Users of ChatGPT’s iOS app should be wary of their phones overheating

Users of ChatGPT’s iOS app should be wary of their phones overheating
Amaar Chowdhury Updated on by

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After only releasing on May 18th, OpenAI’s app for ChatGPT has been the centre of reports of overheating and battery drain.

The app, only available in the United States as of yet, acts as an interface for the popular chatbot, and despite not actually performing any of the intensive data crunching and language generation on-device, users of the app around the States are reporting that the service is causing excessive heat build-up in their devices.

Without ads – the service isn’t necessarily being overloaded by images or networking – so there’s a running theory that the haptic feedback is at fault for the battery drain and overheating. However, there’s an option to disable this, so what’s the deal with the ChatGPT app’s overheating problem?

This following Reddit thread records some of the earliest instances caught of the app overheating people’s iPhones. While OpenAI have recently released an update for the app allegedly fixing these issues – reports of overheating have continued since then.

One of the funniest responses to the issue was that “this happens when you build the app of ChatGPT with ChatGPT,” which while it might not necessarily be the case, is certainly pretty amusing.

Other users had certain issues with the app’s Haptic feedback, which OpenAI have suggested is linked to the battery drain:

Version 1.2023.21This update of the ChatGPT app brings the following improvements:

  • Enhanced battery efficiency
  • Haptic feedback will be auto-disabled on low battery
  • Better full-screen sheet accessibility
  • Resolved message input field visual glitches

Meanwhile, some users have theorised that the app is offloading a portion of its computing resources to the Apple Neural Engine chip, hence why performance has been recorded as slightly faster on the iOS app over the web-app. If the ChatGPT app comes to Android, we could see a different story due to the lack of standardised hardware.

Either way, it’s clear that the ChatGPT app for iOS has certain issues that are putting people’s phones at risk, so it could be reasonable to be careful when using it.