How can I find why certain apps are draining my battery (when they are not in use)?
How can I find why certain apps are draining my battery (when they are not in use)?
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?
I'm surprised this is still up, and if it works
But Battery Historian is what you're after
https://github.com/google/battery-historian
*further edit: please be aware of sending bug reports to random websites.
Bug reports contain pretty much all your PII
Can you go into the apps settings and turn off background usage? That's the only drain I ever get from apps I'm not actively using
Makes sense. I'll try
Consider turning on adaptive power saving. It will turn on/off power saver depending on your usage pattern
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.
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 :)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.
Late to the party but here goes anyway. Have you tried using Routines to restrict processes under certain conditions? I use Note 20 Ultra & battery life was regarded as its Achilles heel but having various Routines set up in conjunction with adaptive battery has helped no end. Also could you get away with switching AOD from always on to tap to show?
You made me curious - can you elaborate on your use of Routines? Regarding AOD - I'm ok with that. It usually set to 'tap to show' indeed, I just wanted to see how much will it matter if it will be always on :)
There's so many options, depends on how you use your phone & your imagination! A simple example is you could block location & allow it to run only when certain apps are open (& turn off when they are closed). Same for bluetooth. You might try setting screen resolution lower, allowing full resolution only for specific apps (or forget this & set the resolution to stay at 720p depending how old your eyes are!) Or you could set power saving mode to run in certain locations or time periods or under certain conditions. Routines is a powerful tool. If you try it & find it useful, definitely add GoodLock & the Routines+ add on for even more advanced functions
A couple more options: If you can live with 60Hz screen refresh rather than 120Hz it's a big battery saver. In battery settings you can turn off enhanced processing (& turn on adaptive battery). In connection >WiFi >intelligent WiFi you can turn on WiFi power saving. In Connections >More connections, you could try turning off nearby device scanning