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Comment by PMan74 | Hacker News Reader

> Battery life has been much better

I'm guessing this is a gut feeling as opposed to any empirical data? Either way I'm curious as to why this would be the case. Unless I misunderstand the kernel is identical between LineageOS & whatever stock OS was on the device. And it's the kernel that presumably impacts most on battery consumption.

I installed LineageOS on an old Nexus 5. The stock OS on the Nexus is already pretty clean so I can't say I noticed a massive difference (although I didn't spend much time on it)

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I actually tested this a little on a Nexus 5X a while back. With a clean install of a LineageOS build manually patched to include microG (before I knew about this fork), I unplugged it from the charger at 100% and left it for 8 hours without using it, at which point the battery read 98%. The same device with a clean install of stock Android from Google read 87% after 8 hours of standby after a full charge. In both cases it had good LTE signal and had no modifications from a clean install other than signing into a Google account.

It is a bit entertaining to think of Google's surveillance quantified via electricity - we can measure their intrusiveness in mAh.

To me, a fun thing to realize was that putting my phone in airplane mode wasn't enough to stop the phone from discharging a lot during the night.

Also, installing SSL Packet Capture showed me that some of my (not even considered shady) apps made a lot of things in the background, eg sending stats or other data to their mothership.

What did do the thing for me was to go into battery settings and set the device in the lowest mode, that severely restricts background work. This, plus airplane, and the device basically doesn't drop anything over a night.

I miss some option (non-root since I want to be able to use bank apps) to tell my phone to never allow anything from apps A, B, and C unless it is active and/or in foreground.

> I miss some option (non-root since I want to be able to use bank apps) to tell my phone to never allow anything from apps A, B, and C unless it is active and/or in foreground.

Sorry if I sound like a broken record but to me run at boot, run in background, storage (outside your own not-shared-with-other-third-party-apps sandbox), and network should all be explicitly opt-in.

Google services tend to make use of wakelocks a lot I believe (I think the nlp [network location provider] service in particular), so replacing these could lead to better battery life if the replacements use less wakelocks etc.

EDIT: Realised parent comment was about regular LineageOS, not the microG fork, never mind

I'm also in the same boat as SmellyGeekBoy, and can attest the same. With the Oneplus rom I saw maybe 1.5 days of battery, with Lineage I often see 2-3 days.

This is completely anecdotal however, and it's likely that the reduced battery is down to having installed different/fewer apps on Lineage.

Google requests location all the time, but it's hidden under the Android OS and Android System categories.

I find it infuriating when it's obvious some app is draining my phone's battery fast, but I can't see which, because Google is allowing developers to hide that activity within those two generic categories.

The Google Play Services collect a ton of data. And for that to happen, your phone has to send this data to Google, which drains battery.

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