Wallet draining battery in iOS 14.5

I'm almost certain that this is a bug with Apple Card family sharing.

My iPhone (XR on iOS 14.6) and Apple Watch (series 3 on watchOS 7.4.1) have been draining battery way faster than usual the past few days. Normally they both last two days between charges, but have been lasting only 9 hours or so. I’ve tried restarting both devices, removing background processes, and updating the watch to watchOS 7.5. The same thing is happening on my wife’s iPhone (same as mine) and watch (series 6 on watchOS 7.5), even though there's not much in common with our phone/watch usage patterns. 

I then noticed on the iPhone’s 10-day battery history that Wallet had used 35% of the phone’s battery life in the past week. This wasn’t showing in the 24-hour battery history for some reason, even though the battery decline was steady throughout the day. The 10-day history showed that battery usage was close to 100% on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday but not on Saturday or before Thursday. 

I then realized that I had activated Apple Card family sharing a couple weeks ago and switched to it as my primary iCloud payment card, but no purchases had been made until Apple subscriptions auto-renewed this week. Those transactions happened on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, exactly when the battery drain was happening. I use Apple Wallet NFC with other cards all the time, but haven’t used the Apple Card other than these renewals. 

Based on this, it looks like there’s a bug with Apple Card family sharing that’s draining battery only on days that the card is used (or maybe only on days that it has scheduled transactions). I’ve switched all payments off of that card for now, and hopefully that will solve the problem. 

Update: I took the inconvenient step of doing a factory reset of my iPhone and then restored it from iCloud. The problem is now gone. Battery life is greatly improved and Wallet is near the bottom of my list of apps using battery.

Update: since Sunday, when I turned off all Apple Card purchases, battery life has been great. The one time I had an issue was when I opened the Wallet app, which started the battery drain again, but it went away when I force quit the Wallet app. I’ve been making plenty of NFC payments with other cards, so it’s an issue with the Wallet app and the Apple Card specifically.

This morning I was losing about 9% an hour on my watch until I went Watch -> General -> Background App Refresh and turned off Wallet. Since then I've been averaging about 4% per hour - which is more than acceptable for me.

Also my open item in feedback has gone from "no recent similar reports" to "more than 10", so I think it's officially on Apple's radar.

I just finished up a call with Apple Senior Advisor. He documented the issues the same as this thread. I was able to remove the Apple Card from my Wallet on my Watch and battery has returned to normal drain 4% per hour. They said they would email me if they need any data.

Update: My husband's iPhone indicated Wallet was 51% of his battery usage today and he has not used his Wallet app in days!!!

I contacted Apple Support via a chat yesterday and the agent determined that my husband and I should take all 4 of our devices into the Genius Bar at the Apple Store not far from our home today. We did and...

This late June 2021 battery drain issue seems to be connected to the latest iOS upgrade and I'm guessing the Apple Card Family Share feature. Expect an iOS update soon.

In the meantime, powering my iPhone off for 15 minutes (I'm the family member who has our one and only Apple Card), seems to have helped a lot. My husband is still sharing my card but all of our batteries seem a lot better this afternoon after that 15 minute powering down of my iPhone. If our batteries start to drain rapidly again, we'll disable the Apple Card family share feature until there is an update.

Speculating that perhaps the precise location tracking is continuing to track after a purchase…Experimented turning off Precise Tracking several days ago, in the iPhone settings/privacy/location tracking/Wallet; and no battery drain noticed when purchases made with the Apple Watch. Turned it back on today for an Apple Watch purchase and lost 49% iPhone battery with 1 min. use due to Wallet app in 5 hours!

As a small update, since doing the Restore via iTunes last weekend, my phone and watch have been performing normally. The wallet app has not creeped up in battery usage either since the restore. That said, my wife has not made an Apple Card purchase either since the reset, so here’s hoping it doesn’t come back when she eventually does.

After an hour chatting with support, I got them to understand that it's not a hardware or an OS issue (since I'm on 15, they were hung up on that for a while), and that it's caused by the wallet app when an apple card is used with family share. The issue is being elevated to R&D and engineering. If anyone talks to support, share a link to this discussion topic - that helped that he could see how widespread the problem was.

This problem just started a few days ago with me and my wife’s iPhones and my Apple Watch. Last night I turned off background app updates for Wallet but the battery was basically already dead. Once the phone was charged I updated to 14.7 and today the battery is back to normal. Not sure if was the update or turning off the background update.

it’s weird that for weeks on end we had no issues with the shared card and then it suddenly started. Hope this holds. It’s been ages since I’ve had problems with our Apple ecosystem.

Problem is improved with iOS 14.7/WatchOS 7.6, but this problem is definitely not solved for me.

Prior to the upgrade, I was seeing 38-48% consumption of my iPhone battery by Wallet app in 24 hours and having to charge at least once during the day, and my watch was dying after about 6 hours.

Since the upgrade, wallet is using 10% of my iPhone battery every 24 hours. I still need to charge but not until evening. And watch is lasting longer too.

Turning off double click and precision location settings didn’t fix this for me.

This problem definitely seems to be related to AppleCard with Family Share turned on. And just to be clear, when you call support, they are going to want to run a hardware diagnostic, and tell you that your battery hardware is OK. But this isn’t a hardware issue, it is a software issue. Wallet app is consuming too much power due to a software bug.

Got an email saying the issue may be resolved in iOS 15 build 19R5312e. Just updated last night and it seems to be true. My watch has been on for 2.5 hours and I've only lost 4% - whereas the last few weeks I'd be down 20% already.

Well… just got off the phone with Apple Support. Very friendly but unfortunately no resolution. She actually was reading this forum post and suggesting some of the things on this forum as possible solutions. Basically, this sounds like a software bug introduced in one of the recent system software updates. I first noted it in 14.6, but possible it was before that. And it is killing both my watch and my phone, as others have reported too. And phone getting quite warm, so I know it is using a lot of processor cycles. Things I’ve tried so far:

Turning off background processing and notifications for majority of apps = no change

Tried to turn off notifications and background processing for wallet app, but you can’t. Since this is an Apple app, you can’t control those settings.

Resetting network preferences = no change

Turning of double-click to access wallet app = no change

Next step suggested by Apple Support was to do a “reset all settings”, and if that doesn’t work, plug it into iTunes and do a full erase and restore. They also suggested I unpair and restore my watch to see if that helps. I’m not quite ready to do a full erase/restore yet. I have a bunch of apps I use for work that are a PITA to reinstall, so hoping to avoid that. But there is definitely a bug that is using battery at a dramatic rate.

Let us know if it continues to be good after using iPhone or Apple Watch for Apple Pay.

On the days we don’t use for ApplePay, batteries are fine. When either or both of us used the shared AppleCard, Wallet app drained the both of our iPhone and watch batteries.

Apple is aware of the problem which seems to be caused by the new Family Apple Card sharing functionality. I am the owner of the Apple Card in my family. A Genius Bar agent shut my iPhone down and it stayed shut down for about 10 minutes. Our battery problems seemed to be resolved after I restarted my iPhone. Not sure if the shutting down was what resolved the issue or not.