How To Fix Find My Battery Drain Issue Caused By AirTag

Is your iPhone’s battery draining faster than usual? Have you checked the Battery stats and Find My is the app to blame? Does it score ridiculously high battery usage values for Background Activity? Have you recently connected an AirTag to your iPhone? Apple’s Bluetooth tracker is the most common cause for excessive Find My battery drain!

How To Check Find My Battery Usage

Proceed as follows to make sure that Find My is the app to blame:

• Open Settings and scroll for Battery.
• Check the Battery Usage By App list. Is Find My displayed towards the top?
• Tap on Show Activity, to confirm that you’re dealing with an abnormal Background Activity.

Fact: In the screenshot provided nearby you can notice that the Find My app tops the battery usage charts with 96% and all battery drainage is caused by Background Activity.

AirTag Causes Find My Battery Drain

To be able to stop the leakage you have to pinpoint the cause. Have you recently connected an AirTag to your iPhone? As soon as I paired Apple’s Bluetooth Tracker to my iOS 14.6 running device, the battery draining issue started.

Other reports confirm this behavior. Apparently, we’re dealing with an iOS bug that has flared up since the iOS 14.5 when the iPhone started supporting AirTags.

How to Fix Find My Battery Drain Issue

Thankfully, there are ways to stop this:

1. Prevent NFC Contact

In many cases users report that the Find My battery drainage occurs over night. However, in my opinion the issue is similar during daytime, but it might be more diluted because of other battery draining apps.
Nevertheless, NFC proximity might cause your iPhone to ping the AirTag and vice-versa more frequently. So, the first tip is to avoid keeping your AirTags in very close range of your iPhone.

2. Reboot iPhone

The force restart trick couldn’t miss from this troubleshooting list either. Reboot your iPhone to flush any temporary glitches that could cause the your iPhone to constantly ping the AirTag and thus deplete its battery much faster than usual.

3. Remove / Re-Connect AirTag

In my case, the battery drain problem was solved only after I removed the AirTag from the Find My app
How to: Browse for Find My -> Items -> AirTag Name -> Remove Item.
After you disconnect the Bluetooth tracker, reboot iPhone and re-connect the AirTag. You have to go through the initial setup process once again.

4. Force AirTag Firmware Update

AirTags also receive new firmware versions from Apple. They mostly include bug fixes and performance improvements. Updates should occur automatically, but you can force it as soon as you know that one is available.
In fact, AirTag firmware 1A276D (version no. 1.0.276) has been rolled out. This is the first firmware update and comes to improve the original firmware no. 1.0.225. Update your AirTag asap and let us know if it fixes the Find My battery drain bug!

5. Avoid Precision Finding

Last but not least, iPhone 11 and 12 users have to be aware that using the U1 chip for locating an AirTag with millimetre accuracy, leads to an increased battery drain! One can actually feel how resource demanding this option is. The iPhone overheats only seconds after the green Find button is pressed in the Find My app.

I recommend you reboot your iPhone, after you use Precision Finding to make sure that you filter out any glitch caused by it. I suspect that the battery draining issue might be also triggered when this feature is used.

Have you managed to fix the AirTag Find My battery drain issue? Did one of the above troubleshooting steps help you out? Have you found a better way to deal with this? Use the comments section and share your thoughts.

Related: How to enable AirTag Lost Mode and mark your Bluetooth tracker as lost, when you’re not able to track it anymore.