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Connect iOS app battery drain

Device iPhone X
Watch Fenix 5x
Connect 4.6.0.18

So for the last week or so I've had this massive battery drain on my phone like 20-30% extra a day and I've been checking and Connect has jumped from being low 4-5% a day to 15-19% a day with like 15 min on screen with 1.5-2 hours background a day...with background app refresh turned off. Anyone else experiencing a huge jump in battery drain here as of late?

-Tom
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 7 years ago
    I'm also experiencing the battery drain issue.

    iPhone 6S
    IOS: 11.4
    GC App: 4.7
    ForeRunner 735XT

    Today the GC app is topping my phone's Battery Usage leaderboard with 65% (24 hours) and 40% (7 days)! I've had to start bringing my phone charger to work as my phone barely lasts the day with only light usage. Very Frustrating!

    This only started happening within the past couple of weeks or so. It sounds like a bug in GC or some kind of compatibility issue between GC and IOS 11. I hope Garmin is aware of it and fixes it soon.
  • checking in here from the other thread (sorry i missed this original thread Tommylee84)...

    i've had this battery drain issue since this weekend which i believe coincides with the latest GC update i did on June 1, although i did update iOS to 11.4 the middle of last week. i've tried doing a bunch of similar things to everyone above without any success. in fact, it took me a while to even figure out that my watch/GC was the cause of the problem. i've always seen a pretty significant "time" number for GC in the Battery preference but never much overall usage. i didn't even see it that high this past week. what struck me was seeing my Usage and Standby numbers identical until i put my phone into airplane mode. i think toggled wifi and BT and eventually found out it was a bluetooth issue related to my watch and Garmin Connect.

    anyway, as Tommylee84 suggested, the only solution i have discovered for this problem is to turn of the BT connection on my watch (using shortcuts on my 935)...and then manually turning it on if and when i want to sync with GC/iphone, i turn on the connection momentarily.

    as for the background refresh issue: this has always been the case for me... even if background refresh is off, GC will connect to my watch periodically. prior to this week, i've always accepted the ~10% battery drain per day (12-16 hours i have the phone on), but since this weekend, the drain is closer to 20-25% which is unacceptable.

    hoping Garmin can figure this out for us as i am pretty convinced this is not an iOS issue.

    Aside: the problem existed with FW8.0 on my FR935, and still persists with last nights' upgrade to FW9.10

  • So it's been a few days and as long as I closed the app out in the background the app did not run, but today that did not work and the app ran for 16+ hours in the background without even being opened. So back to the drawing board.


    any luck yet? i have done everything including removing the GC app, and re-installing it... bummed that the only way to keep my phone from draining incessantly is to make my smart watch into a sports watch as you suggest. (thankfully, i suppose, i only really use it for "caller ID" as i only have call notifications coming through to alert me. but i did like have a counter on the watch face alerting me to stacking up notifications and occasionally could read a text without pulling out my phone)

  • I've not found any solution, I have an email chain open with Garmin and they're not really being any help. I've tried to get them to look at this thread and I get no where.
  • I'm having the same issue. Ever since I updated the Connect app on my iPhone 8+ last week the battery use of the app has gone up significantly. I can't tell you what it was before as it was never an issue, but now I'm seeing 35% battery drain from the app as background usage, which is nuts!

    Edit: Added version info in case it's useful for Garmin support if they're listening.
    iPhone 8+ iOS 11.4
    Fenix 5 Version 9.20.0.0
    Edge 1030 Version 5.0.0.0
  • I'm experiencing the battery drain as well. GCM would always reside in the 2% battery drain area for me. Now its always near the top. I haven't changed any settings related to it, so it must be caused by something in the GCM updates.
  • I have similar problem (may be same)

    but I'm fenix3 user

    this is what i posted. ( https://forums.garmin.com/forum/on-t...-app-in-iphone )

    and I also send email to garmin customer service as the post but can't receive any response yet.

    I update app to GC v4.8 2 days ago but still exist same problem.

    so I'm turning off the bluetooth at fenix3 these days.

    fenix3 has not wrist HR sensor.

    iPhone 8 (11.4)
    Fenix 3 (8.90)
    Garmin Connect (4.8.0.16)
  • Same problem here. Disabling the phone connection on the watch seems to fix it most of the time, but not always.

    Like in the screenshot in the previous post, the problem seems to be with the Connect app failing to sleep properly when it's in the background. If I look at power usage for the app it's saying it accounted for 18% of battery usage (that's low: sometimes it's been at 40%) after 3 minutes on screen and 50 minutes in the background. That's with the phone connection disabled on the watch.
  • I'm using GCM on my iPhone 8+ (iOS 11.4) together with a S60 watch. My iPhone and GCM are running 24:00 h and over night only 2% of the iPhone battery goes down, over day with some e-mails, whatsapp and notifications it goes down 10 to 15%. If I use GPS to track during playing Golf it goes down 20 - 25%. So I can not say it's too much.
    The last 7 days GCM was 39 min in the foreground and 1.8 h in the background activ.
    Here I have the feeling that it has to do with the connection between specific watches.
  • I have similar problem (may be same)

    but I'm fenix3 user

    this is what i posted. ( https://forums.garmin.com/forum/on-t...-app-in-iphone )

    and I also send email to garmin customer service as the post but can't receive any response yet.

    I update app to GC v4.8 2 days ago but still exist same problem.

    so I'm turning off the bluetooth at fenix3 these days.

    fenix3 has not wrist HR sensor.

    iPhone 8 (11.4)
    Fenix 3 (8.90)
    Garmin Connect (4.8.0.16)


    My iphone settings as follow:

    background app refresh - off
    location service of garmin connect - never