Airplane mode on and bluetooth off is on the left and wifi/5G on and bluetooth off is on the right. On the left the battery loses 0.6% points of battery every hour. On the right it loses 5.5% points of battery every hour. On the left the UNACCOUNTED category drains 4.8% and on the right 50%. For some reason it shows the phone as “plugged” and does not give me additional app statistics for last night. In any case, you can clearly see how the phone loses like 8x less power on airplane mode. I’ll think about what to do next.
The next logical step would be airplane off, BT off, wifi on, data disconnected, VoLTE off, and then ariplane off, BT off, wifi off, data connected, VoLTE on. This should tell you whether it’s wifi or 5G that’s draining the battery. If it were Wifi, you could try reconfiguring your Wifi router (or using a different one). If it’s 5G, then it’s a clear case for FP support.
And maybe you can do the tests for shorter time intervals like 2 hours to get a quicker resolution.
If it were Wifi, you could try reconfiguring your Wifi router (or using a different one).
I don’t think it’s a wifi router/AP setting causing the issue.
My girlfriend doesn’t seem to experience high battery drain with her FP4 (256GB model, A13, carrier: Congstar - so same as mine, only a few months newer). We’re living in the same flat, so use the same wifi.
It only drains battery with mobile network enabled which strangely doesn’t show up in the statistics where it belongs (i.e., cell usage). Carrier is Telekom. I’ll see if I find a way to get more detailed bug reports. Factory reset isn’t an option right now.
I received the replacement battery from Fairphone in the meantime that was supposed to solve the issue with the high battery drain. Surprisingly the battery drain still remains to happening. But I told them before about my doubts regarding the proposed solution.
The kernel wakelock RMNET_DFC is still the dominant one besides power management locks while the network quality is quite ok (not full but also not weak). Also the lock still occurs in flight mode, too.
That’s why I refused to do the factory reset, as I had - and still have - very strong doubt about the effectiveness of such measures. It is actually the same with replacing the battery (and I told the support about my doubts), which I did not refuse, as I thought that I would at least get a spare battery in case it does not work. And for that I am very thankful, indeed!!
I know and wasn’t convinced a reset would help, either.
but on the other hand it was worth a try for me, as such a behavior could in theory have been caused by e.g. a malicious app. So I decided to give it a try.
anyway: you can now report back to support that both solutions they mentioned don’t solve the issue, which might make them looking into this from the software side.
Edit: I’ve just raised a support ticket and referred to this thread.
any news on this from you guys?
I’ve received a first response from support, asking me to try the stuff already mentioned in this thread + provide some more info. now I’m waiting for the next reply…
No, nothing new. They asked for to switch to 4G as 5G is supposed to use more power. However, I already do that because my provider does not support 5G anyway.
The other thing they asked for, is to
Charge to 100%.
Reboot into Safe mode
Go to Settings → Battery → Battery usage → Take a screenshot
Use the Fairphone in Safe mode until the battery goes below 15%.
Go to Settings → Battery → Battery usage → Take a screenshot
Send the results.
However I sent them the info regarding the kernel wake lock RMNET_DFC that is present at any time and far too often. I also sent them a chart created with Battery Historian but I have not received any answer, yet
thanks for the fast reply, @Lars_Hennig
I did get feedback from support: They offer to send a module for self-replacement (or send them the FP so they’ll do it).
Don’t know which module exactly but as they are stating I need a PH00 screwdriver for the replacement, I guess it’s not the battery.
I’ll keep you guys posted
I received a replacement battery that did not actually solve the issue as I was almost sure of beforehand.
I am curious how the outcome is in your case
That’s exactly what I wrote them in my support ticket. I even told them that the root cause on my FP4 is the kernel wakelock RMNET_DFC. At least they want to pass this info on to the developers , now. Why they did not do this months ago already? I do not know!
I have not received any update in the past days since my last post. The FP support people are supposed to work on the topic.
Just now I received an update in my ticket: They ask me to
Charge to 100%.
Reboot into Safe mode.
Go to Settings → Battery → Battery usage → Take a screenshot.
Use the Fairphone in Safe mode until the battery goes below 15%.
Go to Settings → Battery → Battery usage → Take a screenshot.
Send us the results.
But the last time I tried to run the phone in safe mode some apps did not work correctly anymore afterwards. And as it is my daily driver phone I can hardly do that for a large part of the day.
Besides the “System/Battery/Battery usage” feature doesn’t work very well: For me at least it does show some apps, but definitely not all, and rarely those which used the most battery (compared to SytemPanel2’s battery log).
