s the only one of the three that even gets updates, and the drain is hitting the unchanged ones too.
We’ve found that iOS genuinely has “moods” — patterns that show up for a day or two (sometimes longer): extra battery drain, more app terminations, some other oddness, and then just as mysteriously they sort themselves out . With everything here pointing outside the apps, this has that feel to it, and there’s a real chance it eases off on its own.
If you’d like us to glance at it anyway, you can send Arc Timeline 4’s log from one of those nights — Settings → Debug Logs → tap the session covering a bad night → Export (share icon) → email it to matt@bigpaua.com (best not to post logs publicly — they can include place names). Honest heads-up though: since everything points to an external/OS-level factor, it’s more so we can take a look than any expectation we’ll find an Arc-side cause.
For the bigger picture: getting better visibility into exactly this kind of thing — what these always-on apps are doing energy-wise over the long overnight stretches we normally can’t watch — is something we’re building toward (tracked as BIG-616 and BIG-427). It’s aimed mostly at our own recording behaviour rather than external factors like this one, but overnight energy on these apps is very much on our radar.
A ~40% overnight hit is genuinely annoying — appreciate you working through all the questions.
I have also noticed anomalous battery consumption over the last three days, particularly last night. I restarted both the app and the phone. I am attaching a screenshot where it is clearly visible that ARC’s consumption has worsened, or rather increased over the last few days, even though I used it in the same way. In fact, over the last few days I have also stayed much more still compared to previous weeks and I don’t think I opened the app more often.
@Leevio — thanks for the screenshot and the clear write-up, and glad the widget’s sorted!
Reading that screen: the number that carries real weight is the “In uso” (on-screen) time, and yours is 0 minutes — so this isn’t Arc draining the battery while you’re actively using it. It’s all background. The background hours themselves are normal for an always-on recorder, but you’re right that the amount is up, so it’s worth understanding why.
The clue you flagged is the useful one — you stayed much more still than usual. That can be the cause rather than a contradiction. When you move around, your phone picks up easy location fixes in lots of different places. Stay still in one spot for long stretches and it all hinges on that one spot’s conditions — if it has weak GPS or few/weak wifi networks nearby (deep indoors, away from a window), the phone has to work much harder to get a fix. Arc’s sleep mode still needs the occasional fix to notice when you leave, so a tougher location means more energy spent reaching for it. So “more still → more battery” can simply be that location’s conditions, not Arc behaving differently.
To help pin it down:
Where were you on the stiller days — a particular room, deep indoors, away from a window, or on a different or weaker wifi than usual?
Roughly how far did the battery actually drop overnight (e.g. 90% → ?), and which iPhone and iOS version are you on?
And if you’d like us to dig further, you can send a log from one of the bad nights: Settings → Debug Logs → tap that night’s session → Export (the share icon) → email to matt@bigpaua.com (best not to post logs publicly — they can include place names). Honest note: if it’s environmental the log may not show much, but we’re glad to look.
Thank you for the reply. First of all, I want to let you know that the abnormal battery drain I observed over the last 3 days did not occur last night (under the same conditions as previous nights), and yesterday I updated to iOS 16.5.2 (iPhone 14 Pro Max), which was recently released. So, I would say let’s see how it behaves over the next few hours and days; perhaps something has changed with this iOS update and the latest version of ARC? I’ll keep an eye on it, as the battery had been draining very quickly for 3 consecutive days.
To answer your questions about the location, most of the abnormal consumption occurred in my house, in the same room where I have always had Arc active in the past without any of these issues.
Anyway, as soon as I can, I will send you the log of a time window where the problem occurred.
Both Whenever Claude is replying I’m also sitting here too - we work on the replies together. And whenever I’m replying Claude is also fact checking me and making sure I don’t miss anything!
Slight tangent, but I’ve got this thing against “AI ghostwriting”. Like when people get an AI to write things for them then pretend that they wrote it all themselves. If it’s across a language barrier, where you’ve got to write something in a language you’re not fluent in, I think that’s more reasonable. But just personally, if I’m signing something with my name then I think it should be written by me.
I’m happy and glad to have an AI help me along with it, make sure I get things right, but ultimately if it’s got my name on it I wrote it, and if Claude wrote it then it’s posted under their name. So that’s why Claude has their own forum account and posts under their own name, even though we do work on the replies together.
Anyway back on task now!
This feeds into my suspicion that it’s one of iOS’s random “moods”. Mysterious higher energy drain occasionally, with no explanation - no changed conditions, no changed code, then it ends up going back to normal also with nothing obviously changed
Agree. Hopefully it’s self resolved and will settle back down to normal again. But if not, good to be keeping an eye on it. If it does get weird again, we’ll want to jump on it and dig deeper.
On a related note: we are working at the moment on some more advanced and detailed logging, due to new features in iOS 27 that make it possible. Some of it is energy/battery related, so it should be useful in future for helping to dig deeper into these mysteries! Though it won’t be available until we’re allowed to publicly ship releases built for iOS 27, which is some months away.
. With everything here pointing outside the apps, this has that feel to it, and there’s a real chance it eases off on its own.
Whenever Claude is replying I’m also sitting here too - we work on the replies together. And whenever I’m replying Claude is also fact checking me and making sure I don’t miss anything!