Does sandboxed google play services help or hurt battery life?

Sbpr

Does it hurt battery life since it's a big thing with network access that is always running in the background or does it help battery life by replacing every app's potentially battery inefficient notification delivery system with the one offered by play services?

Are there other factors at play? What GOS configuration do you recommend for battery life?

GrapheneOS

Sbpr Compared to a fresh install with no apps installed, it will significantly reduce battery life. It won't hurt battery life as much as using a single app with a very inefficient push notification implementation such as the unoptimized implementation of background push Signal uses when Play services isn't available. There's no inherent reason that other apps can't make a push notification implementation as efficient or more efficient than FCM in Play services though. The whole point of sandboxed Google Play is that it's a set of regular apps with no special access in the standard app sandbox. Any app can do the same things it can do including doing push notifications via a foreground service and battery optimization exception while providing the same level of efficiency. Molly (hardened Signal fork) has a dramatically more efficient push implementation than Signal but it's still not highly optimized. It does show how apps could be doing much better though.

[deleted]

With as few apps running in the background as possible. That involves predominantly utilization of built-in apps, no sandboxed Google Play, app battery optimization. From others, lowering brightness and screen refresh rate if possible, disabling 5G and choosing 4G only. But if you rely on notifications, Google Play Services is a must.

GrapheneOS

[deleted] It depends on which notifications you need since you can have very reliable and reasonably efficient push for Signal contacts via Molly and push for email via IMAP IDLE with apps doing that efficiently. If you need push from apps not offering an alternative to FCM or simply have a lot of apps where having a unified push connection is massively more efficient then FCM is very valuable. It would be entirely possible for apps to settle on another standard like Unified Push as an alternative with easy and efficient implementations available, but that's just not how things are overall right now.

Vagabond8630

GrapheneOS a very inefficient push notification implementation such as the unoptimized implementation of background push Signal uses when Play services isn't available

Just wanted to provide some evidence to back up this claim. I absolutely love Signal and am a monthly supporter of the app, but I had terrible experiences with it back when I was using LineageOS with no Google Play Services, before I got a Pixel. Note that this is 3 years ago, and things may have changed since then.

32% drain from Signal's websockets, compared to FairEmail and Telegram FOSS, which both also use websockets for notifications, that were at 7% and 5%, respecitvely
The phone's SOT was 12 minutes at this point, so almost all battery drain is from idle drain and the websockets

As much as I don't like the privacy sacrifices of installing Google Play Services, sandboxed or not, on my device, doing so should be better for battery life. At least it's sandboxed without privileged access on GOS, which is honestly such an amazing solution to the problem of degoogled devices.