This stuff drives me so mad. I recently have noticed higher than usual over-night drain on my phone and decided to investigate a bit. So I connected my phone to my machine, closed out all the apps waited a few seconds and ran adb shell top with a few parameters to see what is actually running.

And would you look at that, despite the phone telling me that nothing is running at all, the microsoft copilot, ebay kleinanzeigen (a german craigslist), google photos and google search either have not been closed or somehow started themselves. Also I have not received any notifications for these Apps in the last few seconds.

First of all, how are these Apps even doing it? With the two Google Apps I kinda get it, since they are System Apps, but in the case of ebay Kleinanzeigen and microsoft copilot it makes 0 sense since they are regular 3rd party Apps. How can they bypass seemingly all optimizations and start themselves (I haven’t used the Microsoft copilot app in months). Also is there any way to prevent this from happening or at the very least get some kind of summary how often these Apps ran in the background. Sadly the Android battery information page is totally useless. With many of these Apps I don’t care about notifications or anything and I never want them to run after I close them in the task manager.

  • @aluminiumOPEnglish
    4•17 days ago

    Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation. If I understand it correctly, there is no way to really prevent these Apps from “running” in the background, although “running” just means they sit idle in memory 99.9% of time and don’t do anything unless a broadcast event they are subscribed to gets fired and then they are permitted to do small task.

    So I guess the most likely issue is that either something else on the phone is causing this drain or that some App constantly gets restarted (which is expensive) for some reason instead of just staying idle in memory.

    • kali
      2•17 days ago

      You don’t use the Mull browser do you? That caused this issue for me, and I fixed it by uninstalling and switching to another firefox based browser (it was a Mull issue not a firefox issue)

    • Skull giverEnglish
      2•17 days ago

      I’ve had the similar problem on an old tablet running a custom ROM. I believe this was caused by either a kernel bug or some other low-level performance bottleneck in the filesystem. None if the user accessible stats showed why the tablet was constantly running hot and slow as hell. The only fix I’ve found was a factory reset. I don’t know what got corrupted, but I found debugging not to be worth it.

      My guess is that a system component has a bug and is in some sort of a crash/retry loop.

      Another thing you can try, that I just thought of, is to look in the battery stats and look for wake locks. Applications can tell the OS not to go into deep sleep (for instance, a media player may want to keep running after you turn off the screen) and sometimes buggy apps can keep their wakelocks unintentionally. Dumping the wakelocks may help figure out if an app is keeping the device awake for no reason