[OtinG]

Sudden battery drain issue on iPad mini 5 after creating a stacked widget:

Battery life under iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 had been okay until last evening. It still seems okay on my iPhone XR, but it went south fast after I added a stacked widget to my iPad mini 5. The stacked widget has The Weather Channel, News, Calendar, and Podcasts wizards in the stack and is NOT set to rotate by some weird Apple scheme. I turned the mini screen off overnight and the battery dropped 32%! WTBleep! I checked the Battery settings and it shows that the Notes app was the main culprit, but that makes no sense at all. Notes has no need to keep in contact with the iCloud at all times. It should be able to phone home after it is opened to see if any changes to any notes have been made on other devices. The listing for Notes showed the words widget underneath it, but I don’t have Notes in a widget. Maybe the Battery app is wonky and flagged Notes rather than the stacked widget. I can see News and WX both wanting to constantly phone home, and perhaps Podcasts too, but not Notes. I'm charging the mini now and will verify later, but prior to updating to iPadOS 14 and iOS 14 I had the Do Not Disturb settings scheduled for 23:00 to 07:00 on all my devices. The iPhone XR shows that to still be the case. I'll check the mini when I get back home.

And one more thing, to channel the ghost of Jobs, the first thing I checked this morning was whether the mini had been downloading updated apps over night. It hadn't, and manually checking showed no new app updates available. So that wasn't the culprit.

Notes being the culprit still bothers me. I spend way more time on Safari than all the other apps combined, yet the Battery setting usage graph showed Notes being used way more than any other app. That is a big ? IMO!

ETA: I’m back where I can look at my iPad mini again. I attached a screen capture showing the Battery settings and another showing the stacked widget I placed on my Home screen. The Battery graph shows 56% of usage is tied to the Notes, app and in small text below that states, “Widget, Background Activity.” So it looks like Apple has a battery issue with widgets on the Home screen in iPadOS 14. My iPhone XR only has the 2x2 Clock widget on its Home screen, and it doesn’t seem to have this battery issue. Bu I don’t have the four widget stacked widget on my iPhone XR.