FindMy drains over 40% battery over night

I have done an experiment: Charged my phone to 100% and let it (mostly) just sit to see when and how far battery would be drained. Turned out I lost 80% of battery in 24h. I had a screen time of 30 min and some minutes screen-off activities. Over night I used the energy saving mode and turned off (nearby) Wifi and Bluetooth from the control center but not the settings menu. Constantly FindMy was listed as one and only battery consumer except when I was actually using the phone. The drain is almost linear, the active time did barely influence the battery consumption at all. Also, energy saving did not have an influence. It is solely FindMy draining my battery whenever the phone's Bluetooth is not deactivated from the settings menu. Interestingly, in the overall consumption chart FindMy was only listed at 12%. I think there is a bug in how activities while screen was on/off are counted vs background activities. I'll have taken some screenshots but I am too lazy right now to attach them.

Next, I upgraded to iOS 15.1 hoping for a change there but the drain just continued. Therefore, I unpaired all my AirTags and removed their batteries and immediately my battery usage went back to normal. I don't loose these 3-5% per hour anymore and FindMy is not draining my battery. While I am now sure which AirTag is responsible (or all of them), I still would like to understand what exactly is the issue and if the issue happens again when I repair them. I don't want to waste my battery power for that. So, I will not do that, I rely on my phone having enough battery to last at least a day. Something that is obviously not possible when half of the battery is just lost to this bug. Instead I will sell my AirTags.

It is deeply annoying that with this issue - and other software bugs introduced in iOS15 - using an Apple feels more and more like being a beta tester for a cheap Chinese phone company rather than a premium American brand. Battery life was never outstanding on an iPhone (unlike for example my iPad or the M1 MacBooks) but always sufficient for a single day with average use. Anything that reduces that even farther is just simply unacceptable to me.

Seems our observations are quite similar. I also had the feeling drain was less when I started using the phone. Did you deactivate Bluetooth from the settings menu and not just from the control center? For me the drain was instantly gone with Bluetooth deactivated. If that is not the case for you, there seems to be another related but different issue at work here. I wouldn't have a good suggestion on how to debug this further.

You could try manually disabling Bluetooth at night using the settings menu (not from the dropdown controls menu). That is not really a fix but it appears to stop FindMy from draining the battery. I guess even on the 7 FindMy would search for other AirTags nearby or other connected devices such as AirPods.

My other AirTag has finally upgraded to 291 so that all now run on the newest firmware. Unfortunately, this did not solve the issue. It might have reduced a little bit: The other night drain was about 3% per hour instead of 4-5% but that is still way too high.

I knew already that flight mode solved the issue and experimented a bit further: When I turn off Bluetooth from the settings menu FindMy is not draining my battery anymore. In fact, it is not even listed anymore for battery usage over night. I just lost 1% battery over night with energy saving on and Bluetooth off. Obviously, this is not a solution - especially since deactivating Bluetooth just from the swipe down menu (control center) is not sufficient. A bug fix from Apple would be highly appreciated.

I cannot tell if it is actually AirTag related and if so whether just one AirTag or all of them are the issue. It might be a general issue with FindMy.

I wonder if that is the same issue or a different one. Even when you don't have AirTags there might be AirTags belonging to someone else in the vicinity. When you don't use your phone, is FindMy or another app listed in the battery usage statistics? For me disabling Bluetooth and/or activating airplane mode stopped the drain, as well as unpairing my AirTags.

Loosing 20% in an hour seems like a different issue, this is huge compared to the (already large) drain I observed.. Maybe some other process is happening here like some constant reindexing, up-/downloads to e.g. iCloud happening in the background. Something that is stuck in an endless loop and not finishing. Or there is just a ton of AirTags nearby that get tracked by your phone, like 25 or more.

Over the last days I noticed that temporarily deactivating Bluetooth over night is NOT a fix. It only postpones the battery drain. Now I don't loose battery over night but during the day as FindMy now drains my battery at daytime. Interestingly, it only does when the phone is inactive, as soon as the phone is active FindMy is responsible for ~4%-6% battery usage but in hours where my phone is just idle, it is responsible for 100% battery consumption and drains somewhere between 3-5% battery soc per hour. My AirTags are all updated. I still don't know if that is an issue with FindMy, a connected AirTag (in range or out of range) or some other Blueooth device such as my AirPods.

Deactivating Bluetooth from the control center does not help but I actually have to deactivate Bluetooth from the settings menu. Practically speaking, I need to deactivate Bluetooth whenever I don't need it in order to not just waste my battery power. With this issue I just lost 25% battery in the last 4 hours while only using my phone (i.e. screen on) for approx. 45 minutes. That is unacceptable to me.

Hi Eric,

Thanks for reaching out. I am already following these steps but thank you for sharing them. Let me also note, that the drainage occurs independent of the energy saving mode being on. I investigated this issue further and believe is to have isolated it more:

• Only happens on my iPhone
• Only when idle and overnight
• Only at home not at work (i.e. certain AirTags being near and other not being in range)

I noticed that one of my AirTags still has firmware 276 on it and not upgraded to 291 (first released end of August). I don't see the battery draining given the above conditions when my upgraded AirTags are present. At the same time this AirTag is typically near me but almost out of range or out of range. I think FindMy tries to update the firmware and fails draining the battery. I keep the particular AirTag near me for now and don't see any drain issue for the moment but will explore further.

Unfortunately, despite charging my phone over night, firmware on the AirTag has not updated so I am hoping this will happen soon. It is disappointing that I cannot force a firmware update manually.

I am also attaching screenshots I took the other day. I activated energy saving mode at approx 73% battery and 10 pm, the next morning at 8am battery was drained to 33% and FindMy showing as only activity:

I hope that the issue resolves itself once the AirTag is upgraded. I hope this happens soon.

On a side note: Since iOS/iPadOS 15 FindMy is consistently listed at 4% battery usage (background activity) over 24h/10day period. That is more than what it was before but I guess this is due to the new functionalities added. However, these 4% are not draining the battery. As I have written this issue is not happening on my iPad where I loose a max of 2% battery over night or on my phone when I am using it. That's why I think it could be either the old firmware or an issue with the upgrading process at play here.

Best regards

I can now verify, that any of the AirTags drains the battery. Each AirTag consumes somewhere close to 1% battery per hour of my iPhone. This happens constantly as long as Bluetooth is on. It seems to scale linearly with the number of AirTags connected. It does not matter whether "left behind" notifications are on or off.

I don't know if the distance between iPhone and AirTags matters or whether it matters if they are in range at all. To me it seems it is quite independent of that but I cannot verify this. Energy saving, WiFi etc. does not change anything. The issue is present since the upgrade to iOS 15 and has not been fixed since. The only "fix" is to unpair the AirTags or deactivate Bluetooth. Both obviously renders them useless. Therefore, I have returned my AirTags.

Another issue that I have noticed is that my AirPods Pro case gets drained, too. I cannot estimate how much but it continously looses charge over time even when the AirPods themselves are fully charged. I believe this has to do with the case being add to FindMy in iOS15. At least my phone's battery is not drained anymore but I have to charge my AirPods case much more often than before. While the FindMy network is great and works well, the battery consumption is just simply too high and to me personally outweighing the benefits.