My p8 (running GOS) battery life has been heavily impacted while using Nym. When only using my Owner profile its no biggie, however on days when i use my google profile, for Maps and such, my battery gets annihilated. On those days my phone essentially just needs to stay plugged in whenever possible. Ive usually used ProtonVPN and that is what im comparing it to. I use Fast Mode (always-on). I know its to be expected since Nym has more going on, however i was curious
If other users have experienced this and is there anything to do to alleviate such rapid drainage?
Are there any plans developer-side that would potentially improve it?
I make this post just to voice it. Its impacted me enough to where i switch to Proton on those days. Still loving Nym though! It’s been very reliable on startups and i cant think of any issues ive had.
Edit: also just so people are aware, with GrapheneOS, profiles have their own vpn connections; so in my case, i have the nymVPN app in both of the profiles mentioned, each with their own connection. This will of course drain my battery way more than the standard android user. However, ive just noticed it to be more-so with Nym than when i was using protonvpn.
Settings > Battery > Battery usage > View by systems
If it’s “Mobile network” that’s eating up most of your battery, this is a known issue with AOSP (not just GrapheneOS) due to some firmware for the modem (I believe).
There are a fair few people having this problem (though most of it is on the Pixel 9’s) on the GrapheneOS forum.
You can try forcing 4G Only for your cellular connection, as 5G seems to be very power hungry.
If that doesn’t fix it, having a low signal can also cause excess battery drain (it will still show up under “Mobile network”).
Another one you might see is “System (AUDIO)“ at a high battery %. There currently isn’t anything you can try for this as far as I’m aware.
To the best of my knowledge, these are AOSP bugs, not specifically GrapheneOS bugs.
I don’t think that this is an issue solely with the NymVPN app itself, but if the NymVPN app has a really inefficient web socket push for example, that might also be an issue.
An example I like to give for this is with Signal.
Signal has a really inefficient web socket push (it’s a well known battery hog) but Molly’s websocket implementation is far superior and much more efficient than the standard Signal app.
The “Battery usage” page will very likely show you exactly what is causing your battery drain.
I recommend you have a look around in there.