(initial version taken from FP4 Battery life - #102 by ijgarcia - you may still improve it, it’s a wiki!)
An official list of suggestions to improve your phone’s battery life can be found on the official Fairphone documentation page
Introduction
This wiki explains some basic checks to identify the causes for battery drain and unusual thermal problems. Not all steps may talk about either battery drain or thermal problems, but for both issues the troubleshooting steps may apply.
Low hanging fruit checks
Let’s first cover the basics without asking too much effort from you.
Battery optimization/adaptive battery
Keep in mind that after a software update the operating system could take some time to adjust to the new settings, as some services might be updated only after being used. This might temporarily impact your battery life. If the battery issues persist after 1 week from the update, then please follow the steps described in this wiki.
Signal strength
If you are in the presence of a weak Wi-Fi or mobile network signal, your battery might drain really fast. Please compare to using the phone while having good signal or while in flight mode.
Location services
In general location services are not a huge drain on your phone, however, some apps my request a location too often, this may cause a drain in battery life. Perform the following instructions and use your phone for a few days before evaluating the battery performance again.
- Make sure to update your phone to the latest software.
- Go to Settings > Locations > Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning > Disable both Wi-Fi scanning and Bluetooth scanning.
Always on Display (AoD)
The always on display on an OLED display, such as on the fp5, only uses power for the pixels that are used, with a conservative brightness. Disabling the double line clock may help to reduce the pixel usage and thus power usage. Also note that the AoD feature is disabled when your phone is in your pocket or when placed with the screen facing down (or anything that blocks the proximity/light sensor). Furthermore, you can configure a bedtime schedule to disable the AoD feature during night time. Enabling the battery safer option will also disable the AoD feature. Of course you may also disable this feature as a whole to safe battery life.
High refresh rate
By default 60Hz is used in your display settings, but on the fp5 you can set it to 90Hz. This will drain your battery faster. Disable it if you prioritize your battery life over a smooth refresh rate.
Damaged/old SIM card
A damaged or old SIM card may cause a battery drain as well. Read more about it in the official Fairphone documentation
More advanced troubleshooting
Identify apps that are draining battery
You can easily check which apps are consuming more battery in the Settings.
Go to Settings > Battery > on the top right side of the screen, tap the More Options menu (three vertically aligned dots) > and tap Battery usage. You will see a graph and list of all the apps draining your battery. Take a screenshot(s) of what you see on the screen.
Install pending app updates
Make sure to install updates. Connect your phone to a stable Wi-Fi, then go to Settings > Security > Security update > Check for update, after that go to Settings > Security > Google Play system update > Check for update.
Apps might need to be updated too. Open the app drawer, find the Play Store and long press it until My apps appears. Then tap the icon with the 4 squares and tap Check for updates.
Remove unused apps
It may seem like cool to have many apps on your phone, but each app may need a period to communicate to the Internet or other tasks in the background. All this adds up to more battery drain. Try to prune your app selection, less apps is more battery life.
Remove widgets and live wallpapers from your home screen
Widgets may refresh their content every time you go back to your home screen, or at least on a regular interval. These widgets consume extra battery life. Live wallpapers act in a similar fashion.
In FPOS you might remove all widgets by clearing data of the quickstep app as mentioned here.
Try Safe mode
To exclude the possibility of corrupted third-party software, reboot your phone in Safe mode.
If your battery still drains fast after doing all the above then it may be a problem with the system and you should consider to do the next steps and contactsupport
- Charge your device above 95% (to verify if there is an issue, it is essential that you use the phone in Safe Mode for a full battery cycle, even if 3rd party apps don’t work!):
- Reboot in Safe mode.
- Go to Settings > Battery > on the top right side of the screen tap the More Options menu (three vertically aligned dots) > tap** Battery usage** > tap again on the More Options menu > tap on Show full device usage. Take a screenshot(s).
- Use your phone in Safe mode until the charge drops below 10%.
- Go to Settings > Battery > on the top right side of the screen tap the More Options menu (three vertically aligned dots) > tap Battery usage > tap again on the More Options menu > tap on Show full device usage. Take a screenshot(s).
- You may contactsupport and use your screenshots as documentation for the system battery drain
Check persistent processes
Adaptive battery and battery optimization are features that attempt to keep your phone in a low power state, this is called an idle state. However, there are limits to the intelligence behind this. If there is one or more apps waking the device too often, then the battery may drain faster than usual because the phone cannot maintain an idle state.
The battery usage overview provides a general overview. But this overview is not a detailed account of what drains your phone. Sometimes it helps to also check what’s running in the moment and if that process sticks around after killing the app.
- Kill all apps in the background
- To see the currently running processes, you’ll need to enable the developer mode. You can do this by going to Settings → About phone > there, scroll to the bottom and tap the build number 7 times.
- Then go to Settings → System → Advanced → Developer options → Running services
If you notice an app that’s always there, even if you killed it already, it could be the cause. Especially apps that constantly need to be running such as VPNs or apps that need to use regular keep-alive signals to function, such as SIP accounts. It could also be that you configured an app to e.g. check for new emails every minute. All these things may add up to a faster battery drain.
Once you have identified a possible cause, you could try and disable that app for a day and monitor your battery usage.