I've reported an idle battery drain issue with ARC on Android 14. It's been discussed here: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/b231-high-idle-battery-usage-on-android-14/264654/55 and here: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/arc-b264-high-idle-battery-usage-on-android-14/271817/17
Today I discovered disabling the nearby devices permission in Android seems to help so far with the excessive drain. I have a Pixel Watch and Pixel Buds and I'm wondering if those devices combined with that permission are causing excessive background activity when ARC is not in use. This would explain why this issue has been hard to pin down and why it doesn't affect every user.
Describe your network setup
Gigabit Fiber -> Asus RT-AX-88U Pro (manual port forward) -> ethernet to Unraid Server running Roon under Docker
When you experience battery drain while ARC is idle, is the app a) still foregrounded, even if the phone is locked and b) resting on either the Queue or Now Playing pages?
Development has a ticket in for a high-GPU draw bug when the app sits idle on those pages. This is possibly a variable in your reports.
To test, on the most recent build: can you reproduce any battery drain if you a) background ARC and b) rest on an Album or Browser page?
The app is always backgrounded. It’s inconsistent. I almost never use the queue page but it’s possible it happens when on the now playing page. I will test that now.
@connor I think you are on to something with the now playing page. It really gets bad when I’m at my desk at work listening on my Pixel Buds Pro and then take my buds out and leave ARC in the background and the song I was listening to paused. It also happens when I had music playing in the car and then exit my car. In both of those scenarios I’d either be on the now playing page or the home page with the player minimized.
Since it’s so inconsistent I bet it’s the now playing page.
I’m going to charge my phone to 100 percent and then leave ARC on a browse page and observe the usage until I go to bed tonight.
So @connor I did some testing tonight. I’ve found after resting on browse page “Albums” and backgrounding ARC eventually ARC will close on it’s own. However when resting on the now playing page ARC doesn’t seem to close and it does appear to use a bit more battery. I’m on B288 so I’m not sure if any changes were made as my phone only lost 5% in total. Of that 5% ARC was responsible for 15%, but it does seem like it’s very possible that GPU usage bug may be the cause of the battery drain I’ve been dealing with since February.
Do you happen to know if they have a timeline of when a fix for this might be out? For now I will try to leave ARC on a different screen. Do you know if the home page in ARC is unaffected?
Did a lot more testing today. Avoiding the now playing screen seems to have fixed my battery drain. It would be good to know if the home screen is unaffected by this high-GPU draw bug so I can just make a habit of backing out of the player until this is patched.
Thanks so much for helping to narrow this down @connor . This bug has been driving me nuts for almost a year!
I had a huge spike in battery usage today while ARC was not on the now playing or queue screen. When I went to reopen ARC it was in a state where it was simply a black screen and I had to kill the app to access it. I’m guessing this is related to that GPU bug as the entire app stopped rendering. If someone from Roon support can look into this that would be helpful. The drain was today 8/16/2024 from 9 am to about 10:30 am.
Thanks for your consistent reports! Our Arc team are investigating this issue more thoroughly, and we’ll likely have a solution in a near future release.
I’d like to mention though, in case it may have slipped through the tracks (and only partially relates to Arc, likely not your issue specifically):
We can’t officially support Roon running in a Docker setting. I’m sure your aware of this, but in the future, if you’re looking for help from our support team, you’ll need to set up a temporary instance of Roon that falls within the scope of support.
@benjamin My issue has nothing to do with running Roon under Docker. The issue is specific to ARC and a power management issue on Android. This issue has been reported by others who are likely not using Docker.
I only need support when there is an actual bug, I’m an IT professional I don’t need support with Roon day to day, just when there is a reproducible issue. I reported this battery drain issue in February and have been dealing with it for months.
In all honesty I have a lot of issues with ARC that are all regressions and if I didn’t pay $699 for lifetime I wouldn’t be so invested in getting these issues resolved.
If needed I could move my Roon Server to a Windows install to temporarily rule out an issue which I have done in the past. I reported this transcoding issue in April: Issue with playback stopping Corrupt file error when transcoding [Ticket In] - #46 by mackid1993 which has been confirmed as a bug and hasn’t been fixed. When testing this I installed Roon on Windows to confirm it wasn’t an issue with the Docker install.
A few updates that might illuminate the current status of this issue:
Developers have dedicated an internal channel specifically to Android battery drain/thermal severity reports, for both iOS and Android. No doubt your experience is frustrating, but fortunately, your reports have fueled some activity behind the scenes. Our Product team can now reliably reproduce your specific symptoms (excessive battery drain and thermal severity with Pixel + Buds, to be specific). Several tickets are moving through the pipeline.
We have a fix in the EarlyAccess build for a bug related to backgrounding the app on the Now Playing screen. This bug has likely exacerbated a condition already present that, as mentioned, we’re investigating now.
I hope that helps ease some of the dismay. I’ll provide updates as available on our progress. If you migrate your RoonServer/phone to the EarlyAccess branch, you will possibly experience some improvement for now.
