iPad battery drain

Charts Online Networks Beta Testing
1

I was using the new beta last night and found that with VATSIM traffic and track my aircraft on the application was using so much processor time that the battery was draining faster than it could charge the iPad.

M4 iPad Pro iOS 18.0.1

2

Hello! Welcome back to our forum!

This is probably to be entirely expected: The traffic is updated every second, and the map needs to be rerendered to show the results. We’ll try to optimize this as much as possible, but ultimately it is a tradeoff between fast updates and CPU usage.

Perhaps a customizable refresh rate would be beneficial in cases where you can’t keep the device connected? That way, you could opt out of the 1hz updates and go for the 30 seconds or so that other trackers provide?

Kind Regards,
Malte

3

Definitely. On my Mac, when in the foreground, NG Charts with VATSIM traffic enabled is saturating about 1 to 1.5 cores and causing an increase in fan speed. I think many people would gladly trade a lower refresh rate for reduced CPU usage.

Regards,

Tim

1 Like
4

Hi,

Thanks for the reply :slight_smile: , fully expect it to use an increased amount of processor usage and yes a variable refresh rate would help but it certainly needs to be optimised so that it’s not draining the iPad faster than it charges in one hour long flight I went from 20% battery to 8% while it was plugged in. If dropping the default refresh rate is required to ensure that balance then in my view that should be done.

I guess give us the option to increase polling to a rate that is likely to drain the battery quicker than it can charge but advise us that it’s going to potentially do that?

Just some thoughts!

5

Hmmm, the battery draining faster than it charges does not sound healthy. It is likely due to your battery health and/or charger. We have not seen such behavior while we were developing this - and this is the most optimized it has ever been (it has definitely been worse haha!).

We’ll consider the option for sure! We will also monitor the battery usage statistics that we get from Apple to see if there are any new trends there.

Kind Regards,
Malte

6

Hi,

Thanks again for the reply, the battery health is 100% on my iPad which is 6 months old (12.9” iPad Pro M4), I was also using an official iPad 25w charger and cable.

I’ll continue to monitor and see if it happens again (I’ve not flow again since last Thursday when it happened).

Thanks

Andrew