Spotify's App Might Be Severely Draining Your iPhone's Battery

Usually, we would tell you to update your iPhone immediately when those updates roll out, because they usually contain very important security fixes.

Today, we’re saying maybe wait a bit before you push your iPhone to iOS 15. And that’s because one app you probably use — Spotify — is draining up to 30% or more of your battery per hour with the new update, as reported by AppleInsider.

A community post on the audio streaming site confirmed there are issues. “Thanks for your reports about battery drainage while updating from iOS 14.8 to .15 on both firmware versions during the past days,” as the post notes. “We’ve passed your info on to the relevant team and we can confirm they are currently looking into it.” (The phones also get particularly hot, as some users noted.)

@SpotifyCares iOS 15 iPhone 12 Mini (new, 100% battery capacity). Phone getting extremely hot, plus 1% battery drain per minute caused by Spotify app use only. Tried all recommended actions; none worked. Issue started last week.
— Max Pfeiffer (@pfeiffer__max) September 23, 2021

Their suggestion? “Aside from trying restarting and/or a clean reinstall of the app, it’d be great if you’d give disabling Background App Refresh a shot: this could be found under Settings -> General -> Background App Refresh.”

Obviously, that’s not an ideal solution. While Spotify seems to be getting the most attention, users have complained that the update to iOS 15 is impacting their phone’s battery life. As ZDNet suggests, you shouldn’t panic quite yet. The update itself certainly requires a decent amount of time and CPU power — if you didn’t plug in your phone for the iOS 15 install, you’ll definitely see a major battery drain.

As well, “Installing a new OS on an iPhone triggers a lot of stuff to go on in the background, from indexing to recalibrating the battery, and this can go on for hours or even days,” as Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet writes. “Not only does this consume power, but the battery recalibration can give the impression that the battery is draining more rapidly when in fact it isn’t.” For non-Spotify updates, you’ll just want to go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health see if your battery capacity is over 80 percent.

And then? Well, wait for your next update in a few days. Because iOS 15.1 (or whatever it’s called) will probably fix a lot of issues. And hopefully before then, Spotify will get its own battery-saving fix.