Battery drain concerns

[andrearastelli]

Describe the bug
I've noticed that using anytime player seems to drain the battery way more than other podcast players.
Comparing this to apple podcasts for example shows a more than double battery usage.

Expected behavior
I would expect that a podcast player wouldn't use as much battery, and I'm worried about potential underlying processess running in the background that are not necessary when the phone is locked and I'm just listening to my playlist.

Smartphone (please complete the following information):

• Device: iPhone 11
• OS: ios 18.6

[amugofjava]

Hi @andrearastelli,

Thanks for reporting this. I will do some monitoring of battery usage to see if I can identify any issues.

[joshuacant]

Yeah, there's something to this. It seems to happen around adding podcasts or refreshing them or perhaps downloading. It doesn't happen just opening the app and hitting play on an episode. However twice in the last week my phone has been hot to the touch after adding a feed or going into my feeds and refreshing them. Force killing the app and opening it again resolves the problem.

You've got a loop somewhere that's going full crazy.

Edit for details: iOS 18.6.2, iPhone 15

[amugofjava]

Thank you @joshuacant for the info. I have been running Anytime more on iPhone lately and I too have found, on occasion, my iPhone, running iOS 18, warming up. As you say, it doesn't seem to happen every time you hit play. I noticed it after I used the sleep timer, so that it is my first area to check.

[joshuacant]

A bit more info, in case it is helpful: If I open the app fresh (either from a previous force-kill, or first time after phone boots) and I only interact with downloaded episodes, I've never seen it get hot. However if I do any sort of online activity (refresh a feed, subscribe to a new feed, etc) that's when it seems to happen, but not always.

I haven't been able to pin it down to a specific single trigger, but I think it might be somewhere in the netcode.

[amugofjava]

Thanks for the extra info, I really appreciate it. Would any of that net activity include downloaded episodes? I had an issue earlier where attempting to download and episode would get stuck and I noticed the phone was warmer. Once I killed the app and restarted it, the downloaded started working and the phone cooled down. I've also not been able to reproduce this on Android, so I'm wondering if it's some iOS specific code.

[joshuacant]

Yep, this morning (the most recent time it happened) I opened the app, refreshed 4 feeds, unsubscribed from 1 feed, and downloaded 2 episodes. A few minutes later my phone was warm to the touch, so I force killed the app, opened it back up, and resumed playback and it's been fine since.