I’ve been seeing much higher power usage since updating to version 1.5.0, like 39%-45% assigned to Arc showing up in Settings Battery.
Started Monday, still going on.
Where can I look to understand why I get this high drain?
Hi @GCameron00 — thanks for the screenshot, it’s genuinely useful (the per-day chart especially). This is worth a proper look, so a few questions to get us to the bottom of it:
- How much is the battery actually dropping in real terms? e.g. “unplugged at 8am at 100%, down to 30% by evening” — that measures the real drain directly, independent of how iOS attributes it.
- Has it stayed elevated every day since Monday? The chart in your screenshot shows Monday spiking but the days before looking normal — if you tap the more recent bars, do they look like Monday or like the week before?
- Anything different about where you’ve been since Monday? Travel, a new work spot, somewhere with weak reception or deep indoors? A phone struggling for a location fix burns real energy trying, and that’s the most common cause of a sudden change.
- Which iPhone model, for our reference?
And the one that helps most: on the day view in Arc (pick Monday or any bad day since), open the ⋯ menu and choose Export Diagnostics — it packages what we need to see what recording was doing on that day. Send it to matt@bigpaua.com and we’ll dig in.
One bit of background on reading that screen: the 13h 36m “background” figure is normal and expected — Arc is always alive by design, and that standby time is usually extremely cheap. Which is exactly why a day like your Monday stands out as worth investigating rather than shrugging off.
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Thanks for the reply, let me try to give you some useful answers to your questions:
How much is the battery actually dropping?
I‘m charging, but based both on my feel and on the charts I don‘t think it would last a day. I started investigating because it felt like the battery was draining faster.
Has it stayed elevated every day since Monday?
No. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday were all about the same. Thursday was more normal as is today. I don‘t have a good explanation (see next answer too).
Anything different about where you’ve been since Monday?
Yes and no. I was back from a holiday last Sunday. So the previous week I was in a different country. However, since Monday it has been normal. Normal work location, same mode of transport as a the whole of June, normal routine. Friday I was on a train for a few hours in the afternoon. But it is a trip I often make. Saturday was different, I ran a half marathon race, which I‘ve not done for years and never this exact route.
Which iPhone model?
iPhone 16 Pro
I understand the background figure, makes sense. I‘ve just done the Diag Export (for Friday) and I‘ll send it in just a moment.
Two more screenshots in case they help.
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Thanks — those answers plus the diagnostics bundle were exactly what we needed, and we’ve now been through Friday’s data in detail, including comparing it line-by-line against a reference device running the same version with normal battery use.
The clear findings first: Arc’s recording behaviour on your phone looks textbook. Sleep mode is engaging properly overnight (roughly 22.5 hours a day in low-power sleep, with only brief periodic check-ins), trips are recording normally, and nothing is running when it shouldn’t be. Just as tellingly, the app’s behaviour on your high days is essentially identical to its behaviour on your normal days — Thursday and Wednesday look the same in the recording data, despite iOS attributing very different battery use to them. And none of it differs meaningfully from the reference device either.
Which means the honest answer is: whatever is costing the extra energy on those days isn’t visible in what the app can currently observe about itself. That’s genuinely useful — it rules out a lot — but it leaves the mystery open, and we don’t like open mysteries.
Three things from here:
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One thing worth trying right away: restart the phone. Bluntest tool there is, but system-level oddities of this shape do sometimes clear with one.
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This case has directly bumped a planned upgrade up our list: richer self-diagnostics inside the recording engine (BIG-427), so that next time we look at a case like this, more of the answer is in the data. Your report is logged on that ticket.
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Keep an eye on it over the coming week. Intermittent patterns like this — elevated for a few days, normal again, like your Thursday and Saturday — do usually settle on their own, and recording behaviour being identical across your good and bad days points the same way. If you’re still seeing elevated days into next week, let us know which days specifically, and we’ll take it further from there.
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Thanks again for looking into this.
I have already tried restarting the phone. Probably Tuesday sometime. But I‘ll give it another go.
Looking at the iPhone battery information, one hunch I have is that the iPhone doesn‘t appear to attribute anything to an app when the phone is charging. Which means if I charge my phone overnight Arc (and other apps) gets a free pass on the 8 or so hours while I‘m sleeping bringing down the total. Which explains why Thursday is lower, I charged Weds->Thursday, but not the high days.
This doesn‘t explain why it feels like higher drain. As I said, I started with the feeling and then went looking.
I‘ll keep eye on it and get back to you if there is anything that feels worth sharing.
Worth confirming your hunch, because it matches what we’ve established from our side: iOS doesn’t attribute energy used while the phone is charging. We’ve verified that first-hand on iOS 27, and the evidence for iOS 26 points the same way.
Which makes your Thursday observation genuinely useful context. On a night the phone sits on a charger, the overnight hours mostly don’t count toward the app’s daily figure; on a night it runs on battery, they all do. That alone can move the per-day percentage substantially without anything changing in what the app actually does overnight. It lines up with the pattern you described, and with what we found in your diagnostics (identical recording behaviour across your high and normal days).
The watch arrangement stays as agreed — and if elevated days persist this week in a way that doesn’t track with charging patterns, that’s exactly the detail worth including when you report back.