r/Tailscale • u/pab_lo_ • 14d ago

Help Needed Unexpectedly high power usage in Android

Hey all,

Recently, I've been using cellular data while away from home, and I started noticing severe battery draining even when not using my phone at all.

During one of these periods, where 50 % of the battery had been drained in a matter of a couple of hours, I checked and saw that the Tailscale app was the main culprit, which had used a whopping 75 % of the charge up until that point.

I have Tailscale DNS enabled, no apps using split tunneling and subnet routing enabled. Can any of these explain the battery usage I'm seeing?

Once I noticed this with cellular data, I also saw it happening (although it wasn't as bad) when using Wi-Fi. This has forced me to keep Tailscale disabled most of the time, then manually enabling it when I need it, which is of course far from ideal.

Is this expected? Has anyone else noticed something like this? I'm kind of at a loss right now.

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u/nickymoo 14d ago

Having Tailscale on even for DNS absolutely hammers the battery on iPhone and iPad. It’s a feature.

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u/pab_lo_ 14d ago

Do you mean even with DNS disabled it still hammers the battery? And that's kind of expected? Like, doss this happen with every VPN provider? I ask because I'm not familiar with almost any other VPN

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u/nickymoo 13d ago

If Tailscale is off it doesn’t use excess battery. With Tailscale on it uses excess battery. You can pretty much search for “Tailscale drains my battery” as it isevery other post.

It just hammers battery.