Arc Mini : excessive battery useage

I have the iPhone 14 Pro Max. Been wondering why I don’t get the battery life from my phone that I would expect. On two separate days, Arc Mini was using a substantial amount of the battery, even compared to the main Arc app.

What am I doing wrong?


That’s weird! I’ve got no idea…

For me, Arc is 14% and Mini is 5%, which is about right - I spend much more foreground time in Arc, and foreground time is where almost all the energy cost comes from.

How much “on screen” time do you see for each, if you tap on the rows to toggle the display?

For me I’m seeing Arc with 6h 16m on screen (for last 10 days), and Mini with 1 minute.

Aside: That 1 minute for Mini is clearly nonsense, given I check Mini every morning, as part of my workday “test devices, etc” ritual of checking the apps are running smoothly on every test device. I spend at least a minute every day checking log files, scheduled task states, and a bunch of other things. iOS has got itself confused there!

Anyway, to dig into what’s going on on your phone, you could have a look in the log files in Mini, to see if anything stands out. Though I don’t know what to look for specifically, because there’s nothing I can think of that would be consuming excess energy. Mini doesn’t do the backups tasks, nor daily export tasks, nor several other scheduled tasks that are Arc App specific. So by rights it should almost always be consuming less energy, not more.

Actually, one sign of something going weird would be if the debug logs in Mini are all short duration, or frequently short in duration. There’s one log file per app session, from launch to termination. So if the log files are all hours or days long, that’s good, but if they’re frequently very short, that would mean the app is getting terminated and relaunched repeatedly, which would cost energy.

I think I actually had the same issue back in November after installing Arc Mini for the first time, it made my battery life unusable for several days and I was too busy to troubleshoot it so I just deleted Arc Mini and haven’t installed it back since then. It also seemed like when Arc Mini was recording instead of the main app, that it was overwriting the correct prior activity type classifications in the timeline of the main app with bad classifications repeatedly. The timeline looked reliable when the main app was recording, but then when Arc Mini was recording it got worse data and even changed the already correct data from the main app to worse. That’s just how it worked out for me of trying out using both apps at the same time for the first time. I think I waited a week or so to see if the issue goes away but it didn’t. It was probably the 1.4.0 version that I was using at the time.

Also I would like to note that it would be useful to be able to access the debug information that is available in Arc Mini in the main app too for those who don’t want to use Arc Mini as well or had trouble with the resulting complexities of the two combined apps recording. (I wanted to post a suggestion for this earlier with other things as well but didn’t have time to do so.)

(One more thing about Arc Mini is that since I have the “Button Shapes” Display & Text Size accessibility setting turned on on my iPhone, and unlike the main Arc app, Arc Mini actually supports these kinds of built-in accessibility features and settings with more native iOS UI elements, I noticed a small rectangular invisible button at the bottom center of the Arc Mini timeline that when I pressed opened up an empty window/tab, not sure if that actually did anything affecting functioning the app. :grimacing:)

Here is a bit more information. Not sure what I need to be looking at. Hopefully something will jump out to give a clue on what’s happening!





As an FYI, I only open Mini once a day to ensure it’s up and running. Then for the other 23 hours and 59 minutes it’s just running in the background.

This has been on my todos for a while. I’ll get it done eventually. Though it’s a quite overwhelming amount of detail, that most people shouldn’t need or want to see. So I don’t want those views sitting there for everyone to see unless they turn on some “Show me debug stuff” toggle somewhere in Settings first.

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I thought that might be the button for closing the full map view, but in Mini that button is off to the side. So… no idea what that button is! :joy: You could poke around Mini’s source code on Github, and see if anything stands out. I don’t remember there being any button there at any stage, but maybe I did have a close map button in the middle at some stage, then added the side one and left some relic of the previous button in the code by mistake.

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About the same as me then. Though I do give it a thorough check over, but it’s the same routine every day so I get through the checks probably within a minute.

All of your screenshots look very normal. Unfortunately no clues there :disappointed: As far as I can see, everything looks to be running normally and correctly. The uptimes (as seen in the debug log file durations) are all sensible, ranging from a couple of hours to a couple of days. So the theory of it being a problem of constant terminations and restarts doesn’t fit.

It’s probably worth checking in iOS Settings → Privacy, to make sure Mini has all the permissions it needs. Location Services set to “Always”, and “Precise Location” turned on. Motion & Fitness turned on. In General → Background App Refresh, that should be turned on too. That should be everything.

Though if any of those were turned off I’d expect to see some weirdness in the debug views. But really not sure what else to check for!