The Home Assistant companion app is by far the most energy demanding app on my phone and I use the phone all day long with all sorts of apps.
HA is only used to check some data every now and then and stays in the background 99.9% of the day.
So how is this possible?
If you have enabled many sensors, then it will send updates to HA, which keeps the network alive.
Also the GPS sensor is quite battery intensive.
I have not activated that many sensors. Only the following 12 to be precise:
The sensor update frequency is set to every 15 minutes if not charging.
These are all nothing special. There are many other apps/services that are allowed to use GPS in background in regular intervals to check my location. None of them uses even 2% as much energy as the HA companion app.
Yeah, I already checked this.
So none of these is the reason for my battery drain problem.
Do you have a video stream somewhere on your HA dashboard?
HA sometimes keep the connection open to the camera, even though it is not in focus.
best way to tell if you are impacted by the stream is to check your data usage…high battery drain and high data usage usually point to that
I noticed high battery use and think the video-stream issue is the culprit. Rather than making a new mobile-only dashboard that omits the streams, I created a new user for my mobile self, and I made my video streams only visible to non-mobile users (using the “visibility” setting for dashboard cards).
I have a similar issue, I have a Ubiquiti doorbell and two RTSP feeds for other cameras and I suspect they are causing a high battery drain while I’m at home. Is there a way to only connect to the feed when the app is open and the tab that connect to these feeds is visible?
The problem is when you first open the feed, then it might stay open whether you are on the page or not.
Looking at the number of packets it’s indeed very likely this is the doorbell and/or other camera feeds.It’s becoming more and more problematic to the point where I’m thinking about (temporarily) disabling my cameras in HA.
or just turn off live view or remove them from your main dashboard and place them on another dashboard you dont visit often. Thats the best way around the issue.
Does it matter if the video feeds are on the same dashboard, but another view? Or do they have to be on a separate dashboard?
I have quite high battery use but no video on my default view.
Data usage is 245mb /day for the past few days, only 10mb/day in background (if that’s accurate).
I tried turning off background usage, but it didn’t make any difference today.
Actually… My question is moot. All my video feeds are already on a separate dashboard. Any suggestions on pinpointing the usage?
Sensors are
“Normal” update frequency.
Edit - I have a still image background ( doubt that matters).
I do not know if it makes a difference if its on different views or dashboards, but if you have viewed them, then it will keep the stream open even if you switch away.
Ah! Well I misunderstood that then. I thought switching away was the fix.
Do you know what to do then? Force quit after video? I did notice a PR on deck that seems related.
its not just limited to video streams as well, anything that streams to the frontend like say a weather radar card for example
yes 2025.8 should contain that fix, when the next beta starts hopefully some of hte impacted users can confirm 
Well that’s exciting…
The only thing on my main dash that kinda streams is the Windrose card which just displays an arrow with wind direction following an entity. I don’t think that counts right?
is it pulling its data from an external source?
I don’t think so. The entity is updated from my weather station via mqtt.
I just looked, and I think the only two “external sources” are pirate weather via the standard weather card, and a pollen sensor via a gauge card. Neither of which should be “streaming” as I imagine it.
