Background Battery Drain - iPhone Garmin Connect App

Has anyone found a solution to this yet?..I have just upgraded my phone form an IPhone Se to an IPhone 6s and Garmin connect is showing massive battery drain on my phone (52%), I ride using a edge 520 and broadcast my heart rate from my Fenxis 5s watch ..never had and issue before with previous phone!!. I do have livetrack on but then I always did, and I never start the app , just my edge 520 when riding .

Hi everyone - I seem to have found a solution. I had a watch face and a widget that were stuck trying to update. I updated them manually and battery usage is back to normal.

I'm running iOS 10 and using an original vivoactive on 4.50. GCM is 4.9.2, and the last few versions of GCM rapidly drain both my iPhone battery and my watch battery. (The watch has a battery graph app installed, and the battery drains as if GPS is on whenever GCM is running on my phone. You can clearly see the precipitous drop in battery % coinciding with the launch of the app on my phone.)

Typically, if I leave GCM running, the battery usage stats provided by iOS typically show GCM's background usage being equal to "time since last charge." E.g. if time since last charge is 15h, GCM's background usage is usually 14.9-15h. Background refresh is off, of course. I had background refresh and location set to "always" before, but misbehaving apps lose privileges. Location is now set to "while using," but that hasn't fixed anything either.

Force quitting the app used to fix the battery drain problem. Now, drain continues on both watch and phone (and the watch indicates it's still connected) even after force quitting the app. The battery usage stats in iOS also continue to increment. Only a phone restart can kill the drain now.

Colour me very very unimpressed with the recent versions of Connect. Doesn't Xcode include tools for digging into the impact of an app on an iOS device's battery life? This is pretty elementary stuff--just don't leave things turned on that don't need to be sucking battery life when an app is in the background. It's elementary because this is something that directly affects the user's experience. 1-star App Store review incoming ...

Hi everyone - I seem to have found a solution. I had a watch face and a widget that were stuck trying to update. I updated them manually and battery usage is back to normal.

How did you know the watch face/widget was stuck trying to update? Did the green progress circle never complete, or was there something else that tipped you off?

Garmin, this should not happen. Proper app design would be:

• Try.
  
• Succeed or fail.
  
• If fail, notify user.
  
• Stop.
  

This is how you don't drain batteries!

I mentioned iOS app battery drain in a post on the Fenix 5 forum a few weeks ago.

I have recently upgraded from a FR230 to a Fenix 5. It appears that with the Fenix 5 I am required to leave the app running in the background full time if I want full functionality of 3rd party watch faces. Previously on my FR230 I could force close the app (which I did religiously to avoid battery drain) and there would be no ill effects, however on the Fenix 5 if I force close the app, any third party watch face assumes that the phone is disconnected and will not show any notifications icons or message counts.

The watch still receives the push notifications just fine as I can see then come through, but if you let them time out, there is no record of them on the 3rd party faces. If you have the message icon enabled on the stock faces, there is no problem and message counts show just fine. It appears that 3rd party faces can not distinguish between ‘phone connection status’ and ‘app connection status’ in the same way the stock faces can.

Anyway, as a result of now having to leave the app running in the background and even with background app refresh turned off, I am regularly seeing battery usage pergcentages from the GCM app of between 15-40% per day with hours of unsolicited background usage. Most inconvenient.

Afraid I've had enough of it. Just deleted the app just now. It's not worth the chance of it draining my phone battery at a time when I really need it. If any updates or solutions appear, I may consider reinstalling.

Something has happened recently in that I now no longer need to leave the app running full time. I’m not sure what changed, I don’t *think* it was the update to FW version 10 as I tested it just after, but it appears, for now at least, that I am able to close the app down fully and not lose notifications on the 3rd party watch faces. It has only been a day, but I’m hoping for the best.

So last night I unplugged my phone about 10 pm. It had a 100% charge. Every app had been totally closed out...no background refresh, not even an app open in the background. I do this every once in a while to check the battery....it’s an iPhone 8 running 11.2.2.

At about 10 am this morning I hit the home button to check on the battery and it was at 65%. When I checked the usage I discovered that Connect (v.4.10.0.15) was responsible for about 56% of the usage during the previous 24 hours. (The attached screenshot was taken about an hour later and the usage increased a slight bit, again without any apps even open.) As noted, I didn’t have Connect open and I only allow Connect to use my location when I’m using the app.

By the way, my Vivoactive 3 and my Edge 1000 were both plugged in overnight. The watch is on while charging; the Edge was “powered off”.

Has anyone else had this issue...Garmin Connect using up iPhone battery while not even in use.

Thanks. ciq.forums.garmin.com/.../1402180.jpg

Yes, exact same here. It annoyed me so much I've deleted the app and am back to great battery life. I may give it one more try to see if anything has improved, but I'm not willing to sacrifice so much battery usage if it's still the same. Something far wrong somewhere.