I have recently moved to GOS on a pixel 8a and ive been loving it so far, mainly for the simplicity and lack of bloat.
However, one issue ive had, is that the battery seems to drain very quickly. This is compared to my previous low-end samsung phone too.
For some background, I have set up 4 profiles - the owner which is google-free, “work” which is for my office365 apps as required by my job and has sandboxed gplay, “social” which also has gplay and fb messenger (as I am socially bound to the facebook hellscape), and a “finance” profile which has my fintech/crypto/banking apps (and google play too) but is not allowed to run in the background. I think the googleplay services running may be the battery hog, but am not completely sure. I also bought the pixel brand new and flashed gos immediately, so I wouldn’t know if the issue is with the os or the pixel in general.
I’d appreciate your suggestions as to how to prove battery longevity, as well as general advice on how to setup gos most efficiently.
I’d advise you to look into the battery stats to check which apps use most of the power. E.g. Facebook apps are quite notorious for being power hungry. That said, you are running three times Google Play Services in parallel, which may be a big chunk of the reason why your Pixel seems less efficient than your previous phone. Finally, the P8a’s modem is quite inefficient, especially if you use 5g. You will save some battery if you change the settings to 4g/LTE only.
Thanks, ill try LTE only. Ive only ever gotten LTE connection anyway so it won’t be an issue.
With regard to apps, my “social” profile shows that since last charge (this morning) it was Libretube which used the moat battery. This was for about 30 minutes of music on my way to the office, with the screen off. After that, its facebook messenger, so you are correct.
I’m not on a Pixel and I’m not sure if I’m misreading our metrics, but I think I’ve used Tubular much longer than you used LibreTube and it consumed much less power. Maybe give Tubular or NewPipe a try? But if you’re leaving all profiles running at once, that’d be the first thing I investigate as a source of battery drain.
Ill give NewPipe a shot. As for the profiles, I’m thinking of combining the social and work into one, so as to reduce their number. The fintech one is set up to not run in the background which is the same as not running simultaneously, if I understand correctly.
I mean having more profiles running with more background tasks is quite the impact on battery life. You could try combining some, whilst still separating them through the “private space” feature or through a workprofile with an app like Shelter. Also try to not run messaging apps (like Element or SimpleX) on “pulling” or to “always run in the background”.
For a lot of the messaging apps you could use unified push to get the apps to go to sleep in the background but to still give you timely notifications. I use NTFY with Element, Molly and Fluffychat.
Also try looking at the “view by systems” instead of “view by apps”
Also Facebook messenger is using way too much background time - maybe try changing battery optimization for Facebook messenger? And like thedoc suggested, NewPipe uses less battery
Neat, I didn’t notice I can view by systems also. It is the mobile network that consumes the most, which goes into what Michiel said above about the phones modem. I tried going LTE-only, but haven’t seen a significant difference so far. Same with NewPipe - just tried it but it seems to drain just as much battery if not more.
I will also limit messenger background time, but wouldnt that interfere with notifications?
Glad to report that this seems to be the issue - keeping wifi on for the day, I notice that the most battery has been used by NewPipe and the mobile network (in a 40-minute window on my commute to the office). Overall, with a screen time of over 4 hours, the total drain during the day has been 34% which seems acceptable.