Android Enthusiasts Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for enthusiasts and power users of the Android operating system. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
This file sync app is active for 8 seconds, keeps awake for zero seconds, and yet uses 25-30% of power in a given day.
What could an app be doing to drain battery, without showing up as CPU use time?
To be clear, I'm not looking for solutions to this specific problem (talking to the dev for that): I'm looking for info on what apps can do that isn't logged in battery usage. Something is clearly happening, but what?
(Phone is Poco F1, latest updates on everything)
Also disk operations get battery power. For example, writing a block into the flash memory works first by burning it, and then a write operation.
Also the communication with your Wifi router or base station can take a lot of energy.
Mobile CPUs in phones are well optimized for low power consumption, but the case is not always so for other parts.
On an ext2-3-4 filesystem, also file read operations transfer into a write by default, because the last access time (last read event) meta-data in the filesystem has to be updated. A sane android would disable it (noatime flag in the mount options) but not always do.
Current Androids can say, which app used how much battery, although it probably counts only the CPU usage. My primary battery-killers are my browsers, particularly some webpages (linkedin is the worst....).
