Pixel 4a sucks the battery empty on my patched Android 13

[mischa12345]

Hi, on my Pixel 4a with patched Android 13 the current version leads to low battery in some hours. TotalCommander stays in background, not in task list. Battery usage is set to optimized. I have to kill the app or restart the phone after using to solve it.
best regards
Michael

[ghisler(Author)]

Unfortunately this seems to happen only on Pixel devices. TC does nothing in background unless you use the media player, or continue an operation in background. Therefore I have no idea what could be causing this, sorry.

[Leroy_08]

Hmmm. What a weird problem (only affecting Pixel).

I registered here just for this very problem on my Pixel 5 (grapheneOS).

When I looked at the app info it shwed the TC service and some media module running. This falls in line with what Mr. Ghisler said. I force stopped the media modulebut left the main TC service running - it continued to gobble up battery. I did use the media module for an audio or video file yesterday and that's when battery consumption began - before that no problems with TC using excessive battery.

Is there a way to disable the media module/context selection? I've been using TC since it's early days as "Windows Commander" and even still have the floppy disk I recieved when I registered. I was a little slow to use the Andoid app, but after getting used to it I wish to stick with it (without battery issues). I assume that it will work normally as long as I don't select the 'Total Commander / TotalCmd (Queue)" when a media file is selected?

[ghisler(Author)]

You have to explicitly close the media player via "X" button, either in the player itself, or in the notification. Just swiping the notification away does NOT tell the player to stop - in fact, it doesn't notify the player AT ALL, so it has no change to stop its service.

So if the player is gone, start playing something - anything - and then close the player via "X" button.

[mcc]

Well, this also happens on my Galaxy S22 in exactly the same way. It did stop at some time (for reasons unknown to me) and came back some months ago (also for no appearant reason).

I also have to kill the Total commander Task manually to get rid of the battery drain (which is significant)

The topic has been discussed here to some length with no real fix up to date: viewtopic.php?t=78359

As far as I can tell it has nothing to do with the media player because I never use it and still have the battery drain... Furthermore only swiping the app away in the task switcher will not kill it completely. There is still shown a Total commander task which I have to stop by pressing the switch to really shut it down.

[ghisler(Author)]

The only active background task is for extracting icons and thumbnails from files. It's possible that it hangs on your system at a specific (maybe faulty) image file. You can try disabling thumbnails in the Total Commander settings.

[mcc]

Even if I disable thumbnails Total commander will stay active in an background process even if I manually dismiss it from the task list... This can be seen in the video here... https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/g3a87ucbkvybcvqfs0uka/total-Commander-1.mp4?rlkey=sl78m6dr25jzn36knrynp6cwa&dl=0

[ghisler(Author)]

This makes no sense - TC only starts a service in two cases:
1. For the media player playback
2. When starting a lengthy copy/pack/unpack operation and then switching to a different app

In both cases it shows a notification so the user knows the app is still active. Have you allowed notifications for Total Commander? Otherwise you won't see them at all.

Btw, this message about apps being active in the background doesn't exist on my S10e (Android 12) and also not on the Android 13 and 14 emulators, so I can't check whether this is happening here too...

[ghisler(Author)]

I found the notification about apps in the background in the emulator: It shows up only when you swipe down TWICE from the top.

The message that Total Commander is active in the background only comes up when TC shows a foreground notification.
However, this notification isn't shown when notifications are DISABLED for this app.

To check whether notifications are disabled, please do the following:
1. Start Total Commander
2. Open the list of running tasks, e.g. by dragging the bar at the bottom of the screen slowly upwards (not too far or it will return to the desktop)
3. Click on the Total Commander icon above the app
4. Click on "i" icon or "App info"
5. Click on "Notifications"
6. If they are disabled, enable them (at least temporarily, you can disable them again later)
7. Now check in the notification area at the top by dragging down from the top of the device whether there are any Total Commander notifications. You may need to pull down twice if you swiped away the player notification.