The iPhone version is different
There's a persistent assumption that the iPhone and Android versions of Citizen are functionally identical. They aren't. On iOS, Citizen leans heavily on Live Activities, the Dynamic Island, and Always-On Display features — and pays for it with significant battery drain. On Android, Citizen has less integration and slightly lower battery cost but worse notification reliability.
This article covers the iPhone version specifically. If you're on Android, we have a separate guide.
Installing it
The install itself is simple. The post-install setup is where most people make the wrong choices.
The permissions screen asks for Location (Always), Notifications, Microphone (for broadcasting), and optionally Camera. The default flow encourages you to grant everything. Don't. We'll cover what to actually grant in the settings section.
Battery drain by model
This is the question we get asked the most. The answer depends heavily on which iPhone you own — newer chips handle background location far more efficiently.
14-day average, normal usage pattern, location permission set to 'Always'
The takeaway: on iPhone 14 or older, Citizen is a top-three battery consumer most days. On iPhone 16 Pro Max with the A18 Pro's efficiency cores, it's tolerable. The single biggest variable isn't the phone — it's how often you have Citizen actively open versus passively running in the background.
Live Activities & Dynamic Island
This is the genuinely cool part. On iPhone 14 Pro and later, Citizen can pin an active incident to your Dynamic Island and Lock Screen as a Live Activity. The implementation is one of the better Live Activities in the App Store — readable, glanceable, and updates as the incident develops.
If there's a Citizen broadcast happening near you, the Dynamic Island shows a tiny pulsing dot. Tap it to expand. Tap again to enter the app.
The catch: Live Activities cost CPU cycles. Every Live Activity, including Citizen's, contributes 2–5% to that daily drain number.
The three settings that matter
If you're going to keep Citizen installed, these three iOS settings change your experience more than anything in the app itself.
Location precision
Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Citizen → Precise Location.
Turn this off. With Precise Location off, iOS reports your location to Citizen at city-block resolution rather than 5-meter resolution. The app still works — your alert radius is still correct — but Citizen no longer has high-precision location data on you. The privacy gain is real. The functional cost is approximately zero.
Background App Refresh
Settings → General → Background App Refresh → Citizen → Off.
This one is counterintuitive. You'd think you need background refresh on for Citizen to push alerts. You don't. Push notifications are server-driven; they wake the app on arrival. Background App Refresh is only used by Citizen to pre-fetch broadcast video and update incident polygons. Turning it off saves about 8% of daily drain and you'll never notice it in normal use.
Notification types
Inside the app: Settings → Notifications. You'll see roughly 14 different categories.
| Category | Keep on? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Fires near me | Yes | Genuinely useful, especially in LA |
| Police incidents (high severity) | Yes | Actionable info |
| Police incidents (low severity) | No | Noise — 80% are "person on roof" |
| Missing persons (region) | Yes | These actually matter |
| Trending broadcasts | No | Engagement-bait, not safety |
| Daily safety digest | No | Anxiety-inducing summary |
| Friends nearby | No | Social spam |
| Promotional | No | Just no |
After this triage, you'll get 3–5 alerts a day instead of 30+. The signal-to-noise ratio improves dramatically. Most users who claim Citizen "drove them crazy" never opened this menu.
Privacy on iOS
Citizen collects four categories of data, per its App Store privacy label.
Per App Store privacy labels, May 2026
Citizen's privacy policy is clearer than most. They claim to not sell data to third parties. They do share aggregated usage data with analytics providers, and your location data is processed by their dispatch-matching servers. If privacy is a primary concern, this is a meaningful amount of data to hand over.
The PWA alternative
For Los Angeles specifically, Crime Tab offers an alternative that sidesteps every iOS battery-and-privacy concern in this article. We're a Progressive Web App — install us from Safari by tapping Share → Add to Home Screen — and we behave like a native app with these critical differences:
- Zero background location access (we don't have any)
- Zero data collection (no account, no email, no analytics IDs)
- Zero battery drain when closed (a PWA literally cannot run when not open)
- 0 KB of device storage versus Citizen's 142 MB
The trade-off is that we don't send push notifications without you opening the app once per session. For most LA residents, that's acceptable — you don't need a doom-scroll firehose, you need a tool to check during a specific event.
The Citizen iPhone app is fine if you live in a city we don't cover, you specifically want live broadcast video, or you're paying for Protect. For LA residents who just want to know what's happening, it's overkill — and on older iPhones, the battery cost is genuinely painful. The tab in your browser is the smarter choice in 2026.