Location Reminders Battery Issue
 

Has anyone else been experiencing significant battery issues with OmniFocus for iPhone with location services enabled and a geofence associated with a context?

At first I thought this might have been an iPhone 4s iOS issue, however even after updating iOS to 5.0.1 and making sure OmniFocus is running 1.12 I'm still noticing my battery life dropping significantly throughout the day.

I've noticed that even when the app is closed the location services notification icon is still constantly on and the battery usage only appears to return to normal when location services are completely turned off...

Has anyone else experienced something similar? Is this an iOS problem, an app problem, or both?

-Salem

The location services section in preferences will tell you which apps have asked for the location in the past hour with a purple hour. Have you checked that? Is OF constantly purple?

First, make sure you update to 5.0.1 on your iPhone. Second, if it still seems like you are getting a lot of drain, then go to Settings->Location Services->System Services and turn off Location-Based iAds, Diagnostics & Usage and Setting Time Zone.

That should fix it.

I am getting the same issue with the iPhone 4s. The update to 5.0.1 did nothing to improve battery life. However, I think the problem may still be with Omnifocus.

With Omnifocus location reminders on the location symbol remain on constantly. Also when checking the Setting > General > Usage, the Standby time and Usage time are the same. Turning off Omnifocus location reminders fixes this.

This suggests that this may be a cause of the battery drain issues that we are experiencing with the iPhone 4s. Time will tell....

The initial version of OmniFocus that was released right after iOS 5 seemed to have a negative impact on battery life, but after an update that problem went away. Granted, using any kind of location monitoring is going to reduce your battery life [i]slightly[/i], but the Region Monitoring feature is actually designed to be very power-efficient, and as far as I can tell OmniFocus is using the same feature as the built-in Reminders app.

In my case, I actually found the main culprit of my battery problems was Google Sync (Exchange ActiveSync) when used with [i]Calendars[/i] (Mail seems fine). Disabling Google Sync for Calendars and Contacts has resulted in a [i]huge[/i] increase in battery life for me (even with the iCloud Calendar and Contact options still on).

[QUOTE=ajcorney;103946]I am getting the same issue with the iPhone 4s. The update to 5.0.1 did nothing to improve battery life. However, I think the problem may still be with Omnifocus.

With Omnifocus location reminders on the location symbol remain on constantly. Also when checking the Setting > General > Usage, the Standby time and Usage time are the same. Turning off Omnifocus location reminders fixes this.

This suggests that this may be a cause of the battery drain issues that we are experiencing with the iPhone 4s. Time will tell....[/QUOTE]

I dunno, but my Omnifocus reminders work great. I don't think it is Omnifocus that is the problem. You should turn off those things I mentioned. I noticed a huge increase in battery performance before 5.0.1

Salem, sorry for the confusion! This is likely due to the location-based reminders feature we added recently. This [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showpost.php?p=103933&postcount=14"]forum post[/URL] may help explain what's going on. If you have location reminders enabled, the icon you referred to is going to remain visible; the reminders won't work otherwise.

As previous posters mentioned, though, Apple designed the API we're using there to minimize battery drain. The toolbar icon is intended as a privacy control - they want you to know that something is monitoring your location. In previous versions of iOS, it could be used to gauge battery drain, but that was always a side effect and isn't as useful in that manner in iOS 5.

That said, if you haven't installed iOS 5.0.1, installing it may help - it was aimed at fixing a battery-draining bug in the OS. (Though some folks report that Apple has [URL="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57323047-37/ios-5.0.1-didnt-fix-battery-drain-bug-say-some-users/"]more work to do in this regard[/URL].)