iOS 9 excessive battery drain

[Dangrove98]

Device: iPhone 6 16GB, iPhone 5s 16GB

Operating System Version: iOS 9.1/iOS 9.2

Spotify Version: 4.5.0.1332

Description: The iOS app drains the battery far too quickly! Even with offline playlists, flight mode enabled and no background app refresh, my phone will still die completely from 100% after 5-6 hours of listening and that's if I use no other apps. My iPhone 6 is brand new! In the battery usage Spotify is always ranked as the most draining app and generally shows something around 50% (unless I use any other battery-intensive apps, the lowest I've seen it drop is around 30% - still far too much). My phone never lasts a full day, without Spotify running it's fine! On iOS 9.0.2 I used to easily get around 10 hours from my year-old 5s with exactly the same usage (also now dies after 6 hours). It's shockingly bad but I dislike all other streaming services.

To reproduce:

1. Play any music (including offline playlists)

Workaround:

2. None found, disabling EQ or audio normalisation makes no difference. Using an older version of the app also makes no difference.

Additional information:

Please fix this!

[user-removed]

Recently bought a new iPhone (2 weeks ago) and I am shocked by how much battery the Spotify app uses. If I don't run Spotify at all and only listen to the iPhone music app or podcasts then my battery is still at 80% by the end of a full day. If I run Spotify I get to 80% within an hour. My phone would die before my work day is through if I listened to Spotify for more than an hour.

This is in offline mode, no background refresh, no activity posting, with the screen off. I would love to listen to Spotify more, but if this continues I don't see the point in keeping my premium subscription as I can't make use of the app unless my phone is plugged in.

I hope this issue is a priority to the Spotify team.

[user-removed]

Quick follow-up: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/36370/20150228/top-five-worst-apps-that-drain-your-smartphone-batt...

Spotify is ranked as the second most battery draining app. That's not good news for a music app, which users would like to have running throughout the day. This is just one website, but there are many more examples that rank Spotify as notoriously battery hungry. 

[alexsb199]

I found the culprit of this issue. This has to do with allowing cellular data. Turn off that feature for the Spotify app and the battery issue is gone as long as I'm listening off Wifi. Sounds like there's a memory/battery consumption issue with some feature related to the cellular data algorithm.

[mrfart]

Same issues with iphone 5S, latest IOS. 

What's so weird is that it uses so much juice even with downloaded music. 

I could understand it if it was streaming. Anyway, I got a spotify subscription to listen while running, and I can't really use it on long runs because the battery dies halfway through. 

[ashleyknapp]

This is still a problem on my 6S Plus on iOS 10.2.1. Anyone found a solution to stop the battery drain?

Also does anyone know what the battery usage of Apple Music is compared to Spotify? Extremely tempted to switch and pay the extra £5 a month if the problem continues..

Thanks

[freduke]

Don't know how to quote on here but I added about 1000 songs from my iTunes into my iPhone to the Apple Music app and the battery depletes about the same, this is the worst iPhone I've ever had, I still have an iPhone 4 and I could still get 8-10 hours of music playback. When I use Spotify or Apple Music for just about 2 hours, I'm already at around 60% battery life. Terrible optimization, I wish there was an update to fix this.

[QuiriniusGast]

Not related to a specific iPhone version, or iOS. To fix this:

Go to your iOS settings, scroll down and look for Spotify, within the Spotify settings disable: Background Refreh.

It should be fine now.