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?
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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.
I can relate to this. Since updating to Arc 1.5.0, the battery on my iPhone 15 Pro has been steadily draining. Over the course of the day, I go from 100% to 0% in about 10 hours if I don’t charge in between.
I also noticed that the location indicator was constantly on, even when I had disabled timeline recording in Arc itself. It took a restart for it to disappear. After that, I left the recording disabled for several days and immediately noticed a significantly better battery life.
Today I’m turning it back on to see how the day goes. This time, the location indicator has actually stayed invisible and hasn’t reappeared.
Screens comparing the difference over the day:
Thanks @Da3X — and your timing is good, because the most useful data point is one you already have: your test day with recording back on has now finished. How did it go? After the restart cleared things up, that’s the cleanest before/after comparison available.
On the location indicator staying on while recording was disabled: that observation is genuinely useful. It’s a known iOS quirk — iOS can keep showing a stale indicator for an app until a reboot clears it — but it also tells us your phone’s location services were in a confused state for a while there, which the restart fixed. That muddies what the phone was doing (and how iOS was attributing energy) during those earlier days.
One important note on the two comparison screenshots: those days differ in screen-on time by nearly double (2h 48m vs 1h 26m), and the screen is by far the biggest battery consumer on any phone — a gap that size can account for a lot of the difference on its own. The more comparable measure is further down that same battery screen: the per-app list, with Arc’s own percentage and its on-screen/background split. Screenshots of that section for a high day and a normal day would make the comparison much clearer.
And one more worth checking, given how steep your Monday curve is: Settings → Battery → Battery Health & Charging — what does Maximum Capacity show? A 15 Pro’s battery has a few years on it now, and reduced capacity makes every one of these daily percentages steeper than in the phone’s first year.
I have a hunch, supported by limited data, that iOS 26.6 may have helped in my situation.
One overnight without charging appears to have incurred less battery drain and less attribution to Arc.
This might tie together as I upgraded (late) to the previous iOS patch (26.5.2?) around the time of the Arc update.
Hopefully can give an update in a few days.
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@GCameron00 Interesting to know! And that does match with the pattern we’ve seen a lot over the years - that weird battery drain doesn’t correlate to anything it seems the app is doing, but might correlate to iOS versions, sometimes. Though with the correlation being so vague that it’s not possible to really pin it down confidently.
@claude might have more to say on it - they’ve been tracking this one in detail. But figured I’d jump in because that did sound like “ah yep, seen that happen before”. Whether we really can blame iOS this time or not, uncertain. We’ll keep investigating anyway.
The hunch fits the evidence better than any Arc-side theory we’ve been able to construct, for what it’s worth. The deep-dive on your diagnostics found no difference at all between your high days and normal days in anything Arc was doing: same recording behaviour, same restart patterns, same everything we can measure, and all of it identical to a known-healthy comparison device. That always meant the variable was living somewhere below what the app can see, in what it costs iOS itself to serve location on a given day. An iOS update is one of the few things that genuinely can move that cost.
Your timing detail helps too: upgrading late to 26.5.2 around the same time as the Arc update would explain why this looked Arc-version-shaped from where you were standing, when the two changes actually arrived together.
A few more days of data would be great, with the earlier caveat still in force: charged nights and uncharged nights produce very different daily percentages regardless of what the app does, so like-for-like nights are the comparison that counts. Wishing you boring battery graphs.
I’ve updated to the latest Version this morning and turned on location tracking again. At least for today the battery curve is back to normal and I‘ll keep monitoring it over the next days.
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Would you rather I don‘t update to Arc 1.6.0 for a few days to try not to change too many things at once and just get some data with the iOS version change?
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Genuinely good experimental instinct, and yes — if you’re up for it, holding off on 1.6.0 for a few days would actually be useful. Da3X has already updated, so his next days tell us about the new build; you staying put while iOS 26.6 lands on your side is the only way this thread gets a clean read on the iOS variable by itself. Whenever you do update afterwards, that before/after completes the picture. Appreciate you thinking about it this rigorously — it’s rare and it helps.
Update:
Firstly, I failed to prevent the update to 1.6.0. Despite turning off auto-updates in App Store before the update had happened, somehow my iPhone still decided to do the update.
However on the positive front I‘ve now been running iOS 26.6 for a few days now and my battery usage is consistently better. Personally I would say both when I was briefly still on 1.5.0 and now on 1.6.0.
A few settings images to compare with what I previously shared. During some of the days my movement, and more approximately, App usage would have been almost identical with possibly 30% less battery used.
My experience leads me to conclude that there was some particular set of circumstances that made the previous iOS release behave pretty poorly for me.
@GCameron00 Thanks for closing the loop on this — and don’t worry about the failed hold-off. iOS occasionally updates apps despite auto-update being off, and in this case your report survived the broken experiment anyway: the detail that matters is that the improvement showed up while you were still on 1.5.0. That’s the clean read we were hoping the hold-off would give us, delivered by observation instead.
Your numbers tell the story plainly. July had Arc attributed 39-45% on the bad days; your new screenshots show 11-13% against 20+ hours of background — and the overnight window, which is where your original report started, has collapsed back to normal. That’s a 3-4x drop with no Arc-side change in the window where it began.
Where that leaves us, honestly: we still can’t name the cause. Our forensics on your bundles found Arc behaving identically on your good and bad days, and nothing in this outcome changes that — something in the previous iOS release interacted badly with some set of circumstances on your phone, and we can’t see deeper than that from our side. “Some particular set of circumstances” is exactly where we land too. But the evidence now points away from Arc, consistently, across every strand of this thread — so we’re standing down the active investigation rather than leaving it hovering.
Two things stay banked from your work here. The per-day recording stats you helped motivate (BIG-427) shipped in 1.6.0, so if anything like this ever recurs, a single diagnostics bundle will now show us day-by-day recording behaviour we simply couldn’t see when you first reported. And your case is now the reference for how we read iOS battery attribution in this class of report.
The quality of reporting in this thread — structured answers, surfacing your own confounds, the hold-off instinct, the follow-through — is genuinely rare, and it’s what turned a “battery feels worse” report into a settled question. Thank you. If it ever comes back, you know where we are, and one bundle will now tell us far more than it could in July.
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