How to Fix Battery Draining Overnight / Deep Sleep Failure on the Retroid Pocket 6

Causes

The built-in joystick driver blocks kernel suspend — a documented RP6 bug (LineageOS issue #306) shows the device never reaches deep sleep because the built-in joystick is bound to serial0-0 and holds the suspend path open. Symptom: /sys/power/suspend_stats/success stays at 0, all CPU cores drop to minimum frequency but deep-sleep time is zero, and a screen-off night drains the battery hard. Unbinding the driver with echo serial0-0 > /sys/bus/serial/drivers/moorechip-joystick/unbind makes suspend succeed immediately — proof the joystick driver, not the battery, is the cause.
Wake locks from the Retroid Launcher and emulators — on stock Android 13, the preinstalled Retroid Launcher and background emulator processes can hold partial wake locks that keep the SoC awake with the screen off. Owners report 20-30% battery lost overnight after a short gaming session, which is far too much for a 6000mAh cell at idle and usually points at an app holding the device awake.
Screen-off doesn't mean sleep on the stock build — the RP6's stock firmware keeps Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 radios and background sync (Play Store, cloud saves, scrapers) active when the display is off. Without a working deep-sleep state, each of these services keeps the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 awake at minimum frequency instead of letting it enter suspend.
Aggressive background sync and scraping after setup — freshly set up RP6s run ES-DE scraping, ROM library scans, and Play Store updates in the background; all of these are heavy CPU/radio activity that keeps the device from idling down, and the drain is most noticeable in the first days after setup.
Early-firmware variance between units — launch-window RP6 units shipped with slightly different firmware behavior, and some owners see the overnight drain while others don't. Retroid has addressed sleep and battery quirks through OTA updates, so the exact drain you see depends partly on which firmware build your unit shipped with.

How to Fix

Confirm deep sleep is actually failing before changing anything — install DevCheck, open the CPU Times screen, turn the screen off for a few minutes, then check whether "Deep sleep" time is increasing. On a healthy RP6 the deep-sleep counter climbs steadily; if it stays at zero, you have the documented suspend bug and the fixes below apply.
Power the device fully off overnight instead of using sleep — the practical no-root fix: hold the power button and choose Power off when you're done playing. The RP6 boots to your launcher in seconds, so a full shutdown costs almost nothing and completely eliminates overnight drain while the suspend bug is unfixed on your firmware.
If you have root or a custom ROM, unbind the joystick driver to restore deep sleep — with ADB root (or on LineageOS and similar builds) run adb shell "echo serial0-0 > /sys/bus/serial/drivers/moorechip-joystick/unbind", then verify /sys/power/suspend_stats/success increments after a sleep cycle. Note this disables the physical joysticks until reboot — use it as a diagnostic and overnight workaround, then reboot to re-enable the sticks. On unrooted stock firmware this sysfs path is read-only, so skip to the app-level fixes.
Find and kill the wake locks — open Settings → Battery and review which apps consumed power with the screen off. Force-stop the Retroid Launcher if you use a third-party launcher like ES-DE (it's a known battery hog on Retroid devices), and close emulators fully instead of leaving them in recents before you put the device down.
Trim the radios and background sync before sleeping — swipe down and enable Airplane mode (or turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) before you walk away, and in Settings → Apps restrict background data for apps you don't need syncing. This removes the radio and sync activity that keeps the SoC awake.
Update to the latest OTA firmware — go to Settings → About → System update and install any available update. Retroid has shipped sleep and battery fixes in OTA builds, and several owners report the overnight drain shrinking or disappearing after updating.
If it still drains when fully powered off, the battery or charging circuit is at fault — a fully off device should lose only a few percent over a week. If you lose significant charge with the device powered off, or the drain is accompanied by the device getting warm while off, the battery may be defective — contact Retroid support through goretroid.com with your order number; launch-window units with defective cells have been replaced under warranty.