HealthKit background delivery only triggers when charging. I have set step monitoring to hourly frequency. Despite step changes, callbacks fail to arrive after 3-4 hours on battery, but trigger immediately upon connecting power. Observed for 2 days: background updates are only received when charging. The device is not in Low Power Mode, and Background App Refresh is enabled for the app in Settings.
HealthKit backgroundDelivery is only triggering in the background while charging
What you described doesn't seem to happen to me when I try with my iPhone + iOS 26.1 (23B85). Would you mind to share the device configuration, relevant code snippets, and detailed steps you used to observe the behavior?
To observe the baseline behavior, I'd suggest that you start with an iPhone that has a high battery level (over 80%, for example), because the system may decide to not deliver an update if the battery level is low, even the device isn't in the low battery mode. This is especially true on watchOS.
Best,
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Ziqiao Chen
Worldwide Developer Relations.