I have recently updated from Android 12 to 13 on my Google Pixel 5. I’m running the unmodified Android version directly from Google.
I was using Blokada 5 from F-Droid (the version is from April, iirc), but I have now updated to the most recent APK (22.3.7) from the blokada website.
I have noticed that my battery drains faster since I’m on Android 13, and the OS is complaining that Blokada is constantly running in the background and that it might be the reason for the battery drain.
Now, obviously blokada must run in the background in order to do its filtering, but I was wondering if there is some sort of incompatibility with power management features that have been introduced with Android 13 that cause a higher than usual battery drain? Have the developers looked into that? Does aynone else notice this behavior?
Everything worked great on Android 12 and I would love to keep using Blokada, but ideally without it eating my battery
We haven’t had any complaints about battery drain on Android 12, I am suspecting that it has something to do with Android 13, you should probably contact Google about this.
If you are looking for another solution that is more battery friendly, we recommend using Blokada 6.
Blokada 5 runs filtering locally on the phone but on the other hand Blokada 6 connects your device to the cloud server, read more about it here: What is Blokada Cloud?
Unfortunately I really want to use local filtering on my phone to be able to whitelist certian apps, which only works with Blokada 5 as far as I know. But I’ll give Blokada 6 a try and see how it goes.
However, I still think that you should investigate what has changed from Android 12 to 13, cause in the long run more and more users will end up with the newer versions and might run into similar problems as I am. I also think it makes much more sense if you as developer talk to google about the power usage of your app instead of outsourcing this to the user (me).
I was still of the information that Android 13 was not an official release yet and so this would definitely need to be reported to Google as it is possibly a bug. Any pre release versions may be subject to this unfortunately and often are. Even the first few official builds usually needs some fixes as users report issues. It’s good to tell both parties of something affected but in this case it is more likely to be the beta software having someone changed or even having something wrong I have to say and I often find that true of my own devices. It’s why I don’t really install those anymore on things I need to be stable and keep going as they are currently exactly the same. Things do break and I test in other environments where I can accept that and handle it.
Android 13 was officially released on Monday, August 15. So far I haven’t seen any battery drain issues with Blokada and Android 13 on my Pixel 6 Pro. I’m still running 5.21 from F-Droid though.
