• Bugs Reported

  • [REPORTED] Battery problem: very high usage in the background.

Dear Bunq, we're over half a year later and the problem is only getting worse. Why the heck isnt this dealt with yet? Its a huge dissatisfier....

When are you going to stop telling us it is forwarded to 'your developers' and start making real changes in the code. Im starting to think you don't even have developers...

Id like to see a coherent answer from your dev team about this issue. The app is not an app, its a battery hogger, making my 1300 euro phone as worthless as a 10 year old iphone. Im packing my stuff and leave for KNAB if this isnt dealt with soon.

    6 days later

    Hi bunqers 👋

    After extensive investigation we’ve noticed that some Android devices, specifically Samsung devices drain the battery when you lock the phone while having the app open, and that this can’t be linked specifically to the app usage in the background. Indeed when locking the phone while the bunq app is still open it does register more background usage while if locking the app when the app is not open it doesn’t. Hence, locking the phone without keeping the bunq app open should solve this issue.

    Thank you for both your understanding and patience on the matter!

    For now I wish you a nice rest of the day 🌈

      7 days later

      @Nikoleta#220198 Good to see it's reproducable. Found myself having this issue again today. Are there any steps which stop the draining when this happens? By having the app open, do you mean in the foreground? Or does it also happen when it is in the background? Also is there an ETA on when this issue will be fixed? It's quite annoying when my battery drains before I'm able to charge it.

        @Nick-Indigo-Badger#220629 Hi there 👋

        By having the app open we mean if you leave it open and then lock your phone. But it should also help if you close the bunq app from the background or force quit it.

        We can't provide a time frame when this will be fixed, I am afraid, as it's a very complex bug and we have reasons to believe it's device related rather than bunq related. However, it's still being looked into and I'll let you know if there's any update on the matter. For the time being, please try the workaround 🙏

          12 days later

          @Deniz-Teal-Akita#217286
          Thank you for pointing me in the right direction and saving me hours of misery. I could see the bunq app using 100% CPU in the background in my adb shell. I revoked the permission to use my location and it's no longer a problem. I might be missing some features but for now I'll keep it like that.
          @Nikoleta#218000 This is an issue I'm having on a OnePlus phone with Android 11 and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I don't think the fix should be too hard to implement

            8 days later

            Same problem here. I'm using a motorola one hyper with android 10. Draining my phone since a couple of days...

              20 days later

              Yeah, I have been having this issue as well. Not consistently, just occasionally. Most days it's fine, then some days, in the evening I notice my battery is almost empty.

              • Location is set to always ask
              • Tap & pay is being used, directly with bunq app, not via Google pay.

              Force closing the app will fix it.

              And as people have mentioned, this has been going on for a while now.

                4 days later

                I've been having the same issue for months. What works is shutting the app down after I'm done using it, but one forgets these things and it's a huge battery drain. Surely this should be fixable?

                  Hi everyone 👋

                  Thank you for being so patient! This has been hard to tackle because when reproducing we come up with nothing in particular that can be the root cause, I am afraid. The developers are working on something that might fix the issue and we'll let you know once there's more information about it.

                  For the time being, what you can do is use the workaround provided before - lock your phone without keeping the bunq app open. In addition, if you're using Tap&Pay, you can also try switching to Google Pay for a few weeks to see if there's a difference. I hope this helps!

                  For now I wish you a nice rest of your day 🌈

                    a month later

                    @Stella-Red-Falcon#223636 Samsung S9 - same problem. 30% battery usage for 3 mins Bunq. I have to kill the app after every time I use it.

                      8 days later

                      I have the problem with a a71 and with a pixel 3xl as well.

                        10 days later

                        Hi bunqers 👋

                        Thank you for being so patient with us! Please note that we did some changes and small optimisations which should help at least a bit.

                        Something else we also found while testing is that Samsung phones will register the app (not only the bunq app but any) which was open during the locking of the phone (if left open) as being active in the background while they are actually doing nothing. Battery stats are also sometimes incorrect so the phone's batter would be draining significantly if you leave any app open in the background. This is why we suggest just closing the app before locking your phone to prevent this from happening.

                        As for any background processes which we use while "being active in the background" we tested this with a proxy and got nothing. And non of the possible background processes like travel assistant did actually do anything in that time. Still the test device says it is active and using battery. This also explains why for all of you who tried to limit the backgrounds app activity this didn't work just because there is none.

                        Overall, if you close the app(not kill it) before locking your phones this should help bring the consumption down. Given the fact that basically every app does this while we made the tests we consider that the bunq app actually does nothing different than all the other apps. Hence, I'll lock the discussion for now.

                        I hope that the workaround and the optimisations we made solve the issue for you 🤗

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