WhatsApp battery life

wrapper

Hey

I understand that you need to give WhatsApp unrestricted battery if you want notifications without Play Services. The issue is this seems to be a pretty huge drain on battery. With everything else I have been able to configure push via unifiedpush but this obviously isn't an option here.

I guess I just suffer the consequences or don't expect notifications for WA? I do have a private space with Google Play but I use WhatsApp a lot so I didn't want it locked away.

mmobder

wrapper theoretically you can setup Whatsapp bridge to matrix, if you have other incentives apart from battery life (as it may require self-hosting, dunno...). It had it's own limitations though at the time I've checked it last time. There are services like Beeper that have the bridge integrated, so you may not need to self-host, but you have to check what's their approach re push and if they're Foss

wrapper

mmobder good shout, I already self host a synapse server so this makes a lot of sense. Thanks

wrapper

mmobder have you got any ideas how I'd deal with WhatsApp calls using this method, as currently that isn't supported by matrix synapse bridge.

mmobder

wrapper I suppose there's no way for calls, as even paid Beeper plan doesn't offer it. Theoretically there may be some crazy solutions, but they're not well known

wrapper

I ended up implementing this and I've saved around 20% of my battery life! I now get instant notifications for WhatsApp messages in Element and it also notifies if I'm getting a call. I only have to use the WhatsApp app when I need to make calls and it should be opened once every two weeks to maintain a connection to Matrix.