FP4 Battery life

I was able to replace most of Maps’ functionality with OsmAnd~ and NUNAV Navigation. While I use OsmAnd~ exclusively for hiking and biking, NUNAV is really good at car navigation.

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Once again a little optimized.Based on the tutorial from @rar0 and @Stanzi

Gave a boost again.

Residual charge: 37%
SoT: 7hours, 47 minutes

Can not complain :smiley:

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Hi all,
I’ve just bought a new Fairphone 4 and I have some questions regarding battery usage. I’m using stock OS (Android 11), and relatively few apps (Firefox, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, few banking apps).

Battery drain seems to be very inconsistent: I typically leave my phone on overnight, but with airplane mode on, and with wifi/mobile data disabled. The first night, my phone battery only drained 1%, which is compatible with my experience with my previous phone (a Samsung a5 - 2017).
However, starting from the second night, the phone is draining ~15% battery with same setup.

I have tried to use AccuBattery, but without much success. That said, the power consumption of the phone seems to be relatively high even when idling. Right now AccuBattery reports around 250mA draw, and 20%/h consumption with screen on, 4.5% with screen off. These numbers seem very very high.

When browsing internet I can see the battery percentage dropping very quickly (e.g. 1% every 3-4 minute or so). On my old phone (which was 4 yrs old) I could get with same apps (and Android 8, which was the reason of the upgrade) 2-3 days out of the (small) battery. With the FP4 I’m nowhere near that.

The only “suspicious” thing I’ve done was to install (and then uninstall) an application to enable “tap to wake” (as I was a bit worried about power button wear just to see notifications). Since the app was not working as I expected I have uninstalled it. So I’m wondering if it’s possible for the app to have altered some of the phone factory settings, and now, despite the app is uninstalled, I’m stuck with bad settings.

Any ideas? What is your normal power draw? I’m surprised I’m having issues with this as many reviews mentioned that battery life was “better than average”. Thanks!

Hi and welcome to the community. I moved your post to this existing one, giving some impressions. Using the FP3 not FP4 I can confirm that a tap/wink to wake app def drains more battery, I think that the Phone is never really in “deep sleep” due to that. Therefore I deactivated this again on the FP3 .

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Note that I have uninstalled that app. So, I’m not sure how that could still be the culprit, unless it permanently changed some settings in my phone. AccuBattery reports that 80% of the screen-off time phone is in “deep sleep”, so that should be ok (but then again, I’m not sure why the power draw is so high in deep sleep).

Hi and welcome to the forum

I have n FP3 and get between 1 and 2% over 16hours when in aeroplane mode.

Do you have any data you cannot retrieve as you could do a factory reset or maybe as you only installed 1 app and removed it you could try starting in safe mode.

Finding the culprit piecemeal can take some time.

Aeroplane mode should disable WiFi, Network, Bluetooth and NFC

I’m sure I have a few apps that try to connect during the ‘night’ but as they fail they use limited power, etc.

Yeah - that’s really what’s bothering me - losing 15% overnight with everything turned off is, I think my main concern here. I’ve tried safe mode - but then it’s hard to make a comparison, given I cannot use AccuBattery in safe mode. I will maybe look into factory reset (I don’t think resetting app data would be enough to undo whatever was done).

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I have tried safe mode, what really changes. It it’s only not using AccuBattery, ??? Can you start it in safe mode before you rest for the night and the phone is in aeroplane mode and just see what the inbuilt battery check says?

What I meant is that I would have liked to make a power draw comparison using AccuBattery between safe mode and non-safe mode, but that’s not possible, of course.

Using safe mode overnight seems like a good idea. The built-in battery stat doesn’t seem to report anything unusual, even now, so I don’t think that will provide insights.

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Yes was overdoing the ‘inbuilt’ I really meant the recorded drop overnight :slight_smile:

could it be that your phone is still setting itself up? usually it can take several days for a new phone to „stabilise“ and then power consumption settles at a much lower level (same happens after software updates).

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It could be - that said, I’ve just seen another review which I didn’t see before which mentions some issues with battery life:

https://marketresearchtelecast.com/ct-3003-the-fairphone-4-in-the-long-term-test/207392/

(I think the above just contains a (translated) transcription of the video).

Specifically:

“The battery life is below average. In the test, the Fairphone 4 switched off after 9.8 hours of watching YouTube via WiFi, other smartphones almost doubled. With the Fairphone 4, I usually got through the day on one battery charge, but barely.”

I think this is more or less on par with what I’m seeing here. Just for fun, I resurrected my old Samsung phone (note it’s not a flagship by any means, just a midranger with a 3000mAh battery) - and it does draw a lot less power: on idle it’s sitting at 70mA, while the fairphone is sits around 200mA (even though the screen on the Samsung looks a bit brighter, but that’s probably due to the AMOLED).

I guess it’s probably something that I could live with - although charging the phone once a day instead of 2-3 times a week doesn’t feel like a great upgrade (considering it’s replacing a 4.5 years old phone). Of course it’s always possible that the phone is not working as it should, because of some issue with my specific phone, or some app going rogue (although I can’t see anything strange).

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I know you might not want to go that way but… maybe root your device so you can install BetterBatteryStats and get really detailled battery usage ?

Otherwise I think it’s possible the “tape 2 wake” app have changed the battery statistics and messed up the power consumption but it usually comes back to normal after a few days of consistant usage.

Have you got the device for a long time ? And did you debloat it ?
In my experience the device tends to “adjust” after a few days/weeks and battery life increases. Though I debloated everything I could and use apps such as Servicely and Naptime.
I only charge my phone every 2 days and use it normally.

Thanks for the suggestions. No, would not want to go down the root path :slight_smile:

Also I did not “debloat” it, because, compared to my previous samsung, this already feels debloated enough :slight_smile: . If you refer to remove some of the google services, I use them quite a bit.

I’ll wait few extra days to see what happens, but this is looking not great. For instance, the official android battery usage stats reports 5% battery gone with 16 minutes of moderate browsing. Honestly it seems like it’s just the wifi - this phone is much, much faster at loading websites than my previous one (probably 10 times faster), but it comes with a hefty price in terms of battery life.

At the end of the day I will have to see if the limitations of the phone (mediocre battery life, absence of a proper way to see notifications when off, so and so camera performance) are ok for me to put up with. I understand that for people that feel more adventurous, there are other paths possible - but I sadly don’t much time to tinker between work and family. Since I don’t change phones much (last one lasted 4.5 years) I mostly want something no fuss, that “just works” - and this is starting to look like it isn’t it 100% there (which would be a pity because I like the idea behind the phone, and the great community it has!).

Well could be, I had trouble understanding why my fp4 was draining 1-2% per hour during night time when it could take 2 or 3h during day time to drain this 1% (in idle mode of coure). Until I realized my bedroom being upstairs, wifi signal was much much lower and inconsistant, which constantly forces the phone to try get better signal hence use more battery.

But yeah 5% in 16min there’s something fishy right here.

Thought of that too - but at night I leave my phone in airplane mode (and I’ve also disabled bluetooth and wifi scanning). So that shouldn’t be an issue? This morning Google Photos popped up in the battery stats, so I assume it must be running overnight to do who knows what (I do not have syncing of pictures - the microSD is my cloud :slight_smile: ).

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Also, from where I am, the phone says my wifi signal is “excellent”, so I doubt the drain has to do with interference. I’m using 5Ghz wifi, but so was the old phone (although the old phone could not go past 70Mbps anyway :slight_smile: ).

Yeah that sound unlikely to be the reason.

Now that’s weird but not surprising, who knows what dodgy things Google apps are doing on their own while we sleep :smiley:
A shame you don’t want to root, Servicely does a very good job at preventing those nasty services to work without permission

You can quite easily remove Google Photos and more via ADB without rooting and then install for example the Simple app : Gallery via F-Droid.

For the simple ADB I used on a Raspberry pie see.

see also

Not specific to the FP4 but guides you can emulate

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Do you have energy saving mode enabled at night? Last night my phone went from 90 % to 88 % in airplane mode with energy saving turned on.