Heavy Battery Usage – Android 14

  • Unknown's avatar
    stephenmowen · Member ·

    I left a review and was asked to post here to add context and get support. My battery seems to be draining VERY quickly, whether I’m using bluetooth or the device speaker (low volume).

  • staff-joey8 · Staff ·

    Hi there, @stephenmowen 👋

    Thanks for sharing this with us! I can confirm that we are tracking this issue here. You can keep an eye on the report there.

    In addition to what was shared, our team would appreicate if you could share the following with us:

    1. How much overall battery are you losing over what period of time? This helps us tell how much battery Pocket Casts is using when it is the top battery-consuming app on your device.
    2. Are you listening to a lot of episodes when your battery is getting drained, or are you seeing increased battery usage even when you aren’t listening to any episodes?
    3. Are you streaming over wifi, streaming over a mobile network, or playing downloaded episodes?
    4. Are you listening to audio or are watching video podcasts?
  • Unknown's avatar
    stephenmowen · Member ·

    Hi, @staff-joey8 – Sorry for my delayed reply.

    1. Overall, battery usage was 40%, in roughly 3 hours of play time. Minimal other phone usage in that time (email pings, some basic social browsing, no video streaming or heavy game playing).
    2. I saw the battery usage while I was listening / streaming, both via bluetooth (earbud) and Android Auto (wired).
    3. Always listening via download, not streamed.
    4. Always audio, not video.

    In the 2-ish weeks since this post, the battery usage seems to have dropped. Today, for example, it’s been ~6 hours since I plugged in my phone and I’m only at 75% battery (25% usage); PocketCasts is the bulk of that (39%), but that’s pretty reasonable for several hours of playback.

    I’m not sure if anything on your end has changed, or it’s Android 14 that got better? The other curious note, the battery drain seemed worse when my work profile was active (even though my PocketCasts app is installed on the personal profile). If work was active, the phone got warmer, battery drained more, and PC was displayed as the leading battery drainer.

  • staff-joey8 · Staff ·

    Thanks for sharing this additional information with us, @stephenmowen!

    Our team has been looking into this and recommended that you try changing the battery usage settings for Pocket Casts to ‘Optimized’ instead of ‘Unrestricted’. Can you give that a try and let us know if it helps?

    Note: We are seeing similar behaviour with other podcast apps on Pixel devices too.

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