B231 High Idle Battery Usage on Android 14

[mackid1993 (David)]

I’ve been dealing with incredibly high background battery drain stemming from ARC since the last two EA builds. I’m running Android 14 on a Pixel 6 Pro. Anyone else seeing this?

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

Not sure if related to this in production

iPhone Overheating and Battery Draining - What's Causing It?

Hey all, Whenever I stream music from my phone through ARC to a Bluetooth device my phone gets noticeably hotter and my battery drains pretty damn fast. Does anyone know what’s causing this? (I haven’t tried wired) Of note, I’ve opted to download all songs to my phone, and they’re in original quality, most often 16/44. Are any of you noticing these 2 issues when you opt to download files at lower-quality? Thanks so much! Corey Edit: since posting this 10 minutes ago, my battery has drained…

And this Support thread

iPhone getting hot playing downloaded music [Improvements Released Starting with ARC 242+]

I recently downloaded my entire library (30k tracks) compressed to my phone. The phone (and my ROCK) both got warm during the encoding / downloading process - which didn’t worry me. But what is odd is that the phone now gets very hot while playing. I had a case today where my phone stopped charging in the car while playing ARC via Bluetooth because it got too hot. I had no DSP active at the time. I saw some posts from mid last year - but is this still a problem for other people?

[mackid1993 (David)]

Maybe. I’m also just streaming. I don’t really download anything. If I don’t have cell service which is rare I have SiriusXM to fall back to.

[crowlem]

Can confirm Arc destroys battery life.

Whats worse about this is that i wasnt even listening to music. Prior to these messages, an hour earlier, i had been listening to music then stopped.

In the background Arc just started eating RAM and destorying battery life.

[mackid1993 (David)]

Same experience. Glad it’s not just me.

[mackid1993 (David)]

This is my thread in early access where other users have chimed in with the same issue: B231 High Idle Battery Usage on Android 14

This is a screenshot taken from that thread:

It happens literally every time I use ARC. If I listen to music, my phone will start to get hot. When I stop and ARC goes into the background not playing anything my phone battery will drain excessively and Android’s battery statistics point to ARC as the culprit.

Due to this I have stopped using ARC as I can’t afford for my phone to die on me, I’ve been forced to use the Qobuz app. You can see in my thread that 2 other users have indicated the same issue, with one of those users also sharing screenshots similar to mine. It’s hard to provide a timestamp as I’ve stopped using ARC.

If you want to switch on diagnostics now I’d be happy to open the app and let it run overnight while I’m home and near a charger.

[mackid1993 (David)]

@connor I have ARC playing right now starting at 10:00 AM EST in a bit I will stop playback. I will leave it running in the background while I’m at work until 5 PM EST today 2/22.

[mackid1993 (David)]

I just stopped playback now 10:45 am. I forgot to charge my phone last night and had it charging on a USB - PD charger while ARC was playing. Interestingly it hardly charged while playback was occuring presumably because the power usage was so high.

[connor]

Hi @mackid1993,

Since you’re on EarlyAccess, let’s take your investigation here so that our QA team addresses it. They’re actively testing EarlyAccess, so this removes the middleman. I’m going to merge your detailed posts from this morning into this thread for @ivan and @oleh to see.

@Chikolad, since you are on the Production build of Roon and not the test build, let’s move your own comments to the investigation for the Production build in the Support section. Please post here from now on: ARC/Android: Hot Phone During Downloading/Playback of Downloaded Tracks [Investigating]

Thanks again! We’ll get to the bottom of this shortly.

[mackid1993 (David)]

Thanks @connor. Just so you know since there is no EA build right now the play store did update my phone to stable.

[mackid1993 (David)]

I just force stopped ARC at 4:08 PM EST. You can see here the impact it had on battery just sitting idle.

[mackid1993 (David)]

Any update on this investigation?

[mackid1993 (David)]

Based on my quick testing this seems resolved in B237. Memory usage seems under control and my battery isn’t draining with ARC idle.

@connor @ivan @oleh Can one of you kindly confirm if this has been actually addressed or if I just haven’t tested enough yet and this is an ongoing issue?

[mackid1993 (David)]

Ah better yet after not using it for a few hours ARC silently closed in the background, ie Android battery optimization was allowed to work and close the app. I opened ARC at 2 PM with my battery in the 80s, played music for a moment and then let it go idle. Now at 10:30 PM I’m at 72% battery. Previously I’d be at about 40% on prior builds.

[ivan]

Hi, @mackid1993, sorry for the late response here. I am not sure that there were any fixes in this area.

A question about the time you could reproduce the battery drain, by any chance, did you have Smart Downloads feature enabled back then or background downloads running?

Thanks!

–
Ivan

[mackid1993 (David)]

@ivan Yeah, it seemed better but I have a feeling it isn’t and I just got lucky that one day because I had significant drain yesterday! No, I just stream over WiFi or cellular. I’ve never used smart downloads or any downloads ever for that matter.

The drain tends to happen when ARC is completely idle, in the background and my phone screen is off. Ideally at that point the app would close itself per Android battery optimization. Every time ARC is open it seems to account for 20-30% of the battery drain on my Pixel 6 Pro.

[mackid1993 (David)]

@ivan Does B243 have any fixes for this?

[ivan]

No, unfortunately, this release was only targeted at playlist-related issues.

Thanks!

–
Ivan

[mackid1993 (David)]

@ivan Do you know when these issues will be looked into?