iOS 15 Home app and HomeKit have excessive battery drain

I invested a significant amount of time today to troubleshoot this issue that has plagued me since iOS 15.

What I can definitely tell is that the source of this battery drain is the iPhone itself and not some sort of Bridge/Accessory/Router. Through package captures I saw that the iPhone, even with the screen turned off, is polling HomeKit bridges periodically. The bridges themselves then respond to that. I have two bridges which are both just Home Assistant, about 170 devices in total are exposed to HomeKit through these two bridges.

I was able to significantly reduce this polling by removing CO2, Temperature and Humidity sensors (About 20 in total). I have still about 150 lights, switches, window sensors and thermostats left. Now the iPhones polls about once every two minutes, before it was about once every 5-10 seconds.

Now this is of course just a workaround and not a permanent fix, but it may help some of you. I am quite certain that this issue can only be fixed by Apple themselves.

Hey all - let me try to summarize my thoughts on the issue based upon these replies, some research, and digging into Wi-Fi networks.

A few quick notes: this doesn’t appear to be caused by specific HomeKit devices or bridges. There’s no theme to whether you have a Lutron or Hue or other bridge. The issue persists. Additionally, adjusting settings in the Home app or iPhone/iPad doesn’t resolve the issue. I’ve tried every permutation of setting including deleting my entire Home and factory resetting my iPad, and the issue still persists.

Root cause: it seems like the root cause is due to Apple’s implementation of Thread. I’ve noticed that if I am either off Wi-Fi or on a different Wi-Fi network than my HomePod devices that the issue does NOT occur.

Digging into my Wi-Fi logs via Pi-hole (and looking at several other threads on this topic), my iPhone and iPad are constantly sending out requests to HomePodName.openthread.thread.home.arpa.

This is occurring thousands of times a day and I’m guessing it’s impacting battery life.

I contacted the Thread group and they confirmed this is not the expected behavior.

As such, we’ll have to wait for a fix to the HomePod and/or Apple TV to resolve this problem.

Note- the scenario I described above will impact anyone with a HomePod mini or Apple TV 4K (latest gen).

So this and one other post solved a year+ long mystery for me!!! I went away to the in-laws for a week and I noticed when away from my network my overnight battery drain went from 15/20% to 2/3%.

I’ve turned off facial recognition on the cameras this was it. Just that. Fixed. Sigh. Phew.

thanks LOADS. I thought my phone was defective. Nope. Just a HomeKit funny.

I suffered this HomeKit excessive battery usage problem for over a year and finally got to the bottom of it for me. I figured I’d post here in case it helps anyone else get to the bottom of their issues.

I have a complex setup with >100 devices, and am running home assistant as a HomeKit bridge. (Irrelevant to the root cause).

I’ve tried many things for about a year but nothing seemed to work. All iPhones in our house suffered the excessive drain. It happened even if I was away from home so I always assumed it was *not* related to a local device or network problem. I was wrong!

This may not be the same issue for others but the root cause was my home network was running *two* mDNS relay server servers.

One on the pfsense firewall, and one on another sever to reflect traffic to a docker container. They were running for good reasons but unfortunately were by default setup to relay *all* broadcast traffic back to all. Packets hitting one mDNS server were bounced back to the other, then back anhaib and caused a flood of requests.

This wasn’t noticeable to anyone on the network and everything worked fine, but must have hit HomeKit devices and gave them a headache with the inbound noise notifying of updates. AppleTv or HomePod on the home network then updated my phone when I was out of home - continuing the drain!

3 weeks and all devices (iPad, phones) report 0% consumption by HomeKit!! It’s just a “-“ at the bottom of the list!!

I figured this out my deleting things until the drain stopped (painstaking as had to wait for 24 hours), eventually I deleted the home… and if I recall this made usage drop drastically. Re-adding the home (with just one bridge and no devices) caused it to spike.

good luck folks!

After I’ve recognized that my wife’s iPhone is affected more than my one by this issue I tried to separate IoT-Devices from my home WiFi.

Just left the IoT in the existing SSID and create a new one. (My access point is able to create 8 different SSIDs)

Then set the new SSID into a separate vlan, where the WiFi clients are allowed to access the “old network”, but IoT can’t access the new vlan.

homepods and Apple TV’s don’t stop flooding the network. But due to the separate vlan the queries don’t reach out iDevices. Battery drain on iPhones and iPads stopped. Never had such a high battery percentage in the morning when battery was charged the evening the day before.

Streaming to TV and HomePods works great. Only home app is a bit slower than before. I think, due to separate network the home queries are lead over the internet.

when asking Siri on the HomePods to do something there is no lack in time. All normal.

So, this is my working workaround.

maybe it helps others, too.

I've been using the IOS 15.4 RC since it was available (without updating my homepod). The battery drain persist when only the iphone is updated. The drain has stop completely as soon as the homepod is updated.

Yay !!

Finally, I fixed it!

I can acknowledge that the following procedure worked for me for two different iPhone 12 with two different Homes and two different Apple accounts:

1. Make an iPhone iCloud Backup based on iOS 15.6
2. Upgrade iPhone to iOS 16 PB2
3. Open Home App. on iPhone
4. Connect iPhone via USB to a Mac
5. Set iPhone into Recovery Mode and proceed with recovery to iOS 15.6
6. When prompted, decline that you want to participate any longer on the iOS 16 PB program
7. Restore iCloud Backup

Eventually, it's enough to make a full restore via Mac with iOS 15.6 without PB 16 but in my case/s it worked like this.

Battery drain is fixed and down from > 60% to < 5%.

Few days ago, I took the step of resetting my iPad and restoring it from an iCloud backup. It's maybe still early days, but to me it seems the battery drain usages has stopped. Over the past 24h, 'Home' was only responsible for 4% of battery usage. Before I was around 20%

Just a quick update from me:

Apple support came back and said that engineering is aware of the issue and that there’s no solution right now. That I just need to wait for some future update where this is fixed.

One thing that’s (at least temporarily) worked is signing out of iCloud and back in. We’re a day in and the home app is using more battery than I’d expect , but way less. Something for folks to try.

Here is what I have done to troubleshoot thus far:

1) I have Philips Hue, and for anyone that also has Hue, you might have noticed that they keep saying “Not Responding” in HomeKit since OS15…so I thought, maybe HomeKit is busy querying these non-responding hue devices. I’ll remove the hue hub from HomeKit. This did not change anything.

2) I saw another thread that said to disable notifications for Homekit. I did this, but no change.

3) I thought, maybe it has to do with location services enabled for HomeKit. Nothing in my home really depends on my location, so I disabled this. No change.

4) I have 3 HomePod mini and two Apple TV… I thought, maybe since the HomePod was the hub, and not the TV, it had something to do with this. So I restarted the HomePod and let the primary hub switch to the Apple TV. No Change.

4) Now I’m thinking what else could be querying status in my HomeKit all day and night… I noticed that in Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services > HomeKit is enabled and the arrow is purple all the time. So there is some system services that HomeKit is using for my location. I disabled this. I also noticed that I have an automation in HomeKit that says “When the last person leaves… do nothing”. I don’t know why I had this empty automation, but I removed it. I am not sure if this will fix the problem yet, but I’m starting to run out of things to try.

Listen up Apple - Seeing that ever since I updated to OS15 I am seeing an issue with my battery drain and my “Works with Apple” hue bridge… I’m starting to question whether or not I should rely on Apple Homekit for any of my home automation. I don’t want my home to run on a platform that is subject to stability issues and constant undocumented changes. If this isn’t fixed soon I think I’m going to say goodbye to HomeKit and start running everything on a platform that is more reliable and universal such at Home Assistant. Thanks but no thanks.

I went with my own nuclear option. I removed my home. Setup a Home Assistant server. Added all my devices to Home Assistant. Created all of my automations in HA and then presented HA to HomeKit. Only 1% battery drain all night.

Hello to all,

for quite a few months now I've also been having the problem of my iPad Pro's battery draining overnight. I have several HomePods and one AppleTV 4K in my network, too. Hue lamps and several other devices complete the package.

I have started to activate flight mode at night, before going to sleep. Without a network connection, the battery behaves normally and no longer discharges. Coincidentally, I have enabled Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in addition to flight mode.

With this constellation (activated flight mode, activated wifi and activated Bluetooth) I can use the iPad again for several days without charging. Have you already tried this? For me, the workaround works.

Best regards, CarlMcCoy

Maybe stupid thing: have you tried after the update to sign out from your iCloud account, restart and then re-sign in?

On my side I have a few battery drain, but still present. It's just unbelievable that Apple is taking too much time to address that significant issue..

No more answer from Apple Support for 3 weeks.

It seems clear that that issue has been brought by iOS 15. Is it so hard to make some regression test alongside iOS 14?

This is an interesting setup. Will test VLAN and separate wifi, too.

One additional remark: I pulled the plug of my appleTV, the battery drain stopped immediately.

the homkit centrals seems to be causing the issue.

opened a feedback for apple, hopefully they are able to hunt this bug down