Battery draining on android

[Maxence-v]

Battery is completely drained on android, I'd like to send a screenshot of my stats on my samsung

Steps to reproduce

Expected behaviour

Tell us what should happen

Actual behaviour

Tell us what happens instead

Server configuration

Operating system:

Web server:

Database:

PHP version:

Nextcloud version: (see Nextcloud admin page)

Contacts version: (see Nextcloud apps page)

Updated from an older Nextcloud or fresh install:

Signing status:

Login as admin user into your Nextcloud and access 
http://example.com/index.php/settings/integrity/failed 
paste the results here.

List of activated apps:

If you have access to your command line run e.g.:
sudo -u www-data php occ app:list
from within your Nextcloud installation folder

Nextcloud configuration:

If you have access to your command line run e.g.:
sudo -u www-data php occ config:list system
from within your instance's installation folder

or

Insert your config.php content here
Make sure to remove all sensitive content such as passwords. (e.g. database password, passwordsalt, secret, smtp password, …)

Are you using external storage, if yes which one: local/smb/sftp/...

Are you using encryption: yes/no

Are you using an external user-backend, if yes which one: LDAP/ActiveDirectory/Webdav/...

LDAP configuration (delete this part if not used)

With access to your command line run e.g.:
sudo -u www-data php occ ldap:show-config
from within your Nextcloud installation folder

Without access to your command line download the data/owncloud.db to your local
computer or access your SQL server remotely and run the select query:
SELECT * FROM `oc_appconfig` WHERE `appid` = 'user_ldap';


Eventually replace sensitive data as the name/IP-address of your LDAP server or groups.

Client configuration

Browser:

Operating system:

CardDAV-clients:

Logs

Web server error log

Insert your webserver log here

Nextcloud log (data/nextcloud.log)

Insert your Nextcloud log here

Browser log

Insert your browser log here, this could for example include:

a) The javascript console log
b) The network log 
c) ...

[skjnldsv]

Hi, sorry, but what does it have to do with contacts?

[Maxence-v]

Oops sorry no idea, but my phone (s20 plus) is showing huge amount of battery used by the nextcloud app, I disabled battery optimization in android because I use auto upload, and I'm not uploading 24/7 so I don't understand the battery drained
A friend of mine has a s20 plus too and he doesn't have this problem

[skjnldsv]

Moving to the android repo

[Maxence-v]

So no idea?

[tobiasKaminsky]

what device do you have?
Have you enabled auto sync?

[Maxence-v]

Samsung s20 plus, before I had the Samsung note 10 plus, and I had the same problem.

Yes I have the "auto upload" feature activated

[ezaquarii]

Can you check logs on the server to see if you get a lot of PROPFIND requests coming from the device every 15 minutes? :)

[yawicz]

@ezaquarii, I do actually observe exactly the behaviour you describe with two different Android phones having two different user accounts, yes.
I found those entries in the logs of my nginx server running Nextcloud and was wondering whether this should be expected/desired behaviour or not.
Do you have an idea what's going on with those random directory, but very regular PROPFIND commands?
On both phones, the app is completely closed (not stopped via the app settings, but closed from task manager) and auto upload is deactivated.

[ezaquarii]

@yawicz I don't know exactly - as I'm not expert on files sync component - but I can only speculate that it polls the server for changes. I'd additionally check the interval - if it's 15 minutes, that would correlate with default background task wakeup.

One option is to turn on battery optimization for that app - it should stop OS from waking the app and giving it network access frivolously.

Is this expected? Yes, because sync is implemented using polling.
Desired - hell no, but the fix is not trivial, to say the least.

[jeffWelling]

I hope this doesn't get closed because of inactivity, it's a real problem for android users, I'd be happy to help poke at this if there's more info that I can provide?

Maybe instead of just checking every 15 minutes, we could let the user configure this setting? I would be quite happy with a nightly upload, I don't need my phone to check every 15 minutes. I also understand the desire to avoid options overload as mentioned in another Issue comment, but IMO this warrants a user configurable option of some sort.

[jeffWelling]

I'm currently seeing this battery consumption issue.

Android Samsung model SM-G965W
Android 10
NextCloud App 3.15.1

AutoUpload is enabled, but has caught up with everything needing to be uploaded.

[tobiasKaminsky]

Do you know how many files/images you have on your device?
It scans and compares them to find those needed for upload.

[LSchober]

I have the same problem of high battery drain.

Google Pixel 4a 5G
Android 11
NextCloud App 3.15.1 (F-Droid-Build)
NextCloudPi 20.0.8
~30GB videos & photos

AutoUpload is enabled, but has caught up with everything needing to be uploaded.

[jeffWelling]

Do you know how many files/images you have on your device?

~15K photos and videos for me, totaling about 60GB.

It scans and compares them to find those needed for upload.

Understandable, but it seems the default value perhaps doesn't work for people with large existing camera rolls, one solution here may be to just let the user configure the app to only check nightly, instead of continuously. Is there any chance such a feature could be implemented, perhaps with a simple checkbox in Settings?

Also open to alternative solutions, maybe just let the user decide how often to check?

Even with working from home, having the app drain battery this fast is a big obstacle for getting the rest of the family to adopt NextCloud, so I'd like to help get this fixed any way I can :)

[tobiasKaminsky]

@jeffWelling are all files uploaded?
I currently fear that pending uploads is more draining battery than auto upload does.

[Maxence-v]

I thought the problem came from a large amount of files too. I had 20k files for 185GO, but then i reduced the files to 3k and i have still the same problem....

[jeffWelling]

In my situation, all files are eventually uploaded yes.

@tobiasKaminsky That makes a lot of sense actually.
The last few days I'll take a photo of something in the morning to send to someone (garden growth), and it queues for upload but has to wait for me to charge the phone because that's what I config'd, and Android frequently asks me if I'll let it put the app to sleep because of how much battery it's using. I'll try resisting taking pics to see if the battery usage is different with nothing pending an upload, good thought!

[LSchober]

Can i provide any additional information to solve this problem?

Maybe instead of just checking every 15 minutes, we could let the user configure this setting? I would be quite happy with a nightly upload, I don't need my phone to check every 15 minutes.

@jeffWelling i really like your solution with making this configurable!

A crontab like config would be great :)

[geistchevalier]

I would also like to put my vote behind having a user configurable sync frequency + a sync now button.
For my case, I only sync a few critical files to my phone (less than 5MB) that rarely gets updated, but the battery is draining faster than before I installed the app.

Google Pixel 4a
Android 11
NextCloud App 3.15.1 from Google's play store
a self hosted Nextcloud 21.0.0 server

[MikeZuluUSA]

Hi,
I have been observing a heavy drainage since a couple days.
Samsung S9 - Android - April Update
Nextcloud Version 3.15.1
4 Auto Upload Folders

Haven't had the problem that extreme.
Only a couple auto uploads a day.
Up to 85% consuming battery!!!!! (See the screenshot)!
No pending uploads.

[Zorks]

this is definitely not a stale issue and is an ongoing problem for android users.

Samsung Galaxy Note 8
Android 9
Nextcloud App 3.15.1
Nextcloud Server 20.0.3

Used to be able to leave my phone off the charger overnight and only lose 5% or so battery life. Ever since enabling auto upload, I've seen extreme battery drain from the Nextcloud app and an extremely reduced battery time for my phone.

[Ra72xx]

On which version should this fix be enabled? I tried 3.23.1 and is as bad as ever. Moreover, somehow I now cannot Nextcloud get back to normal battery usage even when disabling auto upload and enabling battery optimization.

[dmalanij]

Seems better with 3.23.1. Will keep an eye on it, so far looks battery consumption has reduced significantly.

[gabooh]

Same issue here on Galaxy S21. Android version 13. Nextcloud version 3.23.0. The battery useage of NC is at about 18% although I'm not synchronizing or working with Nextcloud. Upload is activated when phone is in wifi and charging.

Same problem, S21 ultra, app version and battery usage is very high, sometimes around 30%. Auto upload is enabled on wifi and on charge only. This is so bad I will have to disable the feature.

[okkine]

Mine's been really good since the update. Thanks!

[mhzawadi]

update: I still get issues with high battery use, nextcloud is the 4th on my list of top battery use. But I dont open the app very often as it uploads without needing to open. screenshot from today.

[Nocturna22]

Short version:
Android app version: 3.23.1
Nextcloudversion: 25.0.3
App runtime: ~1 day
Last charge: ~11 hours ago
Consumed power: 977 mAh (21%)

Long version:
Hello, I have a similar problem. The Nextcloudapp has been running for about 1 day and has used 977 mAh. I'm not familiar with apps and don't know how much they should consume, but 977 mAh is 21% of the total consumption. I guess that the consumption resets when charging. Now it's evening and the last charge was about 11 hours ago. I think the consumption is too high.

Thanks for the great work :)

Edit:

If the app only syncs when you load, then only the wifi query should be active. This should not drain the battery so much... I will test this.

[Kathou99]

Hi I still got 20% of usage of my battery

[BLu85]

Hi All,

Unfortunately I am still experiencing this problem.
Nextcloud App: 3.23.1
Nextcloud server: 25.0.3 running Apache

I noticed that the app gets stuck with the blue wheel constantly spinning when trying to load files in a folder with a lot (~5 k) of files. This folder is also set for automatic updates when WiFi is on and phone pluged in.
When phone is unplugged Nextcloud picks the battery usage up to 40%.
Could the amount of files to load be one of the cause of this behaviour?

Thanks for the amazing job you guys do.
Luca

[Ra72xx]

For me there are two factors for the battery drain:

1. What constantly gives me massive battery drain is having automatic upload enabled. This I have disabled and use other software for this functionality.
2. Moreover, there is also a sync adapter for Nextcloud. When this is enabled, I experience battery drain very often (but not always) despite having restricted background actitivity for the app. I also see that this sync adapter runs very long if started manually and often does not finish.

My question is: What does the sync adapter do, and what functionality do I lose if I disable it? I use the Nextcloud app as an Android storage provider, can it happen that storage provider and cloud storage get out of sync? Or does it only mean that changes on the cloud are not synced immidiatedly to the phone but only on access?

[schiessle]

I'm facing the same issue.

Yesterday it used 7.1%, today even 10.6% of my battery usage. Both times it was the app with the most battery usage athough I didn't used the app at all. I also didn't took any pictures, so no instant upload happened.

As you can see here, it is all background usage:

I have the app connected to two Nextcloud servers (my personal one and my work instance). On the work instance a lot of stuff is happening during working ours. So I could imagine that the app checks constantly what changed because the etag of the root changes probably every few minutes.

[dromatriptan]

Suffering same issue. MOTOROLA Edge (2020) running LineageOS 20 and Next loud 3.24 from F-Droid repository. Battery usage hovers around 14% and 4000mah battery goes within a day and app is idle.

Oddly enough, I was not having this issue on Android 11 when I initially started considering next cloud as my Microsoft Office 365/OneDrive replacement. Now that I'm on, essentially, Android 13 the phone goes from a 3-day battery run time to > 1-day.

[OlJohnny]

adding another bump

Also having this issue with all photos uploaded and only set to on wifi + charging.

Why can't the loop checking if photos need to be uploaded just be run when the wifi + charging requirements are met? Then the whole app could just be idling and not require any amount of battery charge!

[storm1er]

using 3.25.0 RC1 on a fresh new phone, android 13, honor magic vs => 21 min background consumed ~35% battery ...

Previously (last days) I was using my oneplus 6 on the latest lineageOS, 3.25.0 also, no issue whatsoever :/

[trostn]

I have the same problem. Please don't forget about it.
The suggested option to have the app just syncing over night or in a configurable schedule would be really nice and could also be a solution to this problem.

[TheOneOgre]

Please add a scheduled upload or only at night or something along those lines. Even if it's not a permanent fix, it's a damn good workaround and as an option shouldn't hurt anything

[tperka-catalogicsoftware]

Still the same problem on 3.29.0 version running on Pixel 6. Enormous battery usage. Why can't we select auto-sync daily just like in case of contacts and calendar?

[etilamine]

I'm having the same problem. Huge battery drain and "Preparing auto-upload" notification present every few minutes. I'm on Lineage OS 20.

[lckarssen]

Same problem here with Nextcloud client being listed as the app that consumes most battery, as well as the frequent "Preparing auto-upload". This is on a Samsung S22, Nextcloud client v3.29.2, with 3 accounts to 3 different servers (all 29.x.x), but only one account has auto-upload enabled.

#12141 is probably related/duplicate. For me this has been a problem since roughly September 2023, when I created #11983.

[Mattie112]

Since a couple of weeks I have the same indeed. It has been good for a long time for me but now lots of "preparing auto-uploads" (even when no picture / screenshot was taken). Battery is worse that it was.

[joshtrichards]

Related: #13008

[d4f0]

I've been having this issue for the last month and in my case it seems to be related to a faulty charging port. Last week the charging port stopped working, i've replaced it and the high battery drain has dissapeared. The app is the same version and other than the charging port I can't think of any change.

[acardona]

I have the same problem: very excessive battery usage by the Nextcloud app. Battery used to last 2 to 3 days, now it lasts less than 1 day. The change was exactly started when I installed the Nextcloud app and set it up to auto-update my image and movie folders, as well as my contacts.

Phone: Android Samsung Galaxy A14.

Update: Today the Nextcloud app used 27.5% of the battery, even though I created no new documents or photos, so there was nothing to backup.

[joshtrichards]

@acardona Please make sure your situation isn't #13738 in v3.30.1 which is unrelated.

[acardona]

F-Droid says it's v3.30.0 from Sept 13, so unlikely.

[acardona]

In the 15 days or so that I've had NextCloud installed, it used up 8 GB of bandwidth when not on wifi. In other words it's uploading and reuploading everything at least daily, as if it wasn't able to detect that the files haven't changed, as if the file watcher thread was misreading the timestamps or checksums or whatever it is that is used to determine if a file has changed.

By the way issue #13738 is reported as done, and that the F-droid should be serving an updated version soon.

Indeed the symptoms described by ZetaTom here #13872 match pretty much what I am seeing, despite F-droid claiming my installed version is v3.30.0 and not v.3.30.1.