GPS always running after 8.4 update. Isn't this killing my battery life?

Hello Tony5426,

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities!

From your question, it sounds like you have an application that is using your location. Please refer to the attached article for information on how to see and adjust what applications use your location.

About privacy and Location Services using iOS 8 on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch - Apple Support

Using location services can affect your battery life. For information on optimizing your battery performance, please refer to the next attached article.

Apple - Batteries - Maximizing Performance

Location and Background Location. This indicates that the app is using location services.

• You can optimize your battery life by turning off Location Services for the app. Turn off in Settings > Privacy > Location Services.
• In Location Services, you can see each app listed with its permission setting. Apps that recently used location services have an indicator next to the on/off switch.

Have a great day,

Joe

I Even turn off the switch for location services and the icon still shows on my iPhone screen. IS there a fix for this? My battery is draining really fast

I also tried setting the phone to "airplaine mode" and icon is still active. Is this a bug?

Hi buddy, thanks for your feedback.

I Tried your approach but didn't have any luck, I even shut down the general switch for app refresh and that didn't help either... Guess I will have to wait for som kind of apple support input. I do think it has something to do with Apple radio and that our settings dont have anything to do with it.

Tony5426 wrote:

GPS always running after 8.4 update. Isn't this killing my battery life?

No. GPS does not kill battery life. It is a passive monitor. And how do you know it is already running? The icon in the status bar only means that an app has used it recently, not necessarily that it is currently using GPS. And if the icon is an outline that means you have a "geofence" request set up. It does not use energy. As you can't see the icon if the phone is asleep you don't know whether GPS is being used or not when the screen is off. Typically it will come on for a few seconds any time you wake the phone to update your location. But if you wait a minute or two it will frequently go off.

If you go to Settings/Privacy/Location Services you can get more information about what apps are using Location Services. But even here, a gray arrow only means the app has used it in the past 24 hours, and purple means that it has used GPS recently - not necessarily currently.

The apps that use GPS, if they run in background, can use battery energy. But so can apps that do not use GPS. Go to Settings/General/Background App Refresh to see what apps you have allowed to run in background.

I Tried switching off ALL of background app refresh and location services and iicon still shows on the upper right corner, that gives you a hint that something's not right ...

ok, tried different approach; going to "general - reset - reset location & privacy" solve the problem, I now see the icon turning on and off as it should... I'll be checking in later once apps start asking me to give them permission to use location services.

NO, it does NOT mean that something is not right. The phone uses GPS for many things, and some of them you can't turn off. For example, do you have Find my iPhone enabled? For that to work, the phone must know its location all the time. It it didn't, how would you find your iPhone if you lost it? Have you checked System Services? Settings/Privacy/Location Services - scroll all the way to the bottom and tap System Services. However, it doesn't really matter; the GPS does not use a significant amount of power. Just ignore it.

Lawrence,

GPS is a passive reception of the signal, but it still uses cycles to process the information and then return the desired result back to the requesting system. These cycles require power, power comes from a battery in a phone. Therefore YES, the GPS does use the battery. This battery drain was introduced in 8.4 because of increased demand for location information based services. If having a phone for something more than a brick is important, then YES something is wrong.

I've noticed that some settings like 'Routing and Traffic' 'Location-Based iAds', and 'Spotlight Suggestions' are always active where in previous versions they were only active occasionally. Disabling these System Services that I can live without are improving battery life. An annoying tradeoff, but worth it if I still need a phone at 8PM.

If GPS were using a significant amount of power I would have seen a decrease in battery life after upgrading to 8.4, because I have not turned off ANY location services. All are on, all the time, full blast. My battery life has not changed since the update. And the Location icon is always on in my status bar.

Yes, it uses power, but not enough to be measurable over the course of a day.

did you miss the ¨good manners¨ class when in school? god you're annoying mate... I don't know if my aproach will help EVERYONE, but I CAN say it did work for me.

If you're SO right, then why is it when you use apps that constantly use GPS location (googlemaps, waze, forsquare) you can literally see the battery percentage droping. You know what, don't bother to answer... its pointless.

Hope my input will help someone in the future, reseting ¨location & provacy¨ did the trick for me...

.

fsancho wrote:

did you miss the ¨good manners¨ class when in school? god you're annoying mate... I don't know if my aproach will help EVERYONE, but I CAN say it did work for me.

If you're SO right, then why is it when you use apps that constantly use GPS location (googlemaps, waze, forsquare) you can literally see the battery percentage droping. You know what, don't bother to answer... its pointless.

Hope my input will help someone in the future, reseting ¨location & provacy¨ did the trick for me...

Apps like google maps and waze do not drain your battery because of location services. They drain your battery because they are constantly on display and constantly streaming data for map displays and map metadata. The actual determining your location is a trivial power drain relative to the active display and backlight, and the data traffic on the wifi or cellular radios.

fsancho wrote:

If you're SO right, then why is it when you use apps that constantly use GPS location (googlemaps, waze, forsquare) you can literally see the battery percentage droping. You know what, don't bother to answer... its pointless.

Because those apps continuously use Cellular Data to download maps, and, in the case of Waze, to track other Wazers for its crowdsourced real-time traffic updates (similarly for Foursquare). It isn't the GPS using the battery, it is the cellular data usage. If you hadn't noticed, cellular data is the heaviest consumer of battery life in any smartphone.

By contrast, try using a GPS app that has its maps stored on the phone, such as Navigon or TomTom (or OffMaps). They get great battery life.

hey! Thanks for the post! I messed around with seeing this indicator all day yesterday and could never turn it off after 8.4 upgrade. Location privacy reset did the trick - thanks!!!