Battery drain on XA2 when not in flight mode

[antoyo]

Hi.
A few months ago, I nocited high battery drain happening on my XA2.
It used to be able to last 7 days without a charge and now it lasts 24h (even when not used at all).
I checked that the battery is fine by installing LineageOS and it last >7 days.

I noticed that enabling flight mode helps a lot:

(you can see on the left part of the graph when flight mode was enabled)
I disabled Android support, but that doesn’t help.

I’ve seen a few other threads with a similar issue of battery drain, but I could not find any solution.

I’d like to keep using SFOS, so I’d like to help debug/fix this issue, but I’m not sure where to start.
Do you have any idea for how to fix the battery drain when not in flight mode?
If not, can you please point me to some information that would help me debug this issue.

Thanks.

[ric9k]

Here is an afternoon with my XA2 in my pocket, not in flight mode but not used, appart for hourly local automatic backup and 1 or 2 clock checks:

is it very different from yours consumption?

[antoyo]

Thanks for your answer. I don’t see this graph in SysMon. What tool did you use to get this graph

[ric9k]

Oh, yes, sorry, the graphics were made with SystemDataScope.

[Fuzzillogic]

Do you have 4G enabled? Switching to 2G simply doubles my stand-by time. The CPU is cooler as well on 2G. I don’t know why. I can’t see much if any difference in CPU usage or sleep or suspends.

[ric9k]

Here, setting on ‘prefer 4G’ but mobile data not enabled.

[Fuzzillogic]

No, it’s regardless of data being enabled or not. Simply connected using 4G is causing considerable drain on my XA2, but not on 2G.

[antoyo]

Here’s what I got for the night, with flight mode and Wifi enabled:

It’s weird that the second part of the night it used more current, but it only 10% of battery during the whole night, so it’s probably not that bad.

I used to recall testing flight mode with Wifi enabled and I believed it used more battery (something like >50% during the night), so I don’t know how reliable it is. But that was with Android App support enabled, so perhaps the combination of Wifi + Android App support takes more battery? (The only Android apps I have installed for now are Aptoid and F-droid).

Do you think that there are some Android support udev rules that could cause the battery drain? If so, would those rules be removed if I uninstall Android support?

[ric9k]

I would say, not 100% sure, that uninstalling App Support is not necessary. Having it stopped should be enough.

Comparing battery percentages is not the best imo. Consumption in mA/h is much more precise as batteries states, ages, capacities can be different between devices.
E.g. A case where an old battery is consumed by 10% in one night. If replaced by a new battery, say, with 4 x more capscity, it will lose only 2.5% in the same night.
the average consumption on your graph is 30mA/h. Approx the double than mine. This would indicate we have the same consumption + approx 15mA/h for your wifi.
I’d say this could be realististic.

[antoyo]

In your case, you had disabled flight mode, right? In my case, flight mode was enabled, so we cannot really compare. If so, it would be better that I show the graph with the same settings. Did you have wifi enabled?

Comsumption seemed much higher when I was not in flight mode.

[ric9k]

Oh, yes, right. I was reversed. No flight mode, no wifi.

[Matias]

I can second this. I have it set to 2g and with Situations have it automatically switch to 4g only if I enable mobile data. Otherwise the battery drains far too quickly.

[antoyo]

It seems a little bit better on 2G:

But it still seems to have a much worse consumption than before the issue happened.

@ric9k: I’ll try with 4G enabled, flight mode disabled and wifi disabled.

[ric9k]

The minimal consumption average I can reach is 12mA/h with no Wifi and flight mode. As base reference:

[sebix]

Do you execute custom commands to turn off/on 4G?

[Matias]

Nope, I just set it with situations

[antoyo]

I forgot to turn off the Wifi last night, so I got the graph with 4G and wifi enabled:

It uses the battery much more.

I’m disabling Wifi now.

Btw, I plan to try older versions of SailfishOS, first to get back to a version where I didn’t have these issues (if it’s possible), and second, to try to understand what caused this regression.
I found this GitHub repo, but I’m not sure if it’s legit.
Is there any official way to download an older version? (I was thinking: since there are a lot of point releases, maybe there’s a way.)

Thanks for your help!

[antoyo]

So, I tried with older versions of SailfishOS (that I’m fairly sure did not have the battery drain issue back when I was using them) and still have the issue, so it’s unlikely to be a regression.

The only other thing I know that I changed is my SIM card: I used to have a SIM card without VoLTE support and now I use a SIM card with VoLTE support.
I guess that could be the issue since disabling 4G helps reducing the battery drain.
What are your thoughts on this?

@ric9k: You seem to not have this battery drain issue. Can you tell me whether your SIM card support VoLTE?

@Fuzzillogic @Matias: Since you have this battery drain issue, I wonder if you have a SIM card with VoLTE support.

It would seem my carrier allows reusing an old SIM card, so I might buy a second plan to confirm this theory.

Thanks for your help.

[Fuzzillogic]

I reckon my sim is new enough for VoLTE, but I’m not sure if there is such thing as a “VoLTE-enabled sim”. From what I’ve read the drain on 4G could be caused by a bad configuration on the provider’s end. I haven’t asked them yet, as I fear to have to go through a whole lot of silly and pointless questions…

I did try resetting the APN. Some APNs allow full internet access to your phone, and the numerous port scans and SSH login attempts on the wild web wake up the phone a lot. There but given that the problem also occurs without data enabled, that can’t be the cause in this case.

[Matias]

Pretty sure my provider supports VoLTE but I don’t know any more than that