Spotify causing severe battery drain on iPhone 6S running iOS 10

[jack_206]

This was an issue on iOS 9 and still seems to be happening on iOS 10. Spotify is using 3x more battery than any other app and accounts for about 50% of all battery usage. This never used to be an issue, and I don't understand what it could possibly be doing that is so resource-hungry. Most of my listening is via saved songs on my offline playlist, so it isn't a mobile data issue.

Anyone know how to resolve this? A music player should not be impacting device battery life like this.

Edit Oct 11 2016: Adding a screenshot since this doesn't seem to be getting any traction with Spotify. I unplugged 4 hours ago and my battery is at 13%. And 46% of my battery has been used by Spotify over the last 24 hours.

[ashleyknapp]

Done the exact same, much prefer Apple Music, looks and is organised so much better than Spotify. Only downside is Apple Music takes up 21GB whereas spotify only took about 9GB! Hopefully an iOS update can fix this

[Charlescui]

Folks, here is the solution. Go to Spotify settings, under social, enable the Private session. I have tried on IPhone7 with IOS 10.2. Enable the private session will save a lot of power consumption!

[pacpinto]

This fixed the issue for me. Tested on iOS 10.3, iPhone SE 64gb in online and offline modes. Phone used to get really hot after 30 mins, and experience severe battery drain. Now please please Spotify, fix this already. Now you know what's causing it. It's really not practical to have to go into settings whenever I load up the app. Thanks.

[siuja]

I tried this fix earlier, and thought that it had done the trick.  However, it just took a little longer for my iPhone to get hot.  My battery was drained about 20% in about an hour and a half.  Still looking...

[clavila]

I have the same problem, the phone was playing spotify. When i picked it up it was hot, and the battery was drained. Spotify had consumed 50% of the battery working on background after 3 hs.

[RZC333]

Thanks a lot for this solution @charlescui which I have just done and it seems that my lingering problem for weeks, from iOS 10.2.1 to 10.3 of extreme battery drain and abnormal readings, has been resolved!

[pacpinto]

@RZC333 @siuja, please note that after 6 hours of inactivity the Spotify client will automatically re-enable "public session" mode. You have to go into settings again to re-enable "private session" so the fix will work again. That's why this is *not* a permanent fix, only a workaround... much better than frying your phone but Spotify still needs to work on this.

[gerardouw]

Same here; I thought it was a solution, but it's not.

3.8 hours background activity -> 58%(!) battery use.

I'm quiet shocked by this bug/flaw and how slow Spotify is to fix this.

I tried many options mentioned in this thread, but none really help.

It occurs with me mainly when I play with my bluetooth headphones or bluetooth speaker.

Edit: my iPhone (7) was 100% at 08:00 this morning, 4 hours later: 25% left.
(in 4 hous 75% drain - it's outragious)

[Nirvana1123]

I'm only using normal settings for quality and it drained my battery by 20% in the span of a 5min song.

[user-removed]

I just installed spotify to my iPhone 7 Plus yesterday and today I have the same issue. Phone was very warm (it never is) and Spotify is using 40%+ of the battery after a couple hours of use.

[jack_206]

Update: I started this thread last fall, and the battery issue has finally stopped happening for me. Over the past 7 days, Spotify has accounted for about 6% of battery usage, which is in line with what I was used to before this issue popped up. 

I don't have a fix to recommend, because I didn't do anything differently, so I don't know if Spotify deployed a fix in a recent update, or if a recent iOS update fixed some kind of memory leak. Regardless, just want to close the loop and at least confirm that it has stopped occurring for me. I still see a ton of reports in the other threads about this, so it's clearly not resolved across the board. Interested to see if anyone else has had their issues stop.

Good luck!

[Tim205]

Same problem. Spotify do something!!

[shumachine]

I just switched from iPhone 6 to iPone7. Yesterday, there was no problem. This morning, my iPhone became a toaster. I just checked the settings, and set quality to "normal" and set "normalize" to off. I would guess, that this could use some battery to calculate the normalized volume. Hope to see some difference.

Funny thing is: Streaming over mobile yesterday was no problem at all. Streaming this morning over WiFi killed my battery. Spotify used more than 50% of the battery.

As I am writing this: Temperature of my phone dropped significantly in the two minutes or so, I wrote this. Will keep you updated.

But still @Spotify: Do something. I am using this with my whole family, and I wouldn't want to switch! This has to be investigated and solved!

[user-removed]

Same issue here. Very inconveniencing.

I'll try turning off public sessions.

[user-removed]

Yep, that fixed it. Private session seems to stay turned on for me, which saves time.

[PauloMoreno]

Same thing happening with me. I'm not sure when it started, but I did notice this issue on an iPhone 7 and 7 plus. My phone was getting extremelly hot, and the battery was draining almost at 1% per minute.

I started using deezer for a month and everything was good. Last week I tried Spotify again, after seing some comments here that the issue was fixed. It seemed ok, but today, after 20 minutes listening to some songs, my phone was really hot and the battery started draining (11% after 20 minutes). I changed to deezer, and, only 1% off battery drained after the same 20 minutes - and the phone is cool as if it was turned off.

Basically, today, I listened to 20 minutes, streaming via Wifi with bluetooth headphones and audio on max quality.

• Spotify: 11% battery drain - phone was cool
• Deezer:  1% battery drain - phone was hot 

I'm really disappointed with spotify. I really enjoyed the service, but, it seems like they don't even care about this problem and are not going to fix it for a while.

[user-removed]

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[aslepire16]

I posted here a few months ago, and I'm happy to say that the problem was not Spotify. Turns out my phone's battery was basically unable to hold a charge anymore. Got a new one and everything is a-okay now!

[N-ninja]

For me my 6s battery was replaced a day after I bought it of eBay by apple as the phone had a common fault, lucky it was free a few weeks later I got Spotify... I rlly don't think a battery will degrade in a week or two?

[N-ninja]

Now this is ridiculous, why does the YouTube app running videos for 3+ hours use less battery than something running for 30 mins doing less things? YouTube is playing a video with sound Spotify? It's playing sound only, the problem is optimising the software, and this is NOT optimised to work with the ios OS.