I got invited to the beta over the weekend and it has a feature to run all the time so you can get chat messages and junk. I turned it on and noticed my battery life drop significantly. My phone died before I had the sense to check the battery usage so it could be a coincidence. I am going to do a better test when I get home and it is fully charged. Curious if anyone else has noticed similar?

Android. I normally get 1-3 days out of a full charge depending on how much I use it. Full charge after running steam app phone was dead 5 - 6 hours later.

From what I can tell it doesn't use that much battery when just running in the background, but when chatting or browsing it can really drain it. I think your case might just be a coincidence, because on my phone it hasn't seemed to make that big of a difference.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I am using the android version as well, nexus running 4.0. I will try to get a screencap of the battery usage chart over the next few hours or so.

It definitely drains the battery. I'm using the Galaxy Nexus and though it reports only 3% battery usage my phone dropped like a rock with it running. In addition I kept it running while charging over night and it only reached 67% after 8 hours charging from 10%.

Left it running all day after a fresh charge and seems like it was just a coincidence. They did put an update out today so who knows if it fixed anything. It seemed like it was fine even before the update though.