"Find My" is draining my battery even though I have turned it off.

Thank you for the reminder Chattanoogan, due to family circumstances I'm at home 99.9% of the time and my iPad never leaves the house and the only place I could really leave my iPhone is in the car. Ideally I'd like to keep this feature on but I'm currently spending more time charging the iPad in particular than using it. If I can't isolate the problem I'm going to either go ahead and try the full restore or wait for the iPad OS 15 beta and try that, since my iPad isn't my primary computer. Thanks.

I'm happy to report that after erasing and resetting my iPad and restoring from an iCloud backup (turning off location services right from the setup) that "Find My" is no longer showing up in my battery usage by app. The price paid was a magazine app that apparently is no longer available on the app store, a reminder of the unexpected consequences that inevitably occur with restores. Another hiccup was that my VPN was blocking my apps from downloading, but this wasn't the obvious culprit until I dug into my settings (the VPN app itself hadn't even been re-downloaded yet). I'm cautiously optimistic that this solves the problem at this point, the entire restore and setup procedure over several hours with the screen on most of the time took less than 20% in battery life and nothing else seems out of the ordinary on that front. Thanks for the advice.

You are onto something, I’ve had an AirTag on my keychain for about three months and it’s within this timeframe that I noticed the Find My problem. After turning off Find My again, it was still showing up in battery activity, now I also turned off Bluetooth and Find My has finally disappeared from my battery activity over the past few days and standby battery life has improved.

Whether it’s a legitimate bug or a “glitch”, my guess is that the iPad and AirTag were pinging eachother. The annoying thing about keeping Bluetooth off is that it makes my Apple Pencil non-functional but I can quickly turn it back on when I need to. It’s better than keeping Bluetooth on just to have this unwanted, unauthorized background activity going on. Apple needs to fix this, its eerily similar to what Amazon is planning by taking bandwidth from people’s WiFi networks for their Sidewalk service, but instead your device’s bluetooth itself is being shared to benefit Apple’s AirTag network.

On a related note, Shazam now has a new “feature” where the app will constantly listen through your microphone for songs so that you never miss one you want to identify. This happens when your iPhone’s screen is off, without your knowledge. I only noticed this recently when my battery was drained 50% overnight. You have to force-quit the app to stop it, the setting can’t be changed in iOS. They are gracious enough to stop it once your battery is down to 20%, what swell guys. I’ve since switched to SoundHound, until they pull this same BS at least.

Thank you Sean, I hadn't noticed that setting yet, I turned it off on my iPhone. On my iPad I had already turned off all location services yet the "Find My" app still appears to be churning away, eating up about 5% of the battery in as many hours on a sleeping device.

Unfortunately, it looks like I spoke too soon, like an ugly gremlin Find My has reappeared in my battery activity list. In the span of 2 hours last night it went from 6% to 54% to 100% of battery activity while the iPad was inactive. It took the battery down from 100% to 95% in about 5 hours while the iPad was asleep. Having done a full restore I am at a loss for what else to do besides take my iPad in to the Apple Store (I am still covered by AppleCare for over a year) or install the iPad OS 15 public beta once it is available in the hope that it fixes this. Waiting for 3 months until the new OS is officially released is too long to wait with an issue like this.

Coincidentally, Find My is also the bulk of my battery usage overnight on my iPhone X. The battery needs to be replaced since it is down to 83% capacity, but just last night it dropped from a 100% charge to 81%, primarily from Find My being active at night. The only band-aid I've found for this problem is turning on airplane mode when the iPad is not in use, though this isn't a viable option for my iPhone.

My only other thought is that Proton VPN is triggering Find My somehow. I will try turning it off to see what happens and possibly resetting all settings on both devices.

Thank you for the suggestion. My iPad is set to use my iPhone as "my location", if I switch it to the iPad then that also becomes the location on my iPhone, since the latter is always with me I think keeping my location as the iPhone makes the most sense.

So far I have been seeing much improved battery life by turning off Proton VPN. Find My is still 100% of the battery usage overnight (I simply turned it back on since having it off didn't seem to make a difference) though based on the bar graph the energy use isn't significant, I only noticed 1-2% drain overnight vs. 10%+ before I turned off the VPN. I'll probably have to work with Proton VPN support to see if I can narrow down the problem. It's strange though because the VPN rarely showed as a significant source of battery activity if at all, it looks like there is some kind of interplay between the VPN and Find My, but I think the VPN is the real culprit for the battery drain. Regardless, even when Find My is turned off everywhere, it still shows up as being active in the Battery app. I might try deleting the VPN profile entirely from the device to see if that does anything.