High battery consumption

Arc has been consuming too much battery even when stationary. In a day, it has consumed 30% battery. Is it normal for the app?
(Iphone 11, ios 14.2)


For that little foreground activity, 30% is not normal. <10% is normal. I’m at 6% right now, mostly background recording but the occasional timeline correction.

I’d suggest swipe close Arc, restart your phone, try again.

Definitely not normal!

If it were my phone, first thing I’d check is if there’s any nonsense in the timeline data for today - anything that the processing engine might be struggling to make sense of. Or if the phone has gone into one of those occasional weird states where it produces low quality location data for a period of hours, for no known reason.

When you’re stationary, Arc goes into “Sleep Mode”, using almost no battery at all. But if something is messing with Sleep Mode, forcing Arc to wake up and go into active recording, for example nonsense location data that tricks the recording engine into briefly thinking you’re moving, then that’ll waste battery.

If that happens, as long as the nonsense data isn’t too messy, Arc should go back into Sleep Mode within a few minutes, once it’s been able to determine that yeah, it’s not real movement. But if it keeps happening throughout the day, that’ll still add up to wasteful minutes of recording time.

If that’s then combined with previous nonsense mess in the timeline in the same day, then the processing engine could also be getting pushed into doing wasteful work, trying to clean up some mess that it can’t make sense of (but a human could probably make sense of much more easily). In those cases, cleaning up any mess you see in today’s timeline will help out.

Oh, and the other thing to be aware of is that iOS’s Settings → Battery view doesn’t distinguish between energy use while plugged in to power and while using battery. So it’s possible that Arc was for example doing daily backups or file exports or some other housekeeping task, while plugged in to power, thus pushing up the percentage on that view, but without actually having any impact on daily battery life (due to it all only happening while being plugged in to power).

Actually, it can be normal if you didn’t use your phone for anything else. If nothing is running except Arc, almost all battery drainage is due to Arc – even if it’s not much. I have an old iPhone that basically just lies around on my desk plugged in and it shows 91% usage for the Covid tracking framework because that’s basically the only thing that phone does all day.

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True!

Though I usually leave this detail out when trying to explain things, because it’s counterintuitive, and more difficult to explain. We assume the Battery view shows us numbers that we can compare between days and between devices, but it really doesn’t :roll_eyes:

I keep a few test devices with me, wherever I go, for testing Arc on each different major iPhone generation. Those devices only do Arc and Arc Mini (and Arc v4!), so they show those apps as using high percentage of battery each day. But a single battery charge actually lasts 2-3 days on those phones, because Arc is using almost no battery at all (even though the Battery view misleads us to think otherwise).