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Users are reporting on Reddit and Apple’s forums (spotted by MacRumors) that Apple Music is significantly affecting their iPhones’ battery life, with some users seeing the app hog 85% of the total battery life. The original thread in the Cupertino giant’s support forum was created in April, but the responses have increased greatly in July. Apple released iOS 13.5.1 back in June that brought with it some security features, but reporting from last week suggests that the release does suffer from a bad battery drain issue.
While initial responses suggested that the problem was caused by Apple Music trying to connect to the user’s Apple Watch, more reports, especially in the past few days have cited multiple reasons for the increased consumption. Interestingly, some users added that the background process was resource-intensive enough to prevent the phone from charging to 100%. The issue is also resulting in the phone heating up, as per other owners.
There are currently no proven workarounds to this problem. Some users have had luck with uninstalling the app, while others have had to perform a hard reset. In some cases, turning off automatic downloads or disabling background app refresh helped solve the issue. It is also not clear if any recent server-side changes are causing this issue, as one of the responses hint at the recent DRM changes for Apple Music files causing this issue.
The battery drain problem is affecting users on both old and new iPhone models, ruling out hardware issues. While the widespread problem has not been acknowledged by Apple yet, it is safe to assume that a fix would be rolled out with the iOS 13.6 release that is currently in beta, in case the issue is caused by an OS bug.