Strong battery drain, no battery stats, unreliable screen timeoff
Rather than starting a new battery thread, can anyone answer the following? Usually during the night i would see consistently around 5-7% battery drain, last night i had 0% drain and would love to know why. Phone always has same set up etc.
- Edited
Hello,
I have noticed the same things as OP (battery drain when barely used and screen time-off often not working), except for the battery usage statistics that I do have. All this since the upgrade from Android 13 to 14 (I currently am on the latest stable release as of today -> UP1A.231005.007.2023102300).
I force stopped all the apps that were running in the background, but it didn't change anything.
I attach 2 screenshots of the battery usage where you can see that in half a day I lost almost half the battery with barely any usage (when with Android 13 the battery would last between 2 and 3 days with average usage).
In the first screenshot, the usage by apps shows that the launcher consumed the most then messaging and finally the phone (these being the defaults apps that come with GrapheneOS).
In the second screenshot, the usage by systems shows that the WiFi consumed the most (54% for less than a min of usage!?), then the CPU with 17% and the System (IDLE) also with 17%.
In my opinion, there is something wrong here with the system (no additional apps seem to drain the battery).
If somebody knows any way to troubleshoot this further, it would be great, as for now, the phone is hardly usable as a daily.
Screenshots :
By apps
By systems
I've noticed the same problem. Idle battery draw skyrocketed after the last update UP1A.231005.007.2023102300. Before that my Pixel7a would last at least a day or even longer. Now it doesn't even last half a day and I have to charge a few times during the day. What's going on?
Malakai are you using a VPN?
No.
Ram You should set battery usage of these three apps to unrestricted
Is there any logic behind this? As setting battery usage to unrestricted could cause the app to use more battery.
And btw phone and messaging are already in unrestricted mode and it can't be changed.
Malakai Is there any logic behind this
The logic behind this is that these three apps are system apps and 2 of them i.e. Phone & message should be always in background without killed by any task killer or Android's App battery optimisation.
There is an example that suppose an app is used most of the time & and should be running in background for proper functioning. It would be better if that app should be kept in RAM so that CPU don't have to work each time to start the app. And the phone, message and launcher app is very main component of a modern smartphone. This thing always work when your phone is power on. So keeping these types of app on restricted mode make your phone to do extra work each time. That's why most of these systems app come with unrestricted mode by default. These apps always run in background so it doesn't matter that you put these apps on optimised or unrestricted. But it will affect your usage of phone when these apps is restricted.
In Android 14 higher SDK app is recommended. But as I know that there Targeted SDK is lower (I may be wrong). But when you lunch these apps (phone & message) first time in Android 14, a warning is shown that app is not compatible. It also can be a reason of misbehaving. Because your launcher is consuming 20% of battery, Messaging & phone 12% & 10% respectively in interval of approx. 12 hours. It is very very high battery usage.
I tried my best to explain. If you think these things are just myth or useless then ,for experiment/test, you can put your all apps to restricted mode. I made this mistake 3 months ago and thinking that if app would not run in background then my battery backup will increase but a opposite thing happened. Because everytime my device have to work hard to launch an app instead of loading it from RAM.
True, it makes absolutely sense to have these apps unrestricted.
But as you stated yourself, they are already unrestricted by default and even if I wanted I couldn't change this.
I can't quite understand what is the action that I should do to try to solve the battery drain problem I am facing?
PS : My wife has a Pixel 5, also on latest stable GrapheneOS version, with the same apps installed and the same overall configuration for the system and the apps, but she is not facing this battery drain issue. Her phone lasts for more than 3 days with average usage.
I did some debugging on the Pixel 6a and top shows the following (click on the link to see the screenshot) :
From what I understand the top CPU intensive processes are mainly used to provision Sim functionality.
Having a look at the sim settings, I've seen that the VoLTE option was activated, but not functional (calls are still downgraded to 2G, as my provider doesn't offer 3G anymore since some time).
I deactivated VoLTE and now top shows this :
So it seems that somehow the CPU intensive processes were trying to provision VoLTE on GrapheneOS, without success, and were stuck, consuming a lot of CPU 24/7, thus the battery drain.
Hopefully this could help others in the same situation.
Malakai So it seems that somehow the CPU intensive processes were trying to provision VoLTE on GrapheneOS, without success, and were stuck, consuming a lot of CPU 24/7, thus the battery drain.
Thanks for reporting back! That may well help other users. If you are in a position to identify the carrier, that might be useful as well.
Malakai That is very useful. i am not android developer and I was using 'better battery stats' app for doctoring my cellphone but the app stopped working with android 14.
using the top command appears to really find something.
Anybody knows about a good app showing process stats? (good means - gives results, can be ugly, no ads, i'd rather buy it).
anyway this instant doctoring, ups and downs, not sure. two weeks good, then days with 30%/hr drain. I had to buy another cheap android cellphone because i could not do some work related stuff because my battery was empty at worst possible moments.. so now i am carrying two devices, on one i am with privacy, on the second of course, people at google know even how often I fart.
annoyingly (is that a word?) that damn cheap moto phone lasts 6! days.. for 20% price of pixel.. uh huh
just for info - my top sinners
1433 system 18 -2 3.1T 491M 371M S 5.3 6.5 2:55.21 system_server
1904 u0_a104 0 0 3.2T 304M 184M S 2.0 4.0 3:15.34 com.android.systemui
5916 u11_a138 20 0 3.1T 214M 148M S 1.3 2.8 1:09.71 com.whatsapp
579 system 12 -8 3.2T 73M 50M S 1.0 0.9 1:59.20 surfaceflinger
526 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.6 0.0 0:19.62 [sugov:0]
2172 radio 20 0 3.1T 155M 96M S 0.3 2.0 0:20.36 com.android.phone
not sure what com.android.systemui and surfaceflinger do with phone locked, screen off.
I kicked out default launcher, with novalauncher, it appears that com.android.systemui uses less cpu. will continue experimenting...
muhaha after first night with default launcher away, the night drain was 9% instead of 30% as it was recently..
Techtrest I also noticed that the screen timeoff is often not working. The screen stays on until I switch it off via button. Rebooting the phone temporarily restores the feature. But it can return any time.
I second this.
yosk just swapped launchers.
I am not android expert but why is the com.android.systemui having constant cpu load if the screen is off and locked? ui related should sleep like a baby imho then...
Hi, having battery drain on a P8a. I got it brand new in mid December. I'm not sure which stock android version it came with, I flashed GOS A15 straight away. Not sure if this has anything to do with the battery drain. I can't get a full day without charging. Mobile network 70% and system idle 17% are the culprits. Would a factory reset fix this ?