GrapheneOS/Pixel 8a battery draining

Thats more than 1 full charge per day, I would say your usage is very, very high.

My P8 bought in March 2024, charge cycle count is 135.

I wonder whether it is due to your usage or configuration. 1 full charge should last around 8-10hrs SOT.

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Yes, I actually have been using my smartphone a lot lately, but the issue of draining doesn’t help :sweat_smile:

156 cycles is still good condition. Anything up to ~500 should be fine, after that you’ll start to notice.

I’ve read that on pixels below 9 the cellular radio isn’t very efficient. Try WiFi or try these steps.

Are you near a charger most of the time? Utilizing bypass charging is the best for battery health.

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I am at 88 cycles since September… I have kids and ADHD so I just lose my phone all the time.

So you are basically saying you do not have a good backup of your data. That should generally be worrying you more than anything discussed in this chat. You could loose your phone or break it.

The stock backup of graphene unfortunately fails to restore a good percentage of the time (At least since the last time I tried it with my old Pixel, I don’t know if anything has changed but I doubt it.)

At least i backup the app settings and important file, and put them in the cloud, but I really don’t feel like wasting time with that app.

But thanks for caring :sweat_smile:

Wow that’s impressive. I’m just happy to have less than one charging cycle per day lol. Hopefully with bypass charging I’ll be able to reduce my charge cycles per day at least a little more.

One of the unintended but amazing side effects of switching to GrapheneOS that should likely be advertised by them at some point, is that I use my phone way less. Two reasons for this I believe:

  1. GrapheneOS is plain less sexy by design and it’s exactly what we need in phones today. I had family wanting to buy my son a tablet, and so I ended up forcing them to buy a Pixel tablet that I sideloaded Graphene on. He plays with the timer, some low-tech open source svg doodle and tic-tac-toe apps, and some videos I added on there, and puts it down himself after 5-10 min…whereas, if he gets a hold of my wife’s iPhone, he stays on it indefinitely and throws a temper tantrum when we take it away. Same with my daughter.
  2. Because I am using Graphene, I naturally am much more selective about the apps I add there because, I want to increase my efforts around privacy. More private apps are typically less sexy and less attention grabbing. This one will likely only affect the people who frequent a group like PG, but still it’s made my phone much less exciting and made me more present with my kids.

I swear, I would do a commercial for the Graphene folks.

Thanks Graphene :smiley:

But yeah, less time on my phone and therefore better battery cycles.

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I ran some tests with the Accubattery app. The results are really bad and I think I’ve figured out who the culprit is.

However by putting my phone in airplane mode, I only consumed 2% of the battery in 9 hours on standby, so I imagine the culprit, since I always have mobile network/WiFi enabled, is the modem itself.

If you have any advice, let me know :face_with_diagonal_mouth:.

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Enable 4g only mode. The modem is a lot less efficient when using 5g in my experience.

I have ‘LTE’ mode, not ‘LTE only’ mode, is there any difference in terms of battery life? When I had ‘4G only’ it gave me some issues (Since a few versions ago, 4G has disappeared and been replaced with LTE)

Whether it’s called 4g or LTE is probably just a quirk depending on your carrier. LTE mode will only prioritise LTE. It might save a little battery life compared to prioritising 5g (I have no idea) but it certainly won’t be comparable to disabling 5g entirely.

What kind of issues were you having in LTE only mode?

I tested it for a short while, but I remember that I couldn’t make calls, maybe I’ll try it again

You can try enabling VOLTE

With VoLTE enabled? It is possible your carrier just sucks and doesn’t have proper VoLTE support and therefore would require 2/3g to make calls.

VoLTE is enabled :).

the option appeared recently and I found it already active If I’m not mistaken, could it be that it was active even when it wasn’t in the settings? Sorry, I should inform myself a bit about the various connectivities because I don’t know the differences well :sweat_smile:

Actually VoLTE and VoWiFi could be tricky as not every carrier (esp. MVNOs) enables them, and your phone model might not on their support list (also carrier dependant).

You should see VoLTE icon or “WiFi call” rolling banner on your notification bar if you have succesfully enabled the feature.

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even having LTE I notice significant battery drain on my pixel (not that Google allowed me to use 5G)
So no it’s a general problem with the modem for that, it’s just drains quite the battery.
(I do use a Pixel 7, @SpunkyEatsYou didn’t mention which one they have).

The only solution I found unfortunately is to just remember to turn it off when you’re on you local Wi-Fi.

I also don’t recommend Enabling LTE Only as it means if your phone needs to fallback, it simply won’t and that may be inconvenient (If you don’t have that problem, that’s fine but for some carriers it’s probably necessary to be able to fallback to 3G if not in general for some areas you can’t reach an LTE Network.)

Yeah I think newer modem contributed quite a bit to the batter battery life in P9 series (except 9a).