Poco F1 battery drain issue due to Android Pie, Xiaomi exec says

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Longer battery life is certainly one of the most common desires among smartphone community. We started to cram every possible feature inside the phones to make them ‘smart’, and the battery life took the toll. The endless run after slimming down the gadgets is another factor, as the batteries now have very less space to occupy.

We have already seen engineering marvels to to fit larger capacity batteries inside the phone. The rapid growth of fast charging techs are on the other hand reduces the need of carrying a bulky phone or weird battery cases. heck, you can even have “A day’s power in 20 minutes“!

Kidding apart, carrying a massive battery or fast charging brick won’t help much if the software is buggy and responsible for draining the juice. Sometimes it is the buggy design of a particular app (*cough* Google Play Services *cough*), or the messy cellular radio, or the all round rough optimization of the OS itself.

The above discussion is just a prelude to a larger problem. We have talked about the January update (Stable channel) of Poco F1 earlier. Labeled as MIUI V10.2.2.0.PEJMIXM, the update brought support for 960 fps slo-mo video shooting & enhanced low-light mode. Unfortunately irregular battery consumption is also bundled (again) with update.

To be humble, Poco users are facing the battery drainage issue since days. Multiple excuses were made by officials, but the root causes are still unresolved.

Well, it looks like Alvin Tse (Head of Pocophone Global) has started to accuse Google behind the mediocre battery performance in Android 9 Pie. Essential did the same in past and Google’s own Pixel users are not behind.

Google has incorporated a number of under-the-hood changes inside Android Pie. The minimum LTS kernel version requirements are bumped to 4.4 and beyond. Kernels older than 3.18 is only allowed with Pie on older devices originally shipped with Oreo or Nougat.

Qualcomm is also trying to hard to bring faster Android updates on select SoCs. Together with Project Treble, perhaps it’s one of the biggest impactful changes we will observe in time. Android Pie may be the undesired victim of this vast transition era – way more features, way less polish and optimizations. ?

On the other hand, Google at last realized that dark mode can improve battery life on devices with OLED screens. We can only hope Android Q will resolve such battery issues, as system-wide dark mode may finally come with the next major Android update.

FYI, PiunikaWeb is also investigating on another showstopper bug regarding botched up WiFi after Android Pie update.

Are you happy with Android Pie on your Poco F1?

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