Severe battery drain using app split tunneling on Android

[derekcentrico]

What is the issue?

Reference support ticket TSS-46822

Substantial battery drain on Android 14 when using app split tunneling. Battery usage is high without it, 9% or so, but if even 1 single app is added to split tunneling the battery usage is 49%. 49% occurred with less than 10 minutes of screen-on time.

Was testing beta via Play Store beta program. Downgraded to public release available in Play Store. Issue remains.

Steps to reproduce

Use split tunneling (at least on Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro)

Are there any recent changes that introduced the issue?

Unknown

OS

Android

OS version

14

Tailscale version

1.74.1

Other software

No response

Bug report

Available on ticket TSS-46822, don't have it any longer.

[agottardo]

When you enable app-based split tunneling, all we do is tell Android that traffic related to a given package identifier should not be handled by Tailscale and should instead be left untouched. It is extremely odd that driving traffic away from Tailscale would increase the battery consumption attributed to Tailscale. What makes you say that split tunneling is responsible for the increase battery usage? Do you have any logs from adb logcat indicating repeated errors related to the feature?

[derekcentrico]

I provided whatever logging and data the bug report feature of the app provides. Is adb logcat not part of it? I can schedule some time to toy with it if this is needed.