Prodigy III

High Battery Drain on this week's iOS and Android apps

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
July 24, 2024
32 replies
2774 views

Many usersⵜ are reporting extremely high battery drain on this week’s version of both the iOS and Android apps (v80.05.04 and v80.05.06, respectively). Using the iOS/Android battery tracking dashboards, users are reporting 30-50% battery drain‡ from the Sonos app over a 24-hour period.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the battery drain occurs with the Sonos app in the background. Disabling background app refresh doesn’t improve things. Fully exiting the Sonos app is required.

Purely out of curiosity, I plan to monitor Wi-Fi traffic from the app to see if this version of the app is continuously polling the device firmware. Anyone who beats me to such measurements—yay! —by all means let us know what you find.

ⵜ Likely not all users, particulars TBD

‡ Figures reported for phones; tablets have dramatically larger batteries so drain is a smaller percentage

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skullc

Prodigy III

The app uses Bluetooth for the Ace headphones (to tweak eq and other settings) and when you add a new speaker. For the vast majority of people, the app doesn’t need Bluetooth 99.9% of the time … so it will be tremendously ironic if my hunch holds water.

On my iPhone, disabling Bluetooth results in a “puh-lease enable” pop-up every time I launch the app.

Not on mine just a notification to update every now and again 😊

but as I don’t use the app much anymore I don’t care

Network= livewire cpe pro 3 +eero 6 pro wireless

O

orbiter-savoy

Lyricist II

Hmm, if I turn off Bluetooth completely (Settings->Bluetooth), toggle off for everything, then I get the Sonos message asking to turn it on.

However if I leave Bluetooth on, but go to Settings->Sonos, I can toggle it off just for Sonos. In that case, I get no message from Sonos.

press250Author

Prodigy III

Hmm, if I turn off Bluetooth completely (Settings->Bluetooth), toggle off for everything, then I get the Sonos message asking to turn it on.

However if I leave Bluetooth on, but go to Settings->Sonos, I can toggle it off just for Sonos. In that case, I get no message from Sonos.

Hi @orbiter-savoy, same here. I think Apple may allow audio apps to ignore the app-specific toggles—specifically Bluetooth and Background App Refresh—which sounds odd but seems to be the case.

O

orbiter-savoy

Lyricist II

Hi @press250, looks like my findings are off and there is still background activity with the BT toggled off. Probably didn’t wait long enough for the stats to update. :(

C

craigski

Local Superstar

My guess is Sonos is building in some diagnostic code to get them more telemetry on the App performance to help improve the App. It maybe a third-party eg Sentry.io that is using the battery in background.

O

olistrut

Contributor II

Same here. Sonos causing almost half my battery usage over last 24 hours with no more than 5 minutes of active use.

App is either fundamentally broken (again) or using massive amounts of energy to spy on my phone. Don’t know which one would be worse.

M

m-m-i

Enthusiast I

For the last 10 days I have 15m on screen 27h 14m background usage for the Sonos app. I’m fairly certain those 27h are exactly the amount of time the app has just been open (ie not fully quit), as I use airplay and rarely stream using Sonos, if at all.

Draining users batteries just for opening an app occasionally is an extremely bad bug. I don’t understand why this hasn’t been patched with urgency.

S

Sideshow_Bob

Trending Lyricist I

@press250 I wonder if the battery drain is related to this volume bug.

On iPhone if you have the Sonos app running, if you mute system volume it will un mute itself. Force close the app and the volume will work as expected.
Video;

https://www.reddit.com/r/sonos/s/rUp6sQHORz

D

DeRochier

Trending Lyricist I

Same issue here on my iPhone 13 Pro: after my Sonos app updated I couldn’t make it a full day on a single charge. 18 minutes on screen and almost 4 hours running in the background. What is the app doing? And why is Sonos doing everything they can to anger and alienate their customers? Patrick Spence should be fired.

Now I open the app, do what I want to do, and force quit the app to preserve my iPhone’s battery life.

PloppyC

Lyricist III

One more with excessive idle battery drain.

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