Does a Driving App Drain Your iPhone Battery?

23 October 2026

Yes, a driving app that tracks your route in the background will use noticeably more battery than normal phone use, but how much depends heavily on what it's actually doing — continuous GPS tracking is the main cost, not the app itself being "heavy". For most drives, the difference is a few extra percentage points of battery for the length of the journey, not a drain that empties your phone.

It's a fair question to ask before you start using something like Horizn for every drive, especially if you already notice your phone running warm on long journeys with maps open. The honest answer sits between "it's nothing" and "it'll wreck your battery" — the real factor is GPS and screen use, and how your phone is set up around them.

This guide goes through what actually drains a phone's battery during a tracked drive, how that compares to things you're probably already doing (like using Maps or Waze), and what you can change to get sensible battery life without giving up the app entirely.

Key takeaways

• GPS tracking, not the app itself, is almost always the real battery cost — any app using continuous location in the background will use a similar amount of power.
• Driving with your screen locked uses far less battery than having navigation on screen the whole journey, often by a wide margin.
• Phone case materials, signal strength and cold weather all affect battery drain on long drives independently of any app.
• A short daily commute typically uses a small, easily noticeable but not alarming amount of extra battery; very long drives are where it adds up.
• If battery life matters to you on long trips, a simple in-car charger or power bank solves the problem far more reliably than trying to reduce tracking.

What Actually Drains Battery on a Driving App

There are three separate things going on whenever a driving app is active, and they don't cost the same:

Location tracking (GPS). This is the big one. Getting a continuous, accurate fix on your position means the phone's GPS radio stays active the whole time you're recording a drive, rather than switching off between brief checks the way it does for, say, a weather app updating once an hour.

Screen-on time. Keeping the screen lit — whether that's a map, a leaderboard, or just the home screen because you've got the phone propped up — uses substantially more power than GPS alone. This is true for any app, not just driving ones.

Background processing. Calculating distance, speed, and anything else from the raw GPS data takes some processing, but on a modern phone this is a small cost next to GPS and screen use. It's rarely the deciding factor in how warm your phone gets or how fast the battery drops.

With Horizn specifically, the model is built around this: you tap Start Drive before you set off, which is when background tracking begins, and you end the drive when you arrive. It doesn't track automatically in the background without you starting it, so outside of an active drive it isn't drawing on your battery at all — the cost only exists for the length of the journey itself.

Why This Feels Worse Than It Is on Long Drives

Here's a worked example. Say you've got a two-hour motorway drive. With your phone locked in a dashboard mount, screen off, running a drive-tracking app in the background, you might reasonably see somewhere in the region of 10 to 20% of battery used over those two hours, depending on your phone's age, signal strength along the route, and how much charge it started with. That's a real, noticeable cost — but it's roughly the same ballpark as what a satnav app would use doing the equivalent background tracking with the screen off.

What changes that picture dramatically is screen time. If the same two-hour drive is done with the screen on the whole way — say, glancing at a map constantly — you can expect battery use to climb well beyond that, sometimes doubling or more, because the screen is typically the single biggest consumer of power on a phone during everyday use. This is exactly why phones get noticeably warmer and lose charge faster on drives where the screen stays lit than on ones where it's locked and tucked away.

Older phones and ones with degraded batteries will always show a steeper drop for the same drive, simply because battery capacity and charging efficiency decline over time regardless of what app is running.

How to Reduce Battery Drain Without Giving Up Tracking

1. Keep the screen off or locked during the drive. You don't need the app open to be tracked — start the drive, lock the phone, and let it run in your pocket, bag, or a mount with the display off.
2. Use a car charger or wireless charging mount if you have one. This is by far the most effective fix, since it removes the problem entirely rather than trying to minimise drain. Most modern cars have a USB port or 12V socket suited to this.
3. Avoid stacking multiple location-heavy apps at once. Running a satnav and a drive-tracking app simultaneously doubles the GPS cost, since both are independently requesting location data.
4. Check your phone's battery settings for background activity limits. Some phones have aggressive battery-saving modes that can interrupt tracking mid-drive if left on, so it's worth checking rather than guessing.
5. Keep your phone out of direct sunlight on the dashboard. Heat is one of the fastest ways to degrade both battery performance and battery health long-term, and a phone baking on a dashboard in summer will drain faster regardless of what's running.

Common Mistakes People Make Worrying About Battery Drain

• Blaming the app for what's actually screen time. Most "this app destroys my battery" complaints, across all kinds of GPS apps, come down to the screen being on, not the background tracking itself.
• Judging drain from a single unusually bad drive. Cold weather, poor signal in rural areas, and an ageing battery can all make one journey look much worse than a typical one.
• Assuming the app tracks constantly. With Horizn, tracking only happens between tapping Start Drive and ending it — there's no always-on background drain to worry about outside that window.
• Not checking for other apps running location in the background at the same time. It's easy to forget a fitness app or another tracker is also pulling GPS data during the same drive.

When It's Worth Changing Your Setup

For a short daily commute of twenty or thirty minutes, the battery cost of tracking a drive is genuinely minor and not something most people need to plan around. Where it's worth actually doing something about is longer trips — road trips, long motorway drives, anything over an hour or so — particularly if you're also relying on your phone for navigation or music at the same time. In that case, the sensible move isn't to stop tracking drives to protect your battery; it's to plug in. A car charger costs a few pounds and solves the entire problem outright, which is a much better trade than losing the leaderboard, XP and exploration side of using Horizn to save a battery percentage or two.

If you're the kind of driver who already keeps a charging cable in the car for long trips, this isn't something you'll need to think about twice.

FAQ

Does Horizn track my location even when I'm not driving?

No. Tracking only starts when you tap Start Drive and stops when you end the drive, so there's no background location use outside an active drive.

Will using a driving app alongside Google Maps or Waze drain my battery faster?

Yes, running two apps that each use GPS independently will use more battery than either one alone, since both are drawing location data separately. If battery life matters on a long trip, it's worth charging rather than trying to avoid running both.

Does cold weather make battery drain worse during drives?

Yes, cold temperatures reduce battery efficiency across the board, which is why phones (and GPS apps generally) tend to show faster drain on cold-weather drives regardless of which app is open.

Is it better to leave my phone screen off while using a driving app?

Yes, screen time is typically the biggest single factor in how fast your battery drops during a drive, well ahead of background GPS tracking. Locking the phone and letting it track in the background will noticeably extend how long your battery lasts.

Can I check how much battery a driving app is using on my phone?

Most iPhones show battery use by app under Settings, which will give you a rough sense of how much a specific app accounts for over a day or a drive. It won't separate screen time from background tracking within the app itself, but it's a reasonable starting point if you want to compare.