• GeneralPixel 6a

  • Signal Notification issue + googleplay services without logged in

Quality of the network connection to the push server (Google or Signals own servers for people without Play Services) has significant effect on battery drain.

The app (Signal or Play Services) aims to keep a tcp port open to the push server. To do this every now and then the app wakes the phone out of doze/low power mode to see if the connection is still open.
The apps have an algorithm that governs how often the phone wakes depending on how well its been able to keep the connection open. More waking gives more battery drain

Play Services has a better algorithm.
If you dont have Play Ive found the conversations.im implementation is also good. Signals is OK.

If you are somewhere with patchy signal drain will be higher

    Duckduck
    I don't think I did anything magic. I have never had any of the Google Play trifecta in my owner profile. I installed Signal using the .apk from here:

    https://signal.org/android/apk/

    It has prompted me to update it at least once IIRC. That persistent background connection thing is always hanging around, the notifications are instant, and it just kinda works ... ? Battery is set to unrestricted for Signal.

      dazinism If you are somewhere with patchy signal drain will be higher

      Yeah maybe that's it. I do tend to stick to WiFi most of the time, and I live in an urban area with good cell coverage. I'd guess about 75% of the Signal messages I documented above happened while on mobile data, but the rest of the time I was in airplane mode with WiFi on and snuggled up to a router.

          2dognight Thanks a lot for your effort. It is indeed very impressive results. I too live in an urban area close to a cell tower and thus with very good signal strength. I do however mainly use cellular plus another thing I didn't think about before is that I have an always on wireguard vpn.

          @dazinism How do you think an always on wireguard vpn affect signals connection to it's servers?

              trilogy6202
              FYI I had an always on VPN going through all of that. It's a wireguard connection. It's that OVPN entry 3rd up from the bottom clocking it at 1% battery.

                  • [deleted]

                  • Post #28

                  2dognight Wireguard is lighter on the battery than OpenVPN (if we are talking about the same amount of data transferred). But then again, since it is faster it will transfer more data in the same amount of time, which in turn will show on the battery. Again, it comes down to network performance. So at the end of the day if you're mostly texting and polling servers (talking no Google Play here), Wireguard will perform better in terms of battery usage. On most of the clients you can set up which protocol you want them to use.

                    2dognight I see. I missed that. I'll have to do some testing with unrestricted battery again. Our setups seem so similar that I really can't figure out why our Signal battery drain are so different. Just to recap:

                    • No GSF or GPS on user profile with Signal
                    • Signal downloaded directly from their website
                    • Only very light "actual" use of Signal
                    • Always on VPN (wireguard protocol)
                    • Good reception most / all of the time

                    The only real difference I see is the wifi vs cellular part where you are mostly on wifi while i am 95% on cellular. I'll have to do some testing.

                        trilogy6202 Just to recap:
                        No GSF or GPS on user profile with Signal
                        Signal downloaded directly from their website
                        Only very light "actual" use of Signal
                        Always on VPN (wireguard protocol)
                        Good reception most / all of the time

                        All correct. Yeah it's a mystery. To be clear, do you always have Signal's persistent silent notification that says "Background connection enabled" ? And are you sure that when you installed Signal, GSF or GPS was not installed in the owner profile?

                            2dognight All correct. Yeah it's a mystery. To be clear, do you always have Signal's persistent silent notification that says "Background connection enabled" ?

                            When battery mode is restricted there's no persistent notification which makes sense since the OS kills off the background task. When battery mode is optimized or unrestricted (as I've just set it to) the persistent, silent notification is there.

                            2dognight And are you sure that when you installed Signal, GSF or GPS was not installed in the owner profile?

                            Absolutely 100 % sure. I've never any Google stuff on my main (owner) profile.

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                                • Post #33

                                2dognight

                                And are you sure that when you installed Signal, GSF or GPS was not installed in the owner profile?

                                Would that make a difference in the way Signal functions? Let's say you install Signal (apk from website) on a phone with GPS/GFS installed and then uninstall GPS/GFS. Would Signal behave differently on this phone compared to a phone where it was installed without GPS/GFS? All other settings remaining the same obviously.

                                    • [deleted]

                                    • Post #34

                                    [deleted] yes, it would still try to talk to Google servers, so you will receive no notifications. Until you reinstall either the app or the Google services.

                                      ... slightly quicker, could clear Signals data by clearing Storage via its App info page. Pretty much the same as if you uninstall/reinstall

                                      How do you think an always on wireguard vpn affect signals connection to it's servers?

                                      Would hope it wouldnt much/at all. But I dont know a whole load about networking.
                                      Guess if the VPN server wasnt very good at handling traffic it could have a bad impact on things.

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                                        • Post #37

                                        dazinism you haven't really introduced yourself mate. How did you become a mod?

                                            OK here are the results of the same test again, except this time I'm using cellular data only. I kept WiFi off the entire time. I took the phone off the charger at 100% about 1 day, 1 hour ago and battery is now at 24%.

                                            I tried for similar usage of the Signal app as the first test, stayed at home like before except for taking the same walk in the same park as before, taking some more pics and sending them off to people.

                                            Sent 14 messages (8 w/attached photos)
                                            Received 11 messages
                                            Had 1 voice call lasting 13 minutes

                                            Battery usage for Signal:
                                            Used for 1 day, 1 hr and is at (a whopping) 20%

                                            So yeah that's terrible.

                                            Top battery users:

                                            Signal: 20%
                                            Phone idle: 13%
                                            Vanadium: 12%
                                            Screen: 7%
                                            OVPN: 4%
                                            Camera: 2%
                                            Element: 1%
                                            Launcher: 1%
                                            Obtanium: 1%
                                            Android System: 1%
                                            System(CPU): 1%

                                            It turns out that relying on the cellular connection alone made me pay attention to things, and I learned that the cell signal strength inside my house is crap. Wandering around inside my house the best reading I saw (under Settings > About phone > SIM status (sim slot 1) > Signal strength) was -106 dBm, and that was near a big window. Most other places bounced around between -117 and -110 dBm. I think that's pretty much bottom rung.

                                            I don't know what the signal strength for my WiFi connection is in dBm, but in Settings > Internet > [network name] > Signal strength it says Excellent. Back into airplane mode + WiFi mode I go.

                                              [deleted]
                                              Ive been using GrapheneOS since the early(ish) days. Soon after it was rebased from Cyanogenmod onto AOSP I got my hands on a used Nexus 5 to give it a spin and haven't looked back.
                                              Been helping out in the community for a long time, but only recently joined the forum.

                                                2dognight Thanks for the follow up. I'm still in the testing phase of unrestricted battery access for Signal. First using primarily cellular and after that using primarily wi-fi.

                                                I testet my cellular signal strength outside and in my home and it's 75-80 and 95-100 respectively. I don't know if that is good or bad though but I assume that its ok.

                                                I'll do some more testing and post my findings.

                                                    i used honor and samsung phone before, why the graphene OS is soo different when it comes to CLOSE an application? I can not close individual apps and for example the battery view says i used 5 hours of spotify however this is impossible unless the app was actually not closed. I would really need to see linux processes, How to see "ps -ef" as something really fishy with the app closing processes.

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                                                      • Post #42

                                                      grapheneman you can easily close apps from Recent apps menu which you can trigger by swiping from gesture pill to the middle of the screen. Just swipe up on the app you close. Or swipe all the way right to close all apps.