iOS 15 Home app and HomeKit have excessive battery drain

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

I've tried wiping the iPhone and starting from scratch, but the problem is still there. It appears to be something with the iCloud account. Removing my wife from the home, unchecking it in iCloud, and (for good measure) deleting the Home app is the only thing that fixes this for my wife.

I have the same issue on my wife’s iPhone. My iPad and my iPhone are perfectly fine.

What I discovered today were additional symptoms.

When I completely close the Home App and also remove it from multitasking and then re open it, it greets her with the „Welcome to Home“ notification each time.

in addition to that most of the Hubs (all are HomePod Minis) are reported as unavailable in her Home App. I have rebooted the Phone and all Hubs showed as online for a few minutes before they started to show as unavailable again.

With the hints about Threat issues here I decided to install the Eve app on her iPhone to check the Threat network from there.

The Eve app didn’t show any issues or anything offline. Moving back to the Home App and all is looking good there as well now. No welcome message after restarting the app, no Hubs showing as offline.

Wondering of the Eve app has any impact on the threat cache on the device or if anything else could explain the difference with the app installed but things look more promising now. I will keep an eye on this for a few days.

Can anyone else check or confirm if the Eve app is installed on the affected devices and if it makes any difference installing it if not installed?

Ktrap,

Thank you for providing that update. Now we know the issue is isolated to the notifications from the Home app.

We can verify your device is backed up and on the latest iOS 15.1 version: Update your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

Once you verify that, turn on notifications and test to see if the issue persists.

Let's also add HomeKit notifications to Scheduled Summary and test to see if you notice a difference. This article may be able to help: Use notifications on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

Specifically the section titled "Schedule a notification summary."

Let us know what you discover.

Good Luck!

I have the same issue and since I haven't changed the level of notifications since updating to ios 15 then 15.1 my Homekit now uses 39 to 44% battery usage indicating Accessories. Several of them required updates and are off line, so either it is an issue with notifications in general or how 3rd party apps tell Homekit their accessory needs an update is a possibility.

I’ve filed a big report. I encourage others to do so as well or add feedback. It seems like Apple has screwed up the implementation of the Thread protocol which is resulting in iPads and iPhones continuously sending out pings which are never resolved.

@craraque: Do you have a HomePod mini or Apple TV 4K (latest gen)? If you look at page 4 of this thread people have found that devices are continuously pinging openthread.arpa and it’s probable that this is causing battery drain. Suggest logging feedback for Apple about HomePod or Apple TV as its probably an issue with TVOS or HomepodOS and Apple’s Thread implementation.

Ok, so after nearly a month, here is what I can say:

On my side the issue is almost gone, but not totally; background activity has fallen to 8/20 minutes per day. Still better than previous versions, but we cannot say the issue is fixed (on my iPhone 8 with iOS 14.8.1, no background activity at all; same network, same setup, but different OS).

I am still in contact with Apple Support, I am waiting for news about it.

For people who have higher background activity (I know, maybe stupid question): have you updated every Apple devices, including Apple TV and HomePods, to iOS 15.4.1?

Problem is fixed for me, likely due to the update to iOS15.3. But I had not checked every week if the battery was still draining as I was always using my guest Wi-Fi network.

Hello Ktrap,

It sounds like you want to know why the Home app is using so much of your battery. We understand how important this is to you and we are here to help.

This article may be able to provide some general tips: Maximizing Battery Life and Lifespan

If you select show battery usage what percentage of your battery is being used by this app? Are you able to check your notifications to see which device sends you the most notifications? Also, which iOS version are you currently using?

Cheers!

I am also seeing this same issue - iPad Pro 9.7 inch and iPhone Xr - both on iOS 15.2. Highest Battery Usage item is Home - Accessories - 67% over the past 10 days!!! I have turned off Home in iCloud. Turned off Notifications for Home. Turned off Location Services for HomeKit. Little improvement.

Given the number of posts about this (here and on Reddit) - this is a very real issue that needs to be addressed by Apple.

I have a ticket with Apple open on this for months now. They sampled all kind of log files for their developers, but no fix was given so far.

Problem is only while on the home Wi-Fi and happens on all my devices. Traveling or being on my own guest Wi-Fi has no problem.

Same here -- it's only happening on my iPad, and not iPhone.

To those of you with this battery drain problem due to Home app's background activities (when you go to Settings - Battery, it says "Accessories" under "Home" app) -- do you also own a Lutron Caseta bridge at home? I just used Wireshark to see if there's any funny traffic going to/from my iPad, and I see Lutron bridge is sending duplicate ACK's to my iPad (but also to my iPhone). When I opened the Lutron app, I see a low battery alert on one of my shades. I wonder if this has anything to do with the battery drain.

I also have this issue, iPad loses 10-20% overnight. Turning WiFi off or being away from home network stops it completely. Updates, restarts, killing the app etc. have no effect. I have the following devices.

Lutron Caseta Hub with numerous switches and Pico remotes

Phillips Hue hub with maybe 15 bulbs

Starling Hub with Nest thermostat and smoke alarms

logitech circle cameras (2) and doorbell

5 eero routers and access points

Yale doorlock

3 homepods

3 appleTVs