iPhone battery drains when using AirPods

[almondmilk96]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States

Device

iPhone 7

Operating System

iOS 12

My Question or Issue

 A friend and I are having the same issue: Spotify drains our iPhone battery excessively, but only when playing downloaded music over AirPods. I haven't tested it with other Bluetooth devices. I've been having this issue for a few weeks but realized today that my battery life is significantly improved when I'm streaming music instead of playing my downloaded music. My first thought was that this could be because I set my download quality to high, but when I went into Spotify to change my settings it was already set to automatic. Is there any way to address this battery issue?

[rainkidrani]

I think it’s just the headphones. Have you tried using wired headphones and comparing the two?

It could be the app or something else. Please let me know and I could possibly be of some help.

[almondmilk96]

It is the headphones; wired headphones don’t drain the battery but that’s not the issue. The issue is that Bluetooth shouldn’t drain the battery at all and it only happens when I’m listening to music I’ve downloaded on spotify. It makes the app much less useable for me because I can’t stream music without using tons of data/when I don’t have internet access and I can’t download music without killing my battery. The difference is significant enough that it totally outweighs the battery use of streaming the music compared to playing downloaded music.