I got a Whoop 5 a few days ago and it is very interesting. I noticed though that whoop app is excessively draining my battery (iPhone 15 pro). I already made sure background refresh is on, live activities settings are off, restarted the phone and reinstalled the app but it seems that I can’t track activities on the app at the time I do them, without it draining my battery. Yesterday I recorded a few activities and I had to recharge my phone twice as whoop was taking up over 80% the battery usage 
. Today tracking two activities (total about 1hr 45) took the battery down to 65% and most of that time the screen wasn’t on. Is this expected? Are there other optimisation steps to try? I’d rather not have to log activities after the fact as sometimes I want to monitor my hr during and I can’t always remember what time I started or ended. Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
Hi @sparklypickle thanks for reaching out! Short answer: what you’re seeing isn’t expected as a baseline experience, but it is consistent with how iOS behaves when an app is kept active for live, real-time monitoring.
A few important clarifications that should help:
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WHOOP does not need to be open to track activities. Your WHOOP 5.0 records heart rate and activity data directly on the sensor and can store up to 14 days of data without the app running.
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When the app is kept open to view live heart rate, iOS treats WHOOP as a foreground, continuously updating app, which can result in very high battery usage percentages — even if the screen is mostly off.
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The “80% battery usage” you’re seeing reflects how the battery was used (live foreground processing), not that WHOOP is constantly draining your phone in the background.
I completely understand wanting real-time HR visibility. The tradeoff on iOS right now is that continuous live viewing uses significantly more phone power. Many members find that quick check-ins strike the best balance between visibility and battery life.
Thank you for your reply @noooor! That makes sense. I found that if I have low power mode enabled for the iPhone that I can monitor real time heart rates without such a dramatic hit to my phone battery. This suggests to me that it might be possible to optimise the app code to prevent drain (by having it do something similar to what happens in low power mode).
I am sure once the novelty wears off, and I learn what different hr zones feel like, that I won’t want to monitor live as frequently but nonetheless it would be a nice quality of life change if I didn’t have to turn on low battery mode every day to use Whoop how I would like to.
Just to clarify, are you saying that if I start a live activity on the app, then close the app, it will still keep logging an activity until I open then app again and manually stop the activity?
I totally get that! And, yes, precisely 