Android battery life

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supton

supton

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Ok, I've had this Moto G4 for a month now (?). It would go a couple of days on a charge initially, but now it seems to be not. Last few days I've been struggling to get a day out of it, it seems. I did a reboot a couple of days ago. Yesterday I plugged it in and had a full charge at 9am; I used it for at most an hour over the course of the day. It was dead when I got up this morning. That's pretty unacceptable.

I did turn off notifications, as I noticed that the screen comes on a bit too often when I move it (it will tell me the time); I also turned off Location, in hopes that it would turn off the gps (why can't it have a simple gps on/off?). What gives? Do I need to turn off cell service? I looked at the battery (under settings), below is the screenshot. All the other services add up to 13%; "Cell standby" is 41% so that only adds up to 54% of battery usage. Where's the rest?



I'm not sure I believe this, under "Cell standby". Pretty sure I have more service than 2% of the time.


Guess I will have to use airplane mode more often; I do have bad cell reception both at home and while in the office. Or perhaps I have a bad phone.
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Question: is there an app which will put the phone into airplane mode, and ping the tower say every 15 minutes to see if I have a message? It could revert to normal mode when I enable the screen, but otherwise, instead of being always connected, it could be in more of a standby mode. In case it's a problem of lousy service.
 
Well the battery will get used a lot searching for signal. So that in part does explain some of the poor battery life. No idea on an app
 
Battery's are great when new, but the more you use and charge the weaker they get until you need to replace it or the unit.
 
When I got my S4, I could go 2 days with light usage and not charge it.

Towards the end - it's currently out of commission - the battery life was about 3 hours. It also had a broken charging port.

The batteries are the weak points on today's power hungry phones.
 
I've had it for a month. I'd hope the battery isn't kaput yet. I don't use it for more than an hour a day (longer than that and I'm off to use something else, wrong tool).

WiFi doesn't look like it is using much, nor Bluetooth. Looks like I just need to put it onto airplane mode more aggressively.
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No idea on updates. It often updates things on its own. Maybe it got a bum update?
 
Yeah, that constant searching for signal would make a significant dent on battery life.

WiFi and BT use up some battery too, but I would guess less than the signal searching.

I also noticed that all my past Android phones would eat up the battery quicker if they were connected to 3G instead of 4G/LTE.

Sometimes OS updates can screw things up, too. When my 5X got upgraded to Android 7, my battery life went down. I used to get 3 days between charges with limited use before. Now it's barely 2 days. People have been complaining, but Google hasn't acknowledged or done anything about it so far.
 
Bad reception, BT, and gps drain phone batteries. Turning off BT, push notifications, and location can make a huge difference in battery life on my phone. Certain apps may also stay running after you close them. Did you notice your battery draining faster after you downloaded a certain app?

I just plug my phone in at night and have a car charger. My S7 Edge has an ultra power saving mode, but it basically turns into a B&W dumb phone on a touch screen.
 
Only app I downloaded lately was ES file manager. Maybe get rid of that? It might have been around the same time.

I'd turn off gps but I don't see any gps setting. On my old Android there was a dedicated button for that. This just has Location services it seems, or I haven't figured out how to make it use Location based solely on WiFi. Both of which I kinda like on, I got used to it knowing where I was. And it was working fine for 2-3 weeks...
 
I average 1.8%/hr with good signal.

Wifi, and bluetooth will add another .5%/hr easily.

your phone might have some app or bug not letting it go into doze mode.
install a wakelock detector.. or other battery app and let it go a couple days to see

I know for example the mcdonalds app is atrocious. I installed it one time to get a couple
BOGO breakfast sandwiches.

GPS was using at least 3%/hr by itself while doing nothing.
 
Originally Posted By: supton
Only app I downloaded lately was ES file manager. Maybe get rid of that?

Try it and see.

In my experience, ES doesn't have any noticeable impact on battery life if you don't use it. But recent versions of ES have become bloated and have a bunch of features/monitoring tools that can possibly run in the background, so you need to go into ES settings and disable them all.
 
Ah! you jogged my mind. Once I went into ES file manager, I was reminded that it seemed to be constantly "aware" of what was going on. I bet that is the problem. I uninstalled that, and will see if that fixes the problem.

If it does then I'll unload that from my Kindle also (although that seems to be doing just fine on battery, oddly enough).
 
I've been tinkering with my S3 for a couple years. Its stand by is better recently. Only goes down 30% during the day. Used to lose almost half doing nothing. Assume thats the new tower in the area.

Things that helped.. turning off background processes for apps when on data. The assumption is when i'm using wifi I'm plugged in. Make sure the google play store only upgrades apps when you are plugged in. turn off auto brightness, vibrations, location = power saving.

I don't recommend battery saving utilities. They draw more power than they save IMO. But there are a few apps you can try which "seemed" to work for me..

Install

https://play.google.com/store/apps/detai...bat.lifebattery

run, reboot and then install

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newagetools.batcalibra&hl=en

These are free so there are ads and requests for other tools. Just skip through.

Once you are done, reboot again and plug in. Don't unplug till you are 100%

Next day uninstall both of them if you like. I just re-installed and ran the procedure just to see if its a trick or not. Found a bunch of cells that needed to be "fixed"..

Then there's one tool I run every few days to a week. CCleaner. Its the only cleaner that doesn't try to run in the background. Clears the big cache for better performance.
 
You were without a signal 98% of the time? Means the phone was constantly scanning and maxing out its antenna power.. Really no point in keeping it on all the time. Or am I reading that backwards?
 
Use airplane mode when you don't have a good signal.

I work in an area with poor cell reception. The other employees and I quickly realized that if you don't turn on airplane mode your battery will die quickly.

Like the others said, your phone was searching for a signal 98% of the time.
 
Verizon.

I don't buy the 98% searching either. I could understand double digit but not 98%. Had it been say 50% I might accept that--yesterday was an odd day, not in my usual locations.
 
No, not plugging in overnight. For the first two-three weeks, I'd plug it in at work. It would be at say 50%. I'd plug it in for a few hours, and it'd go until the following day, again it'd be down to say 50%. Weekends, I'd plug it, under a similar pattern. Once a day for a few hours, when I didn't need the phone. Power user I am not.

Just found how to turn off the gps. I had it on high accuracy mode this whole time. Doah! A lot changed since Android 4.
 
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