The iOS Home Assistant app is causing a high battery train on my iPhone 12 running the latest version of iOS and Home Assistant app. I go from charged to empty within 8 hours:
Is there anything I can do to keep notifications but otherwise limit the apps battery usage? When running >14 hours in a 24 hour time frame that means the app is running most of the time. No wonder that my battery drains.
HA is always “on”.
So, if hosting HA on the iPhone what you’re seeing would be normal.
I don’t understand what you mean with “always on”. It should be as much or little “always on” as any other app that from time to time polls an API and pushes a notification to the user. E.g. for the past 24 hours, this is how much background activity the apps on my phone had:
7h 15min Home Assistant (!!!)
13min Fantastical
12min Mail
9min Photos
6min Home
2min Facebook
1min Weathergraph
This is just crazy and must be a bug. What’s a good way to alert the app developers?
Try enabling background app refresh.
Background refresh was on for weeks, it was the first thing I turned off when trying to reduce the usage. So that isn’t the cause.
Have you tried uninstalling and installing the app? I have a iphone 13, latest iOS and latest HA companion and no battery issues at all.
In my case HA usage is ~3h over past 10 days (and I use it quite havily as remote to my hose, so it welll justified). So with your result it is clearly something wrong. To be honst I’d personally suspect some connectivity issues from App to HA instance. To me it looks like App is heavily trying to connect to HA isntance, but for extended period of time it struggles with and is constantly retrying connection. What are conditions over testing period you did? Are you stationary at home (connecting over WiFi), or are you moving into areas with perhaps weak cellural signal? Are you sure that that you have properly setup remote access to HA and in any circumstances when you have access to Internet you can also connect to HA?
Maybe I’m confused.
It’s obvious the HA companion app is installed/running on your IOS device, but where you are hosting Home Assistant is not. I’ve read of some that try to run Home Assistant from an IOS device.
No, not yet. I fear that it might break my notifications and it would be a complicated process.
Good thought. Unfortunately I’m seeing these issues daily. It doesn’t make a difference if I’m at home or at work. In both places I have great wifi. I’m only limited to cell service 2x30 minutes a day, and cell service is rather spotless here.
I’m unsure how to not properly setup remote access. Here’s the setup screen in the app:
The event log is rather empty, just a few “Webhook failed with status code 502” and “Application starting” per day, nothing else.
Oh. No, I didn’t even consider that option. I’m running HA on a Raspberry Pi and connecting via the cloud service.
I’m wondering if the usage might be related to having a HA widget on my Apple Watch which I use to open door to the building. There’s nothing else I can think of. But I’d like to find the proper place to report these kind of issues, is there a repo on github for the app?
Just a check point; seems your Companion App is configured to use NabuCasa cloud… but do you have a valid subsription? Without it remote connection won’t work if configured that way. I think I know the answer 
but just double checking…
Thanks for considering this option. Yes, my subscription is active, I‘m not seeing any connection issues.
