WhatsApp consuming huge amounts of battery in background even with play services

gra123d

Pixel 8, latest GrapheneOS. I am facing the same issue for many months now. I have tried reinstalling WhatsApp through APK pure and Aurora as well.

GPlay services are enabled, and Signal works fine and uses very less battery due to FCM.
But WhatsApp uses well over 40% of battery. I keep WhatsApp up-to-date and have also tried restricting/disabling its background usage but no difference.

Does anyone have an up-to-date solution for this?

Endless

Make sure you're not blocking these domains:

firebaseinstallations.googleapis.com
restrictedapps-pa.googleapis.com
fcm.googleapis.com
mtalk.google.com

These are used for FCM else WhatsApp will probably fallback to polling. After unblocking these, restart the device and clear the cache of WhatsApp.

gra123d

Endless

I am not using any firewall, could you please elaborate?

Also, with WhatsApp app force-stopped, I still get instant notifications(through FCM I assume). Maybe WhatsApp app is using more battery for some other reason and not notifications...

Endless

gra123d

Then it's not relevant for you, I had the same problems with WhatsApp and this made the difference for me. Seems your device has another problem.

agi

Same issue here. Whatsapp consuming 30-40% of battery. I can reach the domain names mentioned in this thread. Google Play services installed. Pixel 7 on the latest updates (both GrapheneOS and whatsapp).

brightjob4495

something I noticed is that if a group you are in has lots of activity, even if you have it silenced and don't open WhatsApp for days, it consumes way more battery than on normal use. Specially if you have WhatsApp set up to auto-downoad media and the group is sending lots of media

FlipSid

I came across this thread and by coincidence I had the idea to shut down the VPN (Mullvad) for a test.
Way less consuming now in the background (from about 30-40% down to 12%)

I'll try a different setting or VPN some time soon.

SovereignCopper

FlipSid You might also see these differences between VPN protocols.

FlipSid

SovereignCopper once I'm out of the hospital I will play around some with it. Thanks for the tip 👍🏽

FlipSid

SovereignCopper In VPN settings I turned off block trackers.
Since then it's normal at about 10%

andrej567

it does consume a lot of battery for years. some versions use less battery than others. significantly.

SovereignCopper

FlipSid That's an unexpected cause for this. I suppose it is possible WhatsApp is blocked access to something and keeps retrying, but I'm guessing it's more likely it'll return.