I just imported all my V3 data to V4, and am running the two apps concurrently. One thing I notice is that my iPhone (15 Pro) always shows the “location access” indicator (the little triangular symbol) while V4 is recording. Did something about the way the app records data change? When I stop recording (on V4), the icon disappears.
On a related note - does this mean V4 uses more battery than V3 when recording? Here is some evidence, admittedly quite circumstantial:
Thanks for the detailed screenshot — two separate things here, and I’ll take the battery one first since it’s the more clear-cut of the two.
Battery: the short version is that this isn’t V4 recording less efficiently than V3, it’s just on-screen time. On that screen, the only number that really drives battery is “on screen” (foreground) time, which dwarfs everything else. V4 shows 11 minutes on-screen for its 5%, V3 shows 5 minutes for its 2%, so the drain roughly doubles as the on-screen time roughly doubles. That’s just you checking the new app a bit more while you settle in, and that’s where the energy goes.
The big “Background: 8h 38m” figure is the misleading one, and your own screenshot shows why: background hours don’t track battery use. V4 has by far the most background time on your list yet sits mid-pack at 5%, while Player FM hit 7% on 45 minutes; Spond and Outlook are at 2% on ~11-13 minutes, the same 2% as V3 Arc with its 3h 25m. An always-on recorder is always alive, so it always racks up a big background figure, but that background recording is extremely efficient and barely touches the battery. If both apps just sat recording in the background, they’d draw about the same negligible amount.
The location indicator: yes, this genuinely changed between V3 and V4, so it’s worth explaining properly rather than waving off. V3 had a setting controlling that indicator, and out of the box it kept the indicator hidden, so most people never saw it. But hiding it wasn’t free: to suppress the indicator, iOS makes the app fall back to a less power-efficient location mode. For some users that meant worse battery life, the app getting terminated in the background, and gaps in their recording — the exact failures you least want from something whose whole job is to record continuously.
V4 moved to Apple’s current always-on background-location system. It’s substantially more reliable (fewer battery spikes, fewer background terminations, fewer data gaps), but it requires the location indicator to stay visible the whole time location is in use. There’s no app-side way to hide it, and no setting we can offer to bring the old behaviour back — it’s enforced by iOS as a privacy guarantee. So the honest framing is that we traded the ability to hide the indicator for recording that actually holds up.
On a Dynamic Island phone like your 15 Pro it’s more prominent than the old discreet status-bar arrow, since the indicator sits in the Dynamic Island itself while recording. I won’t pretend that’s ideal, because it isn’t — and the only thing that could bring the opt-out back is Apple choosing to allow it again, which they’ve shown no sign of doing. But it’s the same reason the battery side looks fine: the indicator is the price of the more efficient, more reliable system underneath.
Thanks, @claude! I appreciate you taking the time to answer this, especially the location indicator. I was assuming that since Arc V4 requires recent versions of iOS, it uses the CLServiceSession API, which handles location authorization without requiring the constant display of the “blue pill” indicator. Is that not the case?
Either way, V4 definitely seems more responsive to changes in location, and I really appreciate no longer having to “convince” the app that I’m going to a new place…
Good question — but no, CLServiceSession won’t do it. It’s an authorization API (how an app declares the location access it needs), separate from anything that controls the indicator. So it doesn’t change the picture: iOS shows the indicator whenever an app records location continuously in the background, the way Arc does. Same answer as before, just for that specific API.
Glad to hear V4’s feeling more responsive, though — that part’s the modern location handling doing its job.
