Better battery life after installing play services?

ac_

So I installed GrapheneOS a couple of months ago. At first I wanted to try to use it without play services (I did have private space setup that didn't run in the background for 1-2 apps that absolutely needed it) to see if it was usable, and it definetely was, but after some time and consideration I thought that the sandboxed play services are good enough to protect me without having to run them in private space. While using play services in the private space battery life was, OK, but something felt off. I felt that the battery life should have been much much better. After installing play services in my main profile and deleting the private space, my bettery life improved significantly. Has anyone else experienced this, and if so, does anyone know why this could be?

secrec

If I were to guess, you have some application or applications that have integrated multiple mechanisms for delivering push notifications, and their "without google" implementation is of extremely poor quality, like polling for updates every 5 seconds or something like that. After installing google, those applications switched to feeding the notifications through google instead of using their own crap implementations.

Note: I favor push notifications that do NOT use google, but they have to be implemented correctly so that they don't do stupid things like polling servers for updates. A correctly implemented system will have negligible impact on battery life.

ac_

secrec
Hmm. I do use bot Signal and, unfortunately facebook messenger for family. I do remember signal telling about the notifications without play services but not for messenger. That might be something.