Heavy Battery Drain Problem

Mobile Apps Home Assistant Companion for Android
1

The Home Assistant companion app is by far the most energy demanding app on my phone and I use the phone all day long with all sorts of apps.

HA is only used to check some data every now and then and stays in the background 99.9% of the day.

So how is this possible?

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2

Troubleshooting | Home Assistant Companion Docs.

3

If you have enabled many sensors, then it will send updates to HA, which keeps the network alive.
Also the GPS sensor is quite battery intensive.

4

I have not activated that many sensors. Only the following 12 to be precise:

  • Battery SoC
  • Battery State
  • Charging Device Type
  • Charging State
  • Ringtone Mode
  • Geocoded Location
  • WiFi BSSID
  • WiFi Status
  • Background Location
  • Location Zone
  • Next Alarm
  • Time Zone

The sensor update frequency is set to every 15 minutes if not charging.

These are all nothing special. There are many other apps/services that are allowed to use GPS in background in regular intervals to check my location. None of them uses even 2% as much energy as the HA companion app.

5

Yeah, I already checked this.

  • High Accuracy Mode is disabled completely.
  • Single Accurate Location sensor is disabled completely.
  • Persistent Connection is set to only on home network. Battery drain happens everywhere.
  • Bluetooth sensors including transmitter are disabled completely.
  • Update frequency is set to fast if charging. Battery drain also happen when not charging.
  • I have no notification sensors enabled.

So none of these is the reason for my battery drain problem.

6

Do you have a video stream somewhere on your HA dashboard?
HA sometimes keep the connection open to the camera, even though it is not in focus.

7

best way to tell if you are impacted by the stream is to check your data usage…high battery drain and high data usage usually point to that

https://github.com/home-assistant/android/issues/979