Vera iPhone App heavy battery drain

I don’t know what changed but my iPhone battery life has really fallen off of late. I looked at the battery health tab and see the Vera app is a huge energy waster. 6h 47m over the past 9h 31m. Of the 6h 47m, 6h 44m was in background mode. What is this chatty app doing? Bitcoin mining???

Something wrong here. I went in the configure screen and switched off everything I could and we’ll see if that helps. I’ve had this app for a couple years but maybe the latest update changed something?? I have version 3.62 running.

Hello @curiousB

Please check on your iPhone settings → Privacy → Location Services → Look for the Vera App and set the location access to “While using the App”.

If the signal is weak, this process gets prolonged significantly, and it can last up to 12 minutes.

Determining location is the activity that eats up battery power. In other words, the longer it takes for the app to pinpoint a location, it will consume more battery power.

We will be attentive to your results, requirements, or comments.

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I had it set to never as I am not using geo-fencing in my scenes yet. I think it was already on that setting but I can’t be positive as I changed a number of setting to try to reduce app activity. Lets see if the numbers drop in the next 24 hours. I am think they aren’t but perhaps I’ll give it a bit longer.

99h 23m in last 10 days!!!
5h 5m in last 24 hrs…

The next busiest app is about 1% of this. Something not right here. You some usage “circuit breaker” logic in the app to sleep it if it is doing excess background activity.




delete…reinstall…
continue investigating…

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I deleted and reinstalled the Vera App and that seems to have resolved the problem. I have no idea what was going on but battery life more normal and its not showing as the most active app on the battery tab.

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I just got a new iPhone 14 and again the iPhone Vera app is a major battery user.

Not sure what is going on but I suspect it is a chatty app due to trying to be clever with geofencing.

I don’t use geofencing. At least not yet. Would it be possible to add a switch to the apps config tab to say, turn off all geofencing? In otherwords a mode where the app only runs when active and launched by user. Some sort of miserly power user mode.

I use HomeWave to control my Vera device and don’t have this problem there but as yet HomeWave doesn’t support Ezlo controllers so I am forced to use the Vera iPhone app on Ezlo.

I’m seeing similar behaviour using the Vera App on my iPhone as well (both iPhone 8 and iPhone 12). However, it’s not consistent, about once a week this happens, the other days it’s fine.

Once it happens, my phone is actually quite warm to the touch due to all the activity caused by the app, usually this is how I recognise this issue.

I just ‘kill’ the app by swiping it off screen in the task switcher, and next time it’ll be fine.

Somehow I feel this issue is triggered by the state in which I exit the Vera App. Exiting the App when a camera view is open seems to be one way to easily trigger high background cpu usage.

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You might be right. I was just speculating on the geofencing aspect.

I saw this a few months ago on my iPhone8 but it was intermittent. Since it happened right out of the gate with a new iPhone I thought it was time to report it again.