iPhone battery drain
I was easily getting two days of battery life with my new iPhone 12 Pro. Until just recently. Now a charge is lasting 3/4 day. Tailwind app is gobbling up my battery. And I’m at home all day, not using it. Will this be addressed soon?
-
Official comment
Sorry you're experiencing battery drain. I can help you with that. Are you spending time near your garage while at home? For example, do you work in an office directly above your vehicle in the garage? If so, there is a slight possibility that the app is picking up your vehicle sensor during the day and turning on location tracking when it should not. You can reduce the range of the sensor in the sensor settings menu.
If that is not the case, I strongly suspect this is a known issue we've discovered in iOS.
A phone restart should clear this bug until it crops up again. I'll explain the bug that we are working on with Apple engineers so you have a good understanding of it and how to deal with it in the short term until we can rectify it.
The core issue is that iOS "misses" the event of the vehicle sensor going out of range, so on rare occasions the phone thinks the vehicle sensor is still in range, and reports that it is in range to the Tailwind app. Then of course the Tailwind app tracks your location because the phone operating system is telling the Tailwind app the vehicle sensor is in range (meaning you're in your vehicle). This leads to battery drain :(
The simplest way to see if the bug has popped up is to look at your location tracking icon when you first unlock your phone. If it is always solid for a short time after you unlock your phone, the bug has most likely occurred. Normally if you leave your vehicle and go in the house, that location tracking icon should change from solid to outline within 1 minute, and then each time thereafter when you unlock your phone, that location tracking icon should generally go straight to an outline, not solid.
If it gets stuck on, the easiest way to rectify it is to simply go back out to the garage and close to any / all sensors you have (within about 3 to 5 feet). Your phone's operating system will register that the sensor is back in range, and then hopefully as you walk away from the vehicle it will register that it has gone out of range. In our testing this bug rarely occurs, but we are working with Apple on it. They have verified it does exist and we are providing data to them to help them fix it. This bug rarely occurs but when it does it is frustrating.
Sorry for this inconvenience. Detecting the presence or absence of the Tailwind vehicle sensor is done by the phone's operating system, not by our app - so we rely on Apple to provide the proper state (present or absent).Scott
Comment actions -
Carny,
Sorry about that. Could you please send a bug report from the Tailwind app? Then email support@gotailwind.com and advise that you sent a bug report and why you sent it. We will look into it for you. We released an app update to help remedy this but it wasn't a 100% fix. We are currently testing another update. It is pretty upsetting to me personally that Apple defined the standard used by our vehicle sensors. Apple manufactures the iPhone. It is Apple's operating system that detects the presence / absence of the sensors, and they give our app 3 different ways to interact with iOS and receive status updates on whether or not the sensor is present.
In our testing, NONE of those 3 ways is 100% reliable, and Apple has given us feedback that this is the case. In turn irony, Android works perfectly at detecting the vehicle sensor presence / absence. Regardless, we do have a combination of methods that appears to be working much better but more testing is required.
Who would have ever thought that a $1,000 phone would have trouble detecting if a bluetooth device is nearby or not? Especially when that device belongs to a very specific device type that was designed by Apple. I really, really hope they fix their bug soon. Until then, we believe we do have a workaround.
I can tell you that the bug occurs if you slowly walk away from the vehicle sensor while the iPhone screen is turned on. I have no idea why that would happen, and it certainly does not happen every time. It is actually quite rare, but those are the conditions for it to occur. -
Hi Carrie - I actually found that my phone was connecting to the Bluetooth vehicle sensor while my car was in the garage and I was in the house. Covering the vehicle sensor in foil reduced the signal so it would be detected while I am in the car and not while I am in the house. I haven’t seen the problem since.
-
HI Carrie,
This problem was solved a long time ago, but it resurfaced again recently and appears to be related to the combination of iOS 16 and our latest app release. Earlier app releases as well as iOS 15 did not have this issue. It's not the same issue as 2 years ago but it manifests the same way - battery drain.
Currently the fastest and easiest way to eliminate it is to delete any vehicles you have configured in the Tailwind app. That will obviously disable the auto-open / close features while driving but it should stop the battery drain.
Our team is aware that this issue has cropped up again recently and they are working on a solution to it. An app update will be pushed out again as soon as the issue is resolved, and a "What's New" pop up will be displayed the first time you launch the app after this update is made. If you see "Fixed a battery drain issue" there you will know the update includes that fix.
Sorry for any trouble. I had a discussion the team this morning and told them in no uncertain terms that this was the HIGHEST priority of all tasks. Period.
-
I have the battery drain problem too. I disabled the vehicles and it’s much better. I do like the auto open feature. Is there a way to reduce the distance when closing the door too? The minimum distance is 250 feet, which means I need to drive a house away with the door still open. I’d rather that it close as I’m backing out at a much smaller distance. Maybe set 50 feet as a minimum.
-
Hi Jeff. We are testing a beta version of the app now that appears to resolve the battery drain issue on iOS 16. If all goes well it will be released shortly and you can add vehicles back again.
The short answer on the auto-close distances is "no".
Here is an explanation of why https://gotailwind.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020648492-Why-doesn-t-the-auto-close-work-sooner-as-I-leave-home-I-have-it-set-for-250-feet-but-sometimes-it-doesn-t-close-the-door-until-I-m-much-further-away-
-
Hi Greg,
We found a couple of bugs during beta testing and have been working non-stop to address them. We just submitted another version to Apple this morning for review. If we don't find any more bugs in the next 1-2 days of testing it will be released to everyone.
Sorry for the delay in getting this update out. I felt the bugs we discovered in the beta versions would negatively impact too many users so I held the release until those bugs were addressed. They have now been resolved based on testing of the latest beta version. Fingers crossed.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
15 comments