I know there is a thread about News seemingly having excessive background activity but I am seeing 3 apps all behaving very strangely and identically as far as background activity is concerned and I'm wondering whether it isn't real but is actually a bug with the Settings/Battery reporting.
What I am seeing is 3 apps in particular, Apple News, Apple Maps and Lebara(*) being reported as having a lot of background activity in the Settings/Battery reports. For instance on Sunday I see News as having consumed 6h 10m in the background (and no reported on-screen time, I never opened it on my phone that day). Curiously though for that same day I also see Apple Maps as having consumed 6h 10m of background activity with no on-screen time either (I didn't open Maps that day either). Finally there is Lebara - can anyone guess its usage? Correct (I suspect), an identical 6h 10m of background activity and zero on-screen time!
It's the fact that the usage data is identical for the three apps that makes me think there is some sort of monitoring/reporting error going on here rather than those three apps actually freakishly running for exactly the same amount of time in the background. I could provide similar numbers for any other day where, although the background activity won't always be 6h 10m (it varies a lot), every day will show the same 3 apps having the exact same background activity numbers.
If I then look at battery usage though it gets more confusing. For the Sunday data that I quoted the battery usage data does differ, it shows News as using 86% of my battery that day whereas Maps and Lebara are shown as using no battery (a "-" instead of any percentage value which I assume means that the use was such a small fraction of 1% as to be not worth reporting so rounded down to zero).
To add insult to injury I always run my iPhones with background app refresh set globally to off so there shouldn't be any significant background activity going on anyway, maybe some essential-activities and finishing-up exceptions that iOS specifically allows even when background app refresh is set to off but surely not 6h 10m of background activity?
My next obvious steps are probably to first do a restart and if that doesn't work then delete and re-install the 3 offending apps to see if that fixes it. I'm sort of waiting for 5.1 to get to official release though and ignoring the problem for now. In the meantime I'm curious to see whether anyone else has seen anything similar, or perhaps more generally apps seeming to ignore the fact that background app refresh is turned off and clocking up significant amounts of background activity anyway.
(*) Lebara is the app for my mobile network provider that does the usual account management stuff - look at data and minutes left in the current month's allowance, see available top-up credit, buy add-ons etc.
What I am seeing is 3 apps in particular, Apple News, Apple Maps and Lebara(*) being reported as having a lot of background activity in the Settings/Battery reports. For instance on Sunday I see News as having consumed 6h 10m in the background (and no reported on-screen time, I never opened it on my phone that day). Curiously though for that same day I also see Apple Maps as having consumed 6h 10m of background activity with no on-screen time either (I didn't open Maps that day either). Finally there is Lebara - can anyone guess its usage? Correct (I suspect), an identical 6h 10m of background activity and zero on-screen time!
It's the fact that the usage data is identical for the three apps that makes me think there is some sort of monitoring/reporting error going on here rather than those three apps actually freakishly running for exactly the same amount of time in the background. I could provide similar numbers for any other day where, although the background activity won't always be 6h 10m (it varies a lot), every day will show the same 3 apps having the exact same background activity numbers.
If I then look at battery usage though it gets more confusing. For the Sunday data that I quoted the battery usage data does differ, it shows News as using 86% of my battery that day whereas Maps and Lebara are shown as using no battery (a "-" instead of any percentage value which I assume means that the use was such a small fraction of 1% as to be not worth reporting so rounded down to zero).
To add insult to injury I always run my iPhones with background app refresh set globally to off so there shouldn't be any significant background activity going on anyway, maybe some essential-activities and finishing-up exceptions that iOS specifically allows even when background app refresh is set to off but surely not 6h 10m of background activity?
My next obvious steps are probably to first do a restart and if that doesn't work then delete and re-install the 3 offending apps to see if that fixes it. I'm sort of waiting for 5.1 to get to official release though and ignoring the problem for now. In the meantime I'm curious to see whether anyone else has seen anything similar, or perhaps more generally apps seeming to ignore the fact that background app refresh is turned off and clocking up significant amounts of background activity anyway.
(*) Lebara is the app for my mobile network provider that does the usual account management stuff - look at data and minutes left in the current month's allowance, see available top-up credit, buy add-ons etc.
