Battery and traffic consumption issues
This article is about AdGuard for Android, a multifunctional ad blocker that protects your device at the system level. To see how it works, download the AdGuard app
On Android devices running OS 6 and earlier, built-in statistics often attributed high data and/or battery usage to AdGuard. This was because AdGuard counted all the traffic it filtered from various apps. As a result, AdGuard's share of total data and battery usage was overstated, while other apps were understated.
With Android 7, however, this scenario has improved. Now the data reflected in Android's built-in data usage statistics is very close to reality, although there are minor discrepancies in the battery usage data.
However, AdGuard users can always get a true picture of the situation on the Battery usage screen.
Own battery usage stats screen
You can access it by navigating to Statistics → Battery usage.
Inside you will find a chart that shows the AdGuard battery resource consumption within the last 24 hours, with an option to get more detailed hour-to-hour data by tapping on the chart. Besides that, there’s also a numeric breakdown of the relevant data and a short technical explanation.
How much battery resource does AdGuard really consume?
First, let us lay down a bit of theory and links with necessary data.
Android derives traffic consumption judging on so-called Power Profile, which is given by every manufacturer: https://source.android.com/devices/tech/power/values.html
Main part of Power Profile is a set of values in mAh which define battery consumption for every component of the device: https://source.android.com/devices/tech/power/values.html
For example, from the table above:
wifi.active= 31mA additional consumption in mAh caused by WiFi data exchange.
radio.active= 100-300mA additional consumption in mAh caused by data exchange over Mobile network.
cpu.active= 100-200mA additional consumption in mAh caused by CPU load.
AdGuard by itself almost doesn't consume any traffic, so for the sake of evaluating power consumption let's get rid of 'Mobile/Wi-Fi packets' and stick to 'CPU'.
Formula to calculate the consumption:
“CPU TIME (ms)” X “cpu.active” / (60 60 1000) = “POWER USE mAh”
Let's put real numbers into this formula.
Let's take CPU total from the second screenshot and convert into milliseconds: 506000
A coefficient cpu.active for 2GHz will be roughly equal to 225mAh
Final result:
506000 225 / (60 60 * 1000) = 31,625mAh
Conclusion
Real consumption is several times less than it is shown in Android statistics. Instead of 220mAh it should be somewhere around 31-40mAh. On the other hand, browser's consumption should be not 66mAh, but ~200mAh.