In the last week I’ve seen a number of stories about Apple’s new iPhones getting extremely hot. I ran into a virtually identical problem in July - my iPhone getting super hot and quickly draining the battery.

I tracked my problem down to an update to the Audible app (audible.com).

If I started the app and began listening to a book, my iPhone started getting hot. Even if I switched to a different app, my phone kept getting hotter or stayed hot. It also quickly drained my battery

The only solution was to kick the Audible app completely out of memory (by swiping it away).

Two Audible software updates in two days eventually resolved the problem.

My guess is Audible either had their own bug or was using a buggy library from Apple that created an infinite loop even while the app was in the background.

And I suspect Apple or one of the most popular apps (e.g., Facebook) has repeated this bug, and this is what everyone is running into today.

A software update should fix this issue.

(A secondary issue could be the new iPhone CPUs running at higher wattage, but that's likely not the main concern for most people.)

My conversation with Audible on the issue