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How can I find why certain apps are draining my battery (when they are not in use)? (programming.dev)

submitted 9 months ago by menisadi@programming.dev to c/askandroid@lemdro.id

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My phone (Galaxy S22+, running OneUI 6.0) was inactive yesterday for 18 hours straight. On those hours the battery went from 60% to 25%. I checked and the main two causes were: 13.6% - Firefox 12.2% - Always on Display. The AOD I get, it was indeed on all this time. Altough it is a bit disapointing that it uses this much battery, it is still less than 1% per hour so I'll take it. I have not idea why Firefox was even on this list? What can it be? Why was it active? How can I check it?

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[–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Phones are never really inactive. While most of the subsystems draw very little power on stand by, they still need to wake up occasionally to check on the world. There are the Bluetooth, WiFi and phone radios that will need to ping out and stay active. Radios still take quite a bit of power and may use more depending on signal strength and distance to the routers or cell antennas.

There are multiple system timers that manage things like updates and other functions. Those still take a little bit of power. Email is still going to get checked and text messages need to be updated

Browsers are a huge power suck regardless. While I can't say for certain, it may be allowing any open tabs to periodically refresh in the background. For the most part, phones do a really good job of halting applications that are in the background that aren't considered "core" services. Some apps might be noiser than others, but it's not nearly as bad as it was many years ago. "Task killer apps" are basically useless and have been for a long time.

Also, there is just your average battery lifespan and it's natural tendency to get shorter with every charge.

You would need to turn on any power saving features to improve battery life. TBH, after 18 hours, still having a 25% charge is really good.

[–] menisadi@programming.dev 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the detailed response. I'm aware that there are lots of stuff active all the time but they indeed seem to have very little effect on the battery on this specific time interval. I just find it a bit weird that Firefox was that much active :} And draining 35% in 18h means that my phone can last, at best, ~2 days (from full charce to 0), if I don't use it at all. More importantly it means that at night I must check that it have at least 15% or it will die out during the night (which will cause the alarm not to play).
Not the end of the world, I no, but still a bit weird, so I wondered is it normal or not, I think you are trying to say it is :)

[–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I was basically saying that it's normal. "Normal" is relative, so there is that.

I don't mean to sound pedantic, but I am just trying to cover all the nuances.

You are also thinking in raw percentages, which is confusing by its very nature. Generally, battery-app usage indicators measure from the last time they were fully charged so that will naturally skew what percentages actually mean.

If you use Firefox continuously and discharge the battery from 100% to 75%, Firefox will likely have used ~100% of the total power during that time. When the phone goes idle, the total battery usage percentage by Firefox will decline. So, if the phone is idle from 75% to 50%, Firefox now has only used 50% of the charge from 100% to 50% but still only 25% of the total charge. (I am just using percentages that are easy to calculate in by head, btw.)

When the phone is fully recharged again, the metrics should reset and percent usage indicators will fluctuate by future use.

[–] menisadi@programming.dev 2 points 9 months ago

Makes sens. But I'm looking for the data from one day alone and on this day the phone was idle the whole day (literally, I didn't touch it even once) and still Firefox is responsible for 13% of battery usage (I tried it again yesterday BTW and the stats are almost the same).