Web browsers drains much battery in background while disabled.

leaf

Hey, i have a very annoying problem with battery getting drained by both Vanadium & Firefox focus app to test with another app.
(listed in battery manager sometimes 90% used by them)

Say i browse web in any of those apps, then lay down the phone. next morning i would get 8 hours background usage from said app and 20-30% lower battery, even with background usage restricted.
Disabling the app, or shut it down seems to solve it.

Is there a setting i should know about ?

its in a user profile, i tried changing many background related settings battery saving mode etc, and couldn't figure it out. an vpn is active btw, but that shouldn't drain that much.

Has this happen with others or did i just mess up my settings and i should factory it?

23Sha-ger

leaf an vpn is active btw, but that shouldn't drain that much

You will be so surprised to learn how VPNs drain the battery, especially if it's not WG tunnels with a native app, with occasional keep-alives contrary to those provider-branded junk apps.

Rule of thumb:
Keep the browsers running without the VPN and without open tabs for a day.
Then you will know if it's your tabs or the VPN. My guess it's both.

leaf

23Sha-ger

Thanks for the reply, maybe its the tabs. ill test with only one tab.
never had this issue on old phone, but maybe chromium based browsers is a bit different.

So that means if i lock my screen with the app still on, it bypass background limit settings ?

23Sha-ger

leaf
Unless you need tabs to actually "live", disable background usage for browsers and see if it helps. Most definitely it should because then the entire browser goes to "sleep" when its in background. I keep browsers on restricted battery.

leaf

23Sha-ger
i also have browser settings "allow background usage" unchecked, but still get 8 hour background activity listed in battery settings overnight.
If i cant figure it out, ill factory it next week. then ill know if i messed up some settings.

Onlyfun

I was always curious what's the purpose of Allow background usage setting. I have asked on this forum already, no clarification whatsoever.
Question is not limited to browsers, actually many apps I have restricted background are showing hours in background, they are nowhere near browsers on the battery consumption though . Vpn is unrestricted on battery, but is never above 4th position in battery chart with around 5% vs 40% for browser. At least disabling app works.

leaf

Onlyfun
maybe this answers some?

Say if you download a game with ads on play store.
With background usage limited then you would limit the continuously tracking a little, and also stop a little unnecessarily bloat activity. giving the user more control of your phone.
android added something that removes permission of unused apps, so said unused games would stop being in the background after a while anyways i guess.

"Restricting background usage means the app can't start itself in the background and gets alarms, jobs, etc. deferred until the next time it starts. It can still be started by other apps. A common example is that apps have push notifications delivered to them by FCM or UnifiedPush. Apps also get a little bit of time to run after you switch away from them so they can finish up what they were doing, sync/save their data, etc. If you only use it for a minute at a time then the short time it gets after switching away can add up. Similarly, it gets a tiny window to run each time it gets a push notification via FCM or UnifiedPush, etc.

If you want to outright stop the app from running, you need to disable it. Disabling background use is not intended as a privacy feature and doesn't provide any meaningful privacy protection since it can do whatever it wanted to do once it's started again. The same goes for temporary disabling apps. Apps can't see the data of other apps, your profile data, etc. so the points in time where it runs aren't particularly important. What matters is what you give it access to, not that. Apps are built to build up a queue of work they need to deal with when what they need such as internet access is available so you aren't stopping it sending anything you gave it access to by direct entry into the app, granting permissions, etc. by not having it running as much."

https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1o1jxnn/background_usage_despite_being_disabled/

if you see battery usage for a long period time stack up, as the time frame just reset when battery hits 100%

( my title should been edited to more accurate:
"Web browsers drains much battery in background, while background activity is disabled.")