iOS 15 Home app and HomeKit have excessive battery drain

Good job!!

My issue is gone to. But I did not install IOS16 on my iPhone.

I cannot be sure anymore but I guess it is still related to IOS16 as I did install it on my iPad. I’m sure my iPad battery life got better in ways I can’t express. Was really happy with it. But come to think of it, I think it also fixed my issue on the iPhone.

it seems your steps use IOS16 to fix something in the HomeKit database (iCloud).

In my case the same happened, only via another way, and the fixed database got synced to other devices and BOEM, it’s fixed everywhere!!

Maybe my steps (or way) is less of a hassle for people if the have an iPad.

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!

This is still a problem on iOS 16.02. I have an iPhone 14 Plus that I've had for 3 days now. I'm using the Google Home app because we (only) have a Nest Camera with Floodlight and a Nest Doorbell (battery). Background app refresh is not turned on. and I have location for the Google Home app set to "while I'm using the app". Just looked at my phone and the Google Home app has used 85% of my battery, really drained that battery down quickly. No notifications from the Nest cameras during the period of time that the Home app was draining my battery.

At this rate, I'll either have to dump the iPhone, or the Nest cameras...this never happened in several months using a Google Pixel 6 phone. I don't have any other home automation going on, no use of HomeKit, no Google Home appliances, just the two Nest cameras.

I also reported this in "Feedback" on the Google Home app, so I'm pursuing all avenues that I can think of. This is really stupendous battery usage by a single app, no reason for it, it's someone's bug. But I'm sure that it will destroy my phone battery before too long if this continues. When I saw the battery drain, and Google Home app owning 85% of it, I immediately uninstalled and re-installed the Google Home App. It has not recurred since then, that was a couple of hours ago.

Has anyone encountered this that has a workaround? I've tried turning off Location for the app now, and will try to remember to exit the app from the main menu only, which should turn off any streaming video. But again, this didn't happen on a Pixel phone over quite a period of time with no need for thinking about how I'm exiting from the app or worrying about Location setting. And occurred within 3 days when I got a new iPhone.

Made a tentative decision here...going to get a Google Hub on sale, and use that to monitor the cameras at home. And uninstall the Google Home app. I can re-install the app when I need to away from home. Awkward, and I'm sorry that Apple/Google are making me do this, but I don't want my battery dying prematurely. Apparently this has not been fixed for some time, so I have to reason to believe that it will ever be fixed. Not high on the tech companies bug list, apparently.

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?

Eve app is not installed on my iPhone 14 Plus where the Google Home app shows excessive battery usage. Nor have I ever installed the Eve app. I've removed the Google Home app from my phone, and installed it on my iPad instead. No problems there yet, but I've been careful to exit the Home app from the main menu, all streaming should be off. Also getting a Google Home Hub, in hopes that using that while at home will also help.

I'm still planning to re-install the Google Home app on my phone when I'm traveling. After all, that's at least part of the reason why we have "security" cameras in the first place :-).

I find that my iPad battery is a much stronger battery. The Google Home app is usually last on the list of apps in "Battery" settings. With a "-" for amount of battery consumption, which I assume means less than 1%. Also, I'm sure to exit ALWAYS the app from the main menu, never with any video streaming. On my iPhone, Google Home app is usually around 7% of battery, so it's been exiled off my phone until we go on trips. The iPad also provides a Nest doorbell chime with the notification sound without making the app battery usage more than "-".

This has worked for some time now with no problems. Stupid that I have to do that, but seems that Google and Apple have a problem working together. Who knew *smile*?

I just submitted feedback to Apple about this battery drain by the Home app, pointing to this discussion thread. Please consider doing the same here:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/

I should add...

• The iPad is not configured as a home hub.
• I have a new 4k Apple TV that acts as my home hub.
• Also have both HomePods and HomePod Minis on the network.

I compared idle drain on my SE2. -- WLAN 5GHZ (with HomeKit Devices, 5 HPM 5GHZ + ca. 40+ HomeKit integrated Devices) vs Guest WLAN.

Router: Fritz!Box 7530, v7.29, IGMP Multicast Proxy On

Not fixed for me, iOS 15.4.1 across all the devices, still having more than 6 hours usage in background :

I'm having kind of the same issue "home accessories" except I don't have the HomeKit app downloaded, Bluetooth is always off.

Same issue.