Waking up after a night of binge-watching Altered Carbon on Netflix and then finding out that your battery drained like crazy overnight might make you be more suspicious of apps that went rogue while you slept – we’ve all been here or at least for some, so what is really going on?
Some apps do usually leave processes running in the background but certain versions of the Netflix app for Android are to blame. But how did the app from the giant streaming service get the blame?
The guys at Mobile Enerlytics went down and dirty to find out. They plotted the power consumption of various versions of the Netflix app when idle against an increase in battery drain complaints from reviews left by users in the comment section of the app in the Google Play store since last May.
Here are some of the comments
What did they find?
It turns out that Netflix versions since 6.1 have been going into a background management loop of some kind eating up to 300mA while you slept. Find the in-depth details here.
So they reached out to Netflix with their findings and Netflix issued patches with their latest app(version 7.8.0) fixing the looping in the background issue so as not to consume any more battery life while idle.
If you have the latest Android version, good for you since they handle background processes more efficiently and you’ll never experience that battery drain anxiety when you wake up in the morning.
So if you’re planning to binge your favourite Tv show tonight or this weekend, make sure to update the Netflix app.
