PULSE // BATTERY

Find out what drained your battery overnight, and fix it in one tap. Works without root through Shizuku. With root, it does a lot more.

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Tested on a real rooted phone, not in an emulator

Every root feature in 1.1.0 was run on a physical device before it was accepted:

• Phone: Redmi Note 14 4G (tanzanite, MediaTek mt6789)
• System: HyperOS 3, Android 16 (SDK 36)
• Root: KernelSU, with the Sui module providing the privileged service as uid 0

Each feature landed as its own commit and was tested on that phone before the next one was written, so the history shows which commit was proven by which test. The screenshots below are from those sessions, not mock-ups.

One exception, stated on purpose: Keep enforcing after a reboot is implemented but has not been through a reboot test on hardware. It is marked as unverified inside the app and in docs/ROOT_MODE.md. Everything else in the table there is confirmed.

Why

Your phone loses 15% overnight and the system battery screen just says "Android System". PULSE asks Android directly which apps woke the device, ranks them, and lets you put the worst one to sleep. Every change is read back from the system and can be reverted in one tap.

The one rule

A change is only reported as applied when a read-back returns the value that was asked for. PULSE writes, then reads, then compares. If the system silently undoes something, the app says so instead of showing a green tick. Root widens what can be attempted; it never widens what may be claimed.

Screenshots

Features

Overnight drain report (the headline)

• Tap Start new period before bed. In the morning: apps ranked by alarm wakeups, with a per-hour rate.
• One-tap Restrict moves an offender to the Restricted standby bucket. One-tap Revert.
• Android keeps the counters itself, so PULSE does not run in the background. Detects reboots.

Diagnostics

• Live battery state: level, temperature, voltage, health, power source.
• Active wake locks, attributed to the real package (including *job* tags).
• Top alarms table from dumpsys alarm.

Standby & Doze

• See and change the standby bucket of every app, with raw bucket codes shown.
• Add or remove apps from the user Doze whitelist.
• Force deep Doze on demand to test whether an app survives it.

Wakelocks and background

• Block an app's wakelocks and its background work per app, and put them back with one tap.
• Needs Shizuku only, no root.

Vault (APK backup)

• Export base + split APKs of any app to Download/PulseVault. Survives uninstalling PULSE.
• Restore with one tap.

Console

• Run any shell command as the Shizuku user, with 12 read-only quick commands, cancel, copy and share.

With root

Charge protection and charge limit

• The three HyperOS charge modes, and a charge limit at any level you pick with a recharge floor.
• The limit is the one background component in the app: opt-in, permanent notification, stops itself.

Battery health

• Cycle count, full charge versus design capacity, voltage, current, temperature, manufacture date.

CPU time per app

• Read from the kernel uid statistics rather than from battery stats, so it is the real number.
• Platform accounts such as root and logd are named, and packages that share a uid are grouped.

Standby override for protected apps

• For an app the system keeps exempt, PULSE names why (your Doze whitelist, the ROM's own whitelist, or the framework), drops the removable entry and writes the bucket anyway.
• Verified by read-back, and a failed write puts the whitelist entry back.
• Tested: a third-party launcher held at never was moved to restricted and stayed there.
• Limit: some system packages have their bucket recomputed by the framework every few seconds (on the test phone, android.miui.home.launcher.res flips between exempted and active). No tool can hold a value the system rewrites that often. PULSE says the bucket is unstable and prints the system's own recorded reason instead of claiming success.

Full app data backup and restore

• Archives the whole private data directory plus external data and obb, and restores it.
• The app is stopped first, the archive is verified, ownership and SELinux labels are restored.

Requirements

• Android 8.0 or newer.
• Shizuku running, or the Sui module. Wireless debugging, ADB or root.
• Root is optional. Without it everything above except the With root section works.
• No internet permission, no account, no ads, no trackers.

Install

Download the APK from Releases. On first launch PULSE asks Shizuku for permission. If Shizuku says allowed but PULSE still asks, tap Restart app (some Shizuku builds apply a new grant only to a fresh process).

To get the root features, start Shizuku or Sui as root and pick the root option in its permission dialog. The home screen shows which provider answered and the uid it runs with, so you can see at a glance whether root features are available.

Release signing certificate SHA-256:

3f8c1e2df2deaf9d561a8fdce3c667ed0ceda972622f20d006a1b6098c2a2512

FAQ

Is Restrict safe? It uses the same standby-bucket API Android itself uses. Restricted apps still work when you open them; their background jobs and alarms just run rarely. Messaging apps may deliver notifications late, so do not restrict the ones you need instantly. Revert is one tap, or change the bucket anytime in Standby & Doze.

Why alarm wakeups and not mAh? Per-app mAh estimates are unreliable across vendors and Android versions. Wakeups are counted by the system, are exact, and are the usual cause of overnight drain.

Some apps say "Held by the system". Android marks core and some vendor apps as exempted. Without root their bucket cannot be changed and PULSE does not pretend otherwise. With root it will attempt the change, tell you what was holding the app, and verify the result. If the system takes the bucket straight back, you see that, with the reason the system recorded.

Does PULSE drain battery itself? No, with one disclosed exception: the automatic charge limit has to watch the battery level, so while it is on you will see a permanent notification. It stops itself when it has nothing left to do. Nothing else runs while the app is closed.

Can a data restore bring back my logins? Usually, but not secrets an app encrypts with an Android Keystore key. That key never leaves the phone's secure hardware and is deleted when you clear the app's data, so the encrypted file comes back unreadable. No root tool can change this. Export an authenticator app's own backup before testing a restore on it.

How it works

Feature	Command
Drain report	dumpsys alarm (Alarm Stats per-package totals)
Battery	dumpsys battery
Wake locks	dumpsys power
Standby bucket	am get-standby-bucket / am set-standby-bucket
Standby reason	dumpsys usagestats, current row only
Doze whitelist	dumpsys deviceidle whitelist +pkg / -pkg
Force Doze	dumpsys deviceidle force-idle / unforce
Wakelocks, background	cmd appops set <pkg> WAKE_LOCK|RUN_IN_BACKGROUND|RUN_ANY_IN_BACKGROUND
APK export	pm path then cp
APK restore	staged in /data/local/tmp, then pm install -r
Charge protection (root)	secure setting security_pc_secure_protect_mode_key
Charge gate and limit (root)	/sys/class/power_supply/battery/input_suspend
Battery health (root)	/sys/class/power_supply/*
CPU per app (root)	/proc/uid_cputime/show_uid_stat, names from id -nu
Data backup (root)	tar inside init's mount namespace, then chown and restorecon

All parsers are pure Kotlin, unit-tested against real device output. Package names are validated and shell-quoted before any command runs. Full detail, including the eight features that were deliberately not shipped and why, is in docs/ROOT_MODE.md.

Build

CI is the build system: every push builds, tests, lints and uploads app-debug. With signing secrets present it also builds a signed app-release. See docs/RELEASE.md.

Toolchain: AGP 8.13.1, Kotlin 2.2.21, Gradle 8.13, Compose BOM 2025.12.00, compile/target SDK 36, Shizuku API 13.1.5.

Support

PULSE is free, open source and has no ads or trackers, built in spare time. If it saved your battery, you can support the work with a small crypto donation (USDT on TRC20, or USDC / SOL on Solana). A star helps other people find it, and contributions and bug reports are welcome, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT, see LICENSE. Uses Shizuku-API (MIT), AndroidX, Jetpack Compose and Kotlin (Apache-2.0).