The Garmin Setting That Kills Your iPhone Battery (At Least It Does Mine)

I have dueling desires for my cell phone. I want my iPhone Mini (I’m not a fan of the notebook sized cell phones), I want the battery to last a day without recharging, and I want it to work seamlessly.

I know, those are pretty big to have all three at once.

With Garmin, I wanted my app to track my rides from my cycling computer without having to open the app up on my phone to upload a ride. The way to do this is to give the Garmin app the permission to do this, which means choosing to allow it to run in the background all of the time, not just when the app is open.

Well, the other side of that is the Garmin app has to be set to “always” rather than “only while using the app” in the phone’s permissions in order for that to happen… and I’m here to tell you, if you choose that option, your battery life drops by about 30% to 50% give or take.

I went dealt with this after a recent software update and went from a full day’s use on my phone’s battery to having to throw it on the charger for fifteen minutes twice a day to keep my phone from dying, just from that one app running in the background.

Interestingly, this time, my Garmin app was given permission to run without any other settings being messed with for two days, so I knew exactly what was killing my battery. After two days, I switched that app only back to “allow while using the app” and I went back to a full day’s use out of my battery.

To give the particulars, this post is based on running an iPhone 12-mini with a battery that was 83% that of a brand new battery. With excessive use, I have to plug the phone in to give it a bump to get it to the end of a day, but that didn’t happen too often.

So, there you have it. If your phone’s battery life drops precipitously, check that setting.