Are you experiencing excessive and unusual battery drain on your iPhone and Apple Watch? There could be a lot of reasons why. And one of them, unbeknownst to many, is iCloud Keychain.
So if you’ve recently updated a Mac to Catalina and are seeing drastically reduced battery lives on your other devices, here’s what you should know about the problem and its solution.
That’s according to one intrepid Redditor named Advanced_Path, who dig a bit of digging and figured out that a bug in macOS Catalina was causing the battery drainage issue on iPhone.
While you wouldn’t expect it, there appears to be a new iCloud Keychain process that’s causing major problems for battery life across Apple devices.
According to the Reddit post, macOS Catalina introduced a process called TrustedPeersHelper. Essentially, it keeps tabs on the database that manages iCloud trust across your devices.
But many users are noticing that TrustedPeers is using up a lot of system recourses on Catalina Macs. And after a bit more digging, those users discovered that the same process was draining resources on iOS and watchOS, too.
In other words, there’s a bug affected a new iCloud Keychain process. The bug causes the process to use too many system resources at all times. That, in turn, is causing excessive battery drain.
It doesn’t matter how many or what kind of Apple devices you use. As long as you have one macOS Catalina device, it seems like you could be impacted by this bug.
Note that this may not be the cause of iOS and watchOS battery drain. But if you’ve tried every other troubleshooting step and nothing is working, this is worth a shot.
The solution to excessive iOS and watchOS battery drain
To fix the issue, you’ll need to turn off all your devices and power up the Terminal. It’s a bit complicated, but it seems to work.
Those same Apple users who discovered the issue with TrustedPeers also found a potential solution. It’s a bit involved and technical. But, again, if nothing else has worked, it’s worth a shot.
Power down all of your iOS devices. If you have an Apple Watch, shut that down too.
Now, you need to delete some TrustedHelper databases. On all of your Mac devices running Catalina, open the Terminal and run the following command: rm -f ~/Library/Keychains/*/com.apple.security.keychain-defaultContext.TrustedPeersHelper.{db,db-shm,db-wal}/li>
Then, type or paste this command into the Terminal: tpctl reset
After that, power down all of your Mac devices.
Boot one Mac device. System Preferences show ask you to sign back into iCloud.
You can also check the list of devices associated with your Apple ID at this point. It’s recommended that you do so and delete any devices you no longer use or have access to.
Wait about 10 minutes. This will allow it to reload the databases you deleted earlier.
Power on the other Macs you have (if there are any).
Finally, power on your iOS devices and Apple Watches one by one.
At this point, you’ll want to monitor the CPU usage for TrustedHelpers on your Macs. Over the next few days, keep tabs on your iOS and watchOS battery lives.
While it’s a bit complicated, it seems like the above fix has worked for many users experiencing excessive battery drain.
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
Mike is a freelance journalist from San Diego, California.
While he primarily covers Apple and consumer technology, he has past experience writing about public safety, local government, and education for a variety of publications.
He’s worn quite a few hats in the journalism field, including writer, editor, and news designer.
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