I too am seeing greatly increased battery usage, and I also have a Pixel (6a) running Android 16.
I was previously running Catfriend1’s Syncthing-fork (GitHub build) v1.29.6.4 and had no noticeable battery usage. I recently upgraded to 2.0.10.1 and it now routinely uses ~10% of the overall battery every 4 hours. When the phone is otherwise idle, it shows as 80-90% of the battery usage! (note, that’s relative to the battery used in each two-hour period)
I am likely going to downgrade using my previous backup but I’m willing to provide logs or try experiments if it will help.
Yesterday, I started syncing ~65 GB of data to my computer from my phone, and my phone got really warm, and its battery drained rather fast, and that was fine. It made sense, I think. I can confirm it was Syncthing, the “Device care” section of Settings confirmed that.
But at some point Syncthing started using a lot of RAM, making my phone unusable until either I stopped Syncthing, or it would crash after it got to 3GB
And I can’t tell if the app just ran into a particularly large file I’m not aware of or if there is actually a bug
Aren’t there any logs of what Syncthing is actually doing when consuming so much battery? It’s gonna be impossible to tackle without more data. It also seems related to Pixel phones + Android 16? Or are there other devices affected too?
Galaxy S21 FE (Android 15), no issues. Syncthing 2.0.9 (The Google Play release, though, by nel0x).
We already know that the issue isn’t connected to the wrapper but propably lies within syncthing itself. So what phones and Android versions do you actually use, guys? Maybe there is a connection, since we already have three Pixel phones lined up …
Just putting it out there, there are many complaints about battery-drainage and battery-protection functionality mot working related to Android 16 or Google Pixel.
But yeah, as said before, more info would be helpful.
I use a Fairphone 4 with /e/ os based on Android 14. The only “non standard” I’ve configured is to disable NAT traversal, global search and forwarding since I only need to access local devices.
OK for now there are six Pixel phones and one Samsung phone reporting battery drain. No drain on Samsung (as well), Xiaomi, Fairphone … So maybe not (?) just Pixel specific?
My linked reddit post was covering a Pixel as well though.
Thanks, I did not know that. I had also noticed a general degradation regarding battery life on my Pixel but nothing that serious (as seen on your reddit post). All I know is when I stop syncthing-fork or disconnect wifi (which does the same for me), the biggest contributor to battery drain is gone.
Can you please give us instructions on what you need and how to get it? Sadly I am not a developer …
Can’t really say what to look for exactly. But if Synching is draining as much energy as some here indicate, then it must do something - I’d say. So the logs may indicate what’s going on. I’m no expert when it comes to the mobile version, but usually with some traces enabled, the logs are quite useful.
It may be worth checking. In an idle state there usually isn’t too much happening, at least not continuesly.
