Changelog

Every release of Batbrief. Versions follow Semantic Versioning, and each one matches a git tag in the source repository.

0.0.1

First release. It reads a bug report and gives you a verdict; the screens that only draw data can wait for a later version.

What it works out

• How much of the drain happened while you were not using the phone. The opening screen is a single bar split in two, because that split decides which of two completely different problems you have: the screen-on half is a matter of habits, the screen-off half is a matter of settings — and almost everything recoverable is in the second.
• Whether the cause is permanent or scheduled, by comparing the idle drain during the day with the idle drain at night. Similar figures mean something is running around the clock. A much worse night means something is scheduled. A much worse day means the drain is triggered by using the phone. Those are three different investigations, and guessing wrong wastes an evening.
• Whether the phone slept, and if it did not, whether an app was holding it awake or the hardware was waking it up. This is the fork that decides whether restricting an app can possibly help — and it is why Batbrief will tell you, in as many words, that no app is to blame when none is.
• What was downloaded in the background, what scanned continuously, which app ran a storm of background jobs, whether deep sleep was ever reached, how long the modem spent looking for a network it could not find, and how much capacity your battery has left.

Each finding is a claim, the numbers behind it, and something to do — with a button that opens the system screen which does it.

What it reads

• A bug report zip, shared straight from the notification Android posts when one is ready. The archive is streamed rather than unpacked, so a 60 MB report does not need 60 MB of free space or a long wait.
• An already unzipped bug report.
• A plain adb shell dumpsys batterystats dump — which the usual desktop tool cannot read at all.

Honest about what it cannot say

The battery history lives in a fixed-size buffer that drops its oldest entries once full, and a truncated history looks exactly like a quiet night. Some phones do not report the coulomb counter at all. Some report a power model whose numbers do not add up to the charge actually lost. In each case Batbrief says so, on the first screen, above the findings — rather than presenting a confident conclusion built on a gap.

Privacy

Batbrief asks for no permissions at all, not even internet access, and contains no analytics of any kind. Your bug report is unpacked into the app’s private cache, analysed there, and deleted when you close it. See the Privacy Policy.

Interface

• Material You, light and dark, English and Italian.
• The definition of “night” is yours to set — the day-versus-night comparison is the app’s main diagnostic test, and 23:00–07:00 is not everybody’s night.

Compatibility

• Android 8.0 (API 26) and later.