I have a question, since last Friday I have a Fairphone 5 with e / os. I notice that the battery runs out very quickly. Since last charging, the battery has decreased by more than 20% in four hours. Some examples:
Listening to music / podcast with headphones or speaker is quickly 12% per hour.
Just check for messages or check the news quickly a few percent.
In standby without active internet connection or bluetooth 10% in 9 hours.
On the Fairphone is /e / OS / 2.9-t-20250321478215-official-FP5
The apps are up to date
I close the apps I donāt use.
I cleared the cache of the apps
When I first got my Murena FP5 I soon thought that the battery drains relativly quickly (not as fast as you are suggesting though). I then deactivated 5G and it immerdiately got better. Never reactiveted 5G since. Of course I canāt say that this is the reason for your phones battery drainage problem, but thought I could mention it anyway.
A typical source of battery drain is (among others) sending data, sending costs a lot of energy especially over mobile network. Do you have unexpected network traffic?
Check which apps do indeed leak the accu. If the topmost apps in the ranking are a typical sending apps (mail, social media, ā¦) check what they do. A mail app doesnāt need to send all the time, this depends on the configuration of their mail accounts (IMAP servers).
If the topmost apps are not typical sending apps it would be good to find out if they have trackers which are sending.
Some years ago I had an app which couldnāt stand flight mode. It began to drain the accu when I switched on filght mode.
BTW: You could also switch off the background mobile connection /e/ keeps always open even when you are on wifi. This wasts a lot of energy for nothing. Thereās an option in the developer settings for this and this option is per default ON (keep the connection). Switch other crap off (Location, Bluetooth, NFC).
Same on OnePlus Nord. Deactivate 5G is the solution in many cases. This is a good thing to do anyway as itās often the case that although you might have connected to a 5G enabled cell tower, the backhaul is LTE so no real benefit.
You can test this by doing a speed test on each. Often the ping and speed is worse on 5G than LTE.
Do you have your location hidden under āAdvanced Privacyā ? Iām not using the same phone but since i turned on the fake but plausible location option in Advanced Privacy a few days ago, iāve noticed a massive increase in battery drain, even if the phone is just sitting in my pocket and not being actively used.
Iāve also disabled 5G because itās such a battery hog, and Iām in the US on T-mobile which has the best 5G network. The speeds arenāt that much better than 4G LTE so itās simply not worth the battery drain. In the EU 5G is pretty spotty if available at all so itās a real waste of battery there.
There are so many things with Android that can be a source of battery drain. You have to research and see what functions you can shut off such as anything to do with bluetooth or wifi scanning. If you donāt actually use NFC or print service, shut that stuff off.
Also Iāve had apps just decide to go tango uniform one day and prevent the phone from going into deep sleep which really hammers idle battery drain. Though a reboot usually clears it up. So disabling any apps you donāt actually use is a good practice.
I am using a Murena FP5 for more than a year now and also noticed that after the 2.9 update the battery seems to drain a bit quicker. I am a very moderate user of my phone, so a standard span from 100 to 0% is usually 3 days, sometimes more. Since 2.9 it has been closer to 1.5 to 2 days, max.
When looking to the battery usage menu, I donāt see much standing out. The overall share of the screen is maybe a bit higher than usual (22% instead of around 15% Iād say), but this could very easily be explained by having less night time on a 2 days span than on a 3 days one. I donāt think itās relevant.
On the other hand, Iām also affected my the account manager regression regarding Murena email account protected by MFA (see Feedback for v2.9 - #84 by Tentos) and this seems to cause occasional spam of the same notification. The phone actually display only one, but notification display systems (KDE Connect) see this as a batch of 10+ notifications from time to time. This might explain a higher battery usage too.
Thank you for your comments, I started working on it.
Based on your tips I have made a number of adjustments, the consumption is now a lot lower.
There is no app that uses a striking amount of data
The 5G connection adjusted to 4G as the preferred network type
An app disabled.
Mail synchronizes is once an hour, second mail app I could not adjust the synchronization, I have set this to limited battery usage for the time being.
Fake geolocation was disabled
NFC was disabled
GPS is turned off by default (unless needed on)
Print service turned off
I will also post this in Feedback for V2.9
You could still change from cyclic polling the mail server(s) (this is the default synchronization of your Mail app) to the use of server side push notifications (the mail server informs you about new mail messages when they arrive on the server).
Cyclic polling costs energy and produces a lot of data traffic because new mails are detected by comparison on the client side. So when your inbox is typically full with a lot of old messages they are indeed pumped on an on to the client to be analyzed there mostly with the result that nothing has changed at all.
With server side push notifications you have much less data traffic, less energy consumption and much faster notifications within seconds. The device must then only send very short keep alive messages from time to time to the server ā¦ hey server, Iām still listening. All modern IMAP servers can send these push notifications. The Mail app (K-9) has two settings under [mail account] | Fetching mail | Advanced for configuring push notifications. You can then indeed stop this ongoing synchronization in your mail app completely, this is under General Settings | Network | Background Sync, all in your Mail app.
Update, I went from 100% to 12% between 10h00 and 19h30. Thatās really unusual. I was busy with meetings the whole day and did not use my phone. I think there is indeed some kind of problem since 2.9
This is probably not a self sufficient explanation : Iāve been running this FP5 with /e/OS for more than a year now, not having any similar abnormal battery drain. This is a very clear change since 2.9. When running 2.8, my battery life was casually around 3 days, sometimes even 4 or 5 when really not doing anything of the phone.
Itās not generally 2.9 by itself, otherwise we had it all. I wouldnāt say that anything has changed on my device.
When the drain starts after an update itās probably related to leftovers from before which do not work well after the update. Thatās why you should clear all the caches of all apps including all system apps after every update. Otherwise it takes days until the things normalize by themselves.
If the drain persists and you have an almost empty accu the list of energy consuming apps in the Settings should show which apps have been responsible for that.
Yes, just plain LOS & f-droid for some media app, but also syncing to my own nextcloud and CAL/Card DAV plus IMAP mail.
People buy a mobile, get OTA updates and things are taken care of and just work.
Thatās the standard.
You need to clear cache, disable this or that, try this, maybe, ask people in a forumā¦
With /e sometimes it bites FP, sometimes Pixelā¦ lots of this forum is about such questions.
Iāve cleared part of the appsā cache (not all of them yet) and the situation indeed seems to have improved. Iām not back to my usual battery life, but the last charge is 1.5 day back and the battery level is still at 27%. Not ideal but way more manageable than the <1 day right after the update. Thanks for the advice.
As I said several times that this seems to be a really important thing. Nobody knows why but clearing the caches is such a good idea that it should indeed be an automatic part of the update process. They should indeed build this in. Again and again people struggle with these chaches.
There are apps for doing this completely. You find Cache Cleaner and SD Maid 2/SE in F-Droid. The first one is simple and does the job reliably. The latter one is more complicated, allows also other cleaning things and its GUI is sometimes not easy to understand. If you donāt pay attention this thingy kills some GB of your data in a minute (for instance Osmand maps and voices or pictures in unexpected folders). Be careful with SD Maid.
Itās indeed a good idea to make an update, then reboot and then run Cache Cleaner over all apps including the system apps once for all.
