[Q}Lollipop Yotaphone 2 battery life - any fixes? - YotaPhone

Hi all,
Having just bought a Yotaphone 2, latest model 801 processor and with Lollipop installed, I was impressed with it... lovely screen, sharp response, great display on the back ....until I realised that battery life on the EPD or indeed doing nothing was (and is) terrible.
This somewhat negates the point of having the EPD. Because whether you use the EPD or not, as others have found, the processor seems to be spending 100% of the time doing something like trying to connect to Google headquarters to report my unethical swearwords as I look at the battery level heading south.
To try and make sure the phone was using the least power, I went through all the running apps and services and terminated as many as I could, turned off things like Yotafit tracking, turned off the service that sends all your contact details to the Kremlin, and so on... then, I turned on the Yotaenergy mode and despite that, we are at less than 24 hours with virtually no phone usage at all. Fully 50% of all the energy according to the battery stats is being used by Android System and Android OS processes when the system is in standby. And the historic battery screenshot shows that the processor is active 100% of the time., even though the phone has not been touched. (sorry, not attached, I'll post at some point, but its not very interesting)
So, does anyone have any clues about how this can be fixed? I have seen screenshots where people have shown that their processors are not active the whole time, and I imagine they have Lollipop? I have heard Lollipop has got some kind of bug which means that data connections are live the whole time, not sure if this is related.
(This might explain the sudden appearance of half price devices on eBay around six months after launch in the UK.)
Many thanks in advance!

YotaDevices has acknowledged the problems on Lollipop battery life, which is the reason they won't be shipping devices coming to USA preinstalled with Lollipop, but with KitKat. Now that I've played around with the EPD and created some widgets/applications for it, I can spot many places where things can go wrong in maintaining battery life and still keep things working.
Personally I've been lucky with the battery life on all versions of Android. When I updated to the last version of Lollipop (firmware 1.44), the phone did show poor battery life for hours after the installation was finished, before calming down to the promised 5 days stand by. Are you on the very last firmware? (Settings - about phone - build number)
As a last resort if your device won't settle down, I guess you could roll back to Kitkat, which had a very good battery life for pretty much everyone. You can install it with Yota's flasher tool: ftp://fw.ydevices.com/YotaPhone2/YotaPhoneFlasher/yotaphone2_flasher.exe
Just carefully select your own region and then the last version of KitKat (4.4.3) they offer. As you are rolling back from one major version to another, I would suggest flashing pretty much everything. You will lose your data.
Yota has said that they are working on bringing Lollipop 5.1 or 5.2 to Yotaphone 2. Let's hope that that works better.

Thanks that was very useful. The question is, will Yota do another build ... or build another device? I'm hoping the Y2 has a bit of life left in it yet and they do launch in the US - it can only help the development community!
I reset back to factory/Lollipop last night as it was eating battery so fast I could not believe it, and I am on the latest build 1.44EU (and was before). Since then.. it doesn't seem to be misbehaving so much, but it does seem to insist that the WIFI is on (when it is switched 'off' in the settings) by 'on' I mean the battery usage recorder... I wil take your advice and 'take it slow' for now, but may flash back to Kitkat if necessary. It is a bit tedious having to reinstall all your apps by hand but this seems to be the only way to ensure it is relatively clean.
The screengrabs below show the phone doing nothing at all in Yotaenergy mode - per first post.

ridgemagnet said:
Thanks that was very useful. The question is, will Yota do another build ... or build another device? I'm hoping the Y2 has a bit of life left in it yet and they do launch in the US - it can only help the development community!
I reset back to factory/Lollipop last night as it was eating battery so fast I could not believe it, and I am on the latest build 1.44EU (and was before). Since then.. it doesn't seem to be misbehaving so much, but it does seem to insist that the WIFI is on (when it is switched 'off' in the settings) by 'on' I mean the battery usage recorder... I wil take your advice and 'take it slow' for now, but may flash back to Kitkat if necessary. It is a bit tedious having to reinstall all your apps by hand but this seems to be the only way to ensure it is relatively clean.
The screengrabs below show the phone doing nothing at all in Yotaenergy mode - per first post.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am quite confident that they will release updated Lollipop sooner or later. They don't have the resources to piss off all their customers just yet.
Your Wifi still does some scans on its own for Google's location service, even if it's not enabled. You can disable this feature in the advanced wifi settings. But that is not the cause of your battery problem. Basically your device is awake all the time, meaning something is holding a wake lock. And by something I mean one of Yota's EPD compoments, which are counted as part of "Android OS" and "Android System" - your biggest battery hogs. It could be one of the EPD widgets that is misbehaving, or it could be some specific combination of them, or just something out of your control.
You could try removing ALL the widgets from the rear screen from Yotahub, then restart the device, and then let it run for an hour with the screen off. Then check the detailed battery log if the device went to sleep or if it was awake. If it went to sleep, you can try adding widgets back one at a time, and then check again if the device sleeps. Basically all the widgets which update periodically hold a wake lock momentarily (time, battery, calendar, weather etc). Of course if the problem lies on Yota's EPD framework, then this wont help at all.

Jeopardy said:
I am quite confident that they will release updated Lollipop sooner or later. They don't have the resources to piss off all their customers just yet.
Your Wifi still does some scans on its own for Google's location service, even if it's not enabled. You can disable this feature in the advanced wifi settings. But that is not the cause of your battery problem. Basically your device is awake all the time, meaning something is holding a wake lock. And by something I mean one of Yota's EPD compoments, which are counted as part of "Android OS" and "Android System" - your biggest battery hogs. It could be one of the EPD widgets that is misbehaving, or it could be some specific combination of them, or just something out of your control.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Agreed, I suspect the YotaFit app going bonkers despite my efforts to kill it.... or the Yotagram service, the thing is, looking at the Yota specific apps, you don't really need them, as you can flip the screen with the Yotamirror, and then use any Android app. Sure it would be nice to have notifications on the EPD, but my main focus for this phone is use in bright daylight, and long battery life, not to actually look at the thing 24x7 so I can respond to emails every 30 seconds.
At this point though I'm just trying to determine how bad the underlying hardware is. The GPS on this phone seems to a bit flaky, as does the basic reception of mobile signal. (And I'm not using a metal bumper.) So, I'm happy to flash back to KitKat 4.4.3 to try and give it the best chance..
So, any clues/links about the Yota flash tool? I've put the phone into USB debug mode, installed the flash tool on my windows 7 desktop, and installed ADB/Fastboot as well, but at this point I'm having a bit of an android driver problem, and ADB can't see the phone so that probably explains why the Flashtool says 'waiting for device' when I fire it up. I will go digging to fix that, but I assume that the Flashtool will do all the stuff like putting the phone into bootloader mode, unlock etc...

ridgemagnet said:
Agreed, I suspect the YotaFit app going bonkers despite my efforts to kill it.... or the Yotagram service, the thing is, looking at the Yota specific apps, you don't really need them, as you can flip the screen with the Yotamirror, and then use any Android app. Sure it would be nice to have notifications on the EPD, but my main focus for this phone is use in bright daylight, and long battery life, not to actually look at the thing 24x7 so I can respond to emails every 30 seconds.
At this point though I'm just trying to determine how bad the underlying hardware is. The GPS on this phone seems to a bit flaky, as does the basic reception of mobile signal. (And I'm not using a metal bumper.) So, I'm happy to flash back to KitKat 4.4.3 to try and give it the best chance..
So, any clues/links about the Yota flash tool? I've put the phone into USB debug mode, installed the flash tool on my windows 7 desktop, and installed ADB/Fastboot as well, but at this point I'm having a bit of an android driver problem, and ADB can't see the phone so that probably explains why the Flashtool says 'waiting for device' when I fire it up. I will go digging to fix that, but I assume that the Flashtool will do all the stuff like putting the phone into bootloader mode, unlock etc...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The widgets I'm running at the moment without any problems are Time, Mini Calendar, weather, battery, and communications (the small widget which shows phone calls, notifications and sms). And of course my own widget.
The best way to make sure there are no useless services running is to root the device and uninstall them completely, but that's another story.
For the flashtool to detect the device, you need to boot it into download mode manually. The easiest way is to turn off your device and plug the usb in while holding volume down -button. The screen will show "download" or something in very small white text. After that the flashtool should find the device. You probably don't have to flash the user partition (it asks for it separately), i.e. the simulated sdcard section which holds all your photos, documents and music.
Edit. And when you have kitkat installed, the first thing you might want to do is to disable automatic system updates. Otherwise it will nag you about the Lollipop update all the time.

I've been facing similar issues and am considering a downgrade when I have the time. I'm really disappointed in yota and won't be buying their next device.
I have found this thread useful, you may too.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/general/guide-extreme-battery-life-t3095884

thanks gents, oddly, the advice to let the phone 'calm down' seems to be working. I decided not to revert to KitKat (yet), as every day I use the phone the battery life seems to improve. Yesterday it was down to 40%, today 60% after about a days use. I'm thinking a week of running in will give it time to stabilize. I would love to root the phone but I want to use the Good app, and that doesn't run on rooted phones... (shame but I guess that's the flipside of working for a big corporate for you!)

ridgemagnet said:
thanks gents, oddly, the advice to let the phone 'calm down' seems to be working. I decided not to revert to KitKat (yet), as every day I use the phone the battery life seems to improve. Yesterday it was down to 40%, today 60% after about a days use. I'm thinking a week of running in will give it time to stabilize. I would love to root the phone but I want to use the Good app, and that doesn't run on rooted phones... (shame but I guess that's the flipside of working for a big corporate for you!)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try putting the battery widget on your epd. If it shows 5 days remaining when you are above 85% and you don't use the phone, then the device works as advertised.
That Good app sounds like a real killjoy. There seems to exist some Xposed modules to disable the root check, but they seemed to be rather finicky to setup and very easy to mess up.

I was suffering from terrible battery life after the lollipop upgrade and the EPD battery widget was never showing much above 1d anymore. After much research and tinkering, it has now improved and I am seeing greater than 3d again. I think the culprits were maybe google fit tracking which I have now turned off and I also de-installed and re-installed the google play services updates which is a tip I saw in an android forum. I also over the last two days have received several yota widget updates which may have also helped. At least for now I am seeing a comfortable day's use again!

I experienced poor battery life out of blue again. I went through all the settings, cleared dalvik-cache and cache partition, tried disabling everything, but nothing helped. It only showed <1 day battery life at 100%.
But then I went to mess around in the developer settings, and when I set the animation scales from 1x to 0.25x and enabled "Force GPU rendering", the battery life returned instantly to 5 days.
Just thought I'd add this to the list of things to test out if someone's experiencing poor battery life. The forced GPU rendering might have some unexpected effects on some software rendering based games.

dont know if this will help but just seen some of the new features of android m "marshmallow" one of which is doze and there is a separate app available on play store for this. i have installed and it has helped battery life !!!

I was going through terrible battery life after Lollipop as well. Suffered, tinkered, tried various things. Eventually I just said screw it, backed everything up and factory reset it from recovery. Since then it seems like it's almost back to it's old self. Obviously having root and using some kernel control apps, greenify and some other things helps it but It will happily do at least a couple of days with little-normal usage. Still don't think it's as good as KitKat but it's not too far off. The EPD really does help spread battery out too.

I did the same thing but a 3 weeks on, the battery is as shocking as ever.
Today, on battery since 0730, now @ 1115 51% and 3hrs left!??
No obvious apps causing battery drain, just google services!

Rarelyamson said:
I did the same thing but a 3 weeks on, the battery is as shocking as ever.
Today, on battery since 0730, now @ 1115 51% and 3hrs left!??
No obvious apps causing battery drain, just google services!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have had the phone nearly a week, and these are similar figures I experience. What's the point of the epd if my battery dies by lunch!
Sent from my YD201 using Tapatalk

I think it is something with Android 5.0 that is causing the drain issues. I can go anywhere from half a day to a week with good batteyr life and then it will randomly start draining again. Some background activity seems to hold a permanent wakelock and will not let go of it. I am unable to pinpoint what app is creating the wakelock with better battery stats or wakelock detector since there isn't access to kernel wakelocks in either of the apps for our phone. A restart always fixes things though, so I have a tasker script now that lets me know when idle battery drain exceeds a threshold for too long so I know to do a restart, it's not elegant, but my battery life is exponentially better and gives me enough battery life to make it through the day without a recharge and leave the eink screen on all night as a tv remote.

I got a new phone
sportsfan986 said:
I think it is something with Android 5.0 that is causing the drain issues. I can go anywhere from half a day to a week with good batteyr life and then it will randomly start draining again. Some background activity seems to hold a permanent wakelock and will not let go of it. I am unable to pinpoint what app is creating the wakelock with better battery stats or wakelock detector since there isn't access to kernel wakelocks in either of the apps for our phone. A restart always fixes things though, so I have a tasker script now that lets me know when idle battery drain exceeds a threshold for too long so I know to do a restart, it's not elegant, but my battery life is exponentially better and gives me enough battery life to make it through the day without a recharge and leave the eink screen on all night as a tv remote.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In the end, I got a new phone after my Yotaphone decided to brick itself. Its a Zopo Speed 7, Octacore, dual SIM, nice screen, and does 4G very well in my part of the world. It is also around $200 at time of writing. Its a Chinese phone typical of the genre, Zopo seem to be moderately responsive to bugs compared with Yota... This Zopa phone is running 5.1 Android and I can tell you that Lollipop is not the problem...
That's after charging the phone and leaving it overnight, with the battery saver mode on... not too shabby. Of course it won't actually last 28 days, but this phone is nothing special and it is capable of running without all those services running that the Yota has.
The Yota spent its entire time when I had it trying to contact Moscow with that dodgy 'dictionary app'. What (honestly) is the point of the e-ink display if it doesn't save power...

If you are experiencing "always awake" and wifi always on despite your settings saying otherwise it may be worth going into your advanced wifi settings and changing "wifi frequency band" from "auto" to "2.4 GHz only. I remember reading this tip somewhere else for an Android 5.0 phone that was having battery issues similar to this. I made this change about 24 hours ago and have noticed a dramatic difference in battery drain when the screen is off. When I look at my battery stats I am no longer seeing a solid bar for both wifi and awake. Worth trying.
For what it's worth, I have had fairly light use today, some checking of emails and facebook, 40 mins or so of music via bluetooth (with screen off). Total screen on time of 35 mins. The phone has been off charge since 06:30 this morning. It is now 17:00 and is showing battery of 71% with an estimated 2d and 8h left. Better battery stats show deep sleep of 71% whereas previously it had shown awake at 100%. Far better than I had before.

stapo101 said:
If you are experiencing "always awake" and wifi always on despite your settings saying otherwise it may be worth going into your advanced wifi settings and changing "wifi frequency band" from "auto" to "2.4 GHz only. I remember reading this tip somewhere else for an Android 5.0 phone that was having battery issues similar to this. I made this change about 24 hours ago and have noticed a dramatic difference in battery drain when the screen is off. When I look at my battery stats I am no longer seeing a solid bar for both wifi and awake. Worth trying.
For what it's worth, I have had fairly light use today, some checking of emails and facebook, 40 mins or so of music via bluetooth (with screen off). Total screen on time of 35 mins. The phone has been off charge since 06:30 this morning. It is now 17:00 and is showing battery of 71% with an estimated 2d and 8h left. Better battery stats show deep sleep of 71% whereas previously it had shown awake at 100%. Far better than I had before.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Have you tried using the setting so Wifi is only on while screen is on? (Unless on charge...)

I think I found the issue, at least with my phone.
I was syncing with exchange, and there is a nasty bug with android 5.0 and exchange sync. The sync is taking forever and doesn´t sync everything. Calendar and contacts missing.
Then I removed the ActiveSync connection on my phone and set up the app Nine to sync instead.
After that I got much better battery. This may help for others as well. The phone is just hammering the exchange server all the time and this takes up a lot of power.

Related

[Q] Another battery thread but I am desperate

Hey guys and please dont crucify me. I know there's a ton of other battery issue threads on this forum and on many others but I cant find the right one. I have looked up each and every one of them, about mediaserver draining the battery about the android system and so on. I have done everything each thread said to, downloaded greenify and hibernated most active apps, disabled and froze certain bloatware with titanium backup pro and so many other things. And I think that the battery would be supposed to perform at its best right now. I am not a very heavy user, I just use my phone for music, calls, a little gaming and the occasional facebook/messenger/browser session with either 4G or WiFi. I have everything everyone ever said turned off. Things like auto backup of Google+ and all location services and auto sync. Screen is constantly at 65% brightness. To further prove my point, at this point in this post which took me like 3 minutes to write, my battery has lost 3 percent. I can leave the phone unplugged all night at 100% and when I wake up it will be at 95% but the moment I pick it up and start playing some music or some games the battery goes down really fast. I can even compare it to the battery of my old Xperia S after a year and a half use which was like 7 hours altogether. Battery stats say that mediaserver takes up 20ish% battery and Android system goes over 40%. I really don't know what to do. Do you have any suggestions?
Thanks in advance, George.
you should look at the time it depletes when screen on, if its below 5 hours from 100% downward then its not good. I have noticed the battery still charges past 100%. So leave it an hour after it reaches 100%. I would also recommend using the charger that came with phone. No usb charging for these tests. Dont use phone while charging either.
Also freezing\debloating can be adverse, at least thats my experience on battery life. So I recommend going back to stock full clean with factory resets.
No recovering of apps or app data for these tests. No contamination so to speak.
Also lg roms allow you to switch off services via taskmanager settings, in settings app you can disable what you dont want to use. No need for debloating\freezing etc.
Switch off location settings, gps and bluetooth for this test. Search for carrier iq on lg g2 forum and how to disable it via settings. Switch of cloud storage(dropbox/box etc) and lg backup stuff. Only google accounts, wifi and mobile networks.
Now for the screen on time test, just use browsing apps. No games or music\movies.
Your screen on time should be 6 hours approximately. From 100 to 0. It can be 5-6 hours. If its below 5 then its not good. this is with good network coverage btw.
thats what I would do
send from the jungle
Have you tried better battery stats, wake lock detector, or even gsam battery monitor. Maybe you have Google location services on?
Sent from my VS980 4G using Tapatalk
comk4ver said:
Have you tried better battery stats, wake lock detector, or even gsam battery monitor. Maybe you have Google location services on?
Sent from my VS980 4G using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes I have tried all of the above. Only thing that sticks out is something called 1013 which keeps running and waking my phone but I think it's something about the sound. Next is Android System with many wakelocks and as I said with 30+ % battery consumption. Everything location-wise is off. Actually everything is off. Every setting. Things go to hell when I open 4G or WiFi. Also I have the international model so I don't think there's carrier IQ in my device, or maybe I didn't find it in an app suggested by someone here for that purpose. System Tweaks I think it was.
Could you post a screen shot?
Sent from my VS980 4G using Tapatalk
I've had android 4x do this on multiple devices, multiple roms for no apparent reason. Wipe it and start over. Wipe everything. Especially directories with any form of music, sound files, videos... ( Use LG Flash Tool and go back to stock 4.2 for example will do just that )
So the OTA came over to my country and now it seems like BBS and WLD are broken. Can't really do anything to show you the more complex battery stats and can't really say that the battery has improved. Reducing the brightness did have some effect but I am not really fond of having it at such low values. Anything else I can do to minimize the Android System battery consumption? Its bigger than what the screen is using, even when it was at 70% brightness.
Sad to say my first LG G2 just got replaced today & am now running into this problem with the 2nd phone. Its literally night and day battery life performance between both phones.
First phone had 0 issues and by now I'd still have battery % in the 90s. New phone is sitting @ 63% after 3 hours of use (setting up phone, few reboots here there....just factory resetted for the 2nd time to try and clear this etc)
Culprits are:
Google Services
Android Core Apps
Media Server
System UI
Both phones are: 4.2.2
build: JDQ39B
Software: D80110c
brightness (which never was an issue)= 45%
O.P,
has your situation improved or worsened since you've encountered this problem? I'm thinking about sending my replacement back for another replacement
tiguy99 said:
Sad to say my first LG G2 just got replaced today & am now running into this problem with the 2nd phone. Its literally night and day battery life performance between both phones.
First phone had 0 issues and by now I'd still have battery % in the 90s. New phone is sitting @ 63% after 3 hours of use (setting up phone, few reboots here there....just factory resetted for the 2nd time to try and clear this etc)
Culprits are:
Google Services
Android Core Apps
Media Server
System UI
Both phones are: 4.2.2
build: JDQ39B
Software: D80110c
brightness (which never was an issue)= 45%
O.P,
has your situation improved or worsened since you've encountered this problem? I'm thinking about sending my replacement back for another replacement
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I can now say that the battery life of my phone has improved. But sadlyf the problem was probably some corrupt mp3 files that I moved directly from my old device which forced the mediaserver service to run constantly and thus the android system. :/ I still can say that I think it drains a bit fast when I use it for browsing, Facebook, games and stuff but at least when I check the battery consumption, the only things stated there that make a difference are the screen at ~30-35% and the game which I was playing or for example Chrome. It finally feels like that whatever I use drains the battery and not something else in the background but I don't have that good of an impression for the 3000mAh "beast" battery of the G2. Awesome phone though.
giorgos123 said:
I can now say that the battery life of my phone has improved. But sadlyf the problem was probably some corrupt mp3 files that I moved directly from my old device which forced the mediaserver service to run constantly and thus the android system. :/ I still can say that I think it drains a bit fast when I use it for browsing, Facebook, games and stuff but at least when I check the battery consumption, the only things stated there that make a difference are the screen at ~30-35% and the game which I was playing or for example Chrome. It finally feels like that whatever I use drains the battery and not something else in the background but I don't have that good of an impression for the 3000mAh "beast" battery of the G2. Awesome phone though.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I ended up returning my replacement phone and am back on my original G2 until I can get a proper replacement. I can tell you, the G2 does have an awesome battery life if you get a good phone out the box.
The differences between my first G2 and the 2nd one tmobile sent me are night and day. Get a replacement phone while you still have time.
Should have my new one next week. Just hope it's exactly like my first one.
Ex....been using it all day..I mean heavy usage...and in still @ 75%..and the phone is cool to the touch
The replacement g2 would [email protected] 36-37% by now and running hot
giorgos123 said:
Yes I have tried all of the above. Only thing that sticks out is something called 1013 which keeps running and waking my phone but I think it's something about the sound. Next is Android System with many wakelocks and as I said with 30+ % battery consumption. Everything location-wise is off. Actually everything is off. Every setting. Things go to hell when I open 4G or WiFi. Also I have the international model so I don't think there's carrier IQ in my device, or maybe I didn't find it in an app suggested by someone here for that purpose. System Tweaks I think it was.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're on 4.2.2, not 4.4.2 when you have the 1013, is that correct?
Try rebooting when the volume is on, rather than rebooting in quiet/vibrate mode.
Sfkn2 said:
You're on 4.2.2, not 4.4.2 when you have the 1013, is that correct?
Try rebooting when the volume is on, rather than rebooting in quiet/vibrate mode.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The OTA came to my country some days ago. Still the battery feels kind of small. Is it normal to lose 1% every ~1-2 minutes on 4G browsing? With nothing else on. No gps no G+ backup no anything.

[Q] Unrooted Note 3 - Battery Drain, Most Tips didn't work.

Hi Guys,
Firstly, I know there are several threads with different tips and suggestions but most of them didn't work for me.
Recently (since more than a week) , I have noticed strange drain in battery and getting hot pretty quickly. It has kitkat and I didn't get time to use it properly in the beginning. After reading different threads and forums here's what I did:
- Let it drain completely, shut off, took out battery for a couple of hrs and then charged without switching on. x2
- Rebooted after charging
- Uninstalled some apps I thought might be problematic
- Factory Reset (such a pain!)
- When attached to Kies, it prompted for Firmware update N9005XXUENC2 followed by another factory reset and hard reset.
- Cleared cache by going into recovery mode.
- Rebooting after charging
But seems like none of it made much difference, my routine use
- couple of hours on wifi
- no heavy games, only temple run, subway surf etc.
- no streaming
- no lengthy calls, not a lot of messaging
- 1, 2 hrs of music
- Syncing off, gps off, blue tooth off, Wifi mostly off, power saving on, brightness on auto, no 3g/4g data, almost no photos and video capturing, sensors, motions off except smart stay
I don't want to root the phone because of my busy schedule, with some difficulty I was able install WLD on it which resets after Rebooting. Point is, I am not a heavy user and this being a "beast" isn't quite unleashing the beasty-battery-life. I do get more than a day but that is when it's in deep sleep for 20hrs or more. I took some screenshots after reseting, updating firmware. It's past 3 battery cycles now, I will attach the latest one's to not clutter it up. I like this phone, but this battery is just not good enough. So, please helpful answers that don't require rooting.
Thank you for reading and Good day!
Is the battery drain consistant or does it happen at certain times (at home, at work, etc.)? If you are in an area where the signal changes frequently that will drain the battery because the radio is using power to maintain a connection. With wifi scanning for google services even when turned off setting make sure it is off if you dont need it. How do you charge the phone? If possible always use the charger that came with the phone, charging from a usb port from a computer is not as strong and can affect the memory of the battery and do not wait till almost dead to charge. It works best to recharge when between 35% and 45%. Look at your background services and see if anything out of the ordinary is running. And it could be possible the battery is defective and you might want to have it tested. I use my Note3 lightly and get 24 to 25 hours over two to three days (turning off at bedtime). This may not help any but this is what I have learned from others with similar situations. Good luck!
MPDnnrd said:
Is the battery drain consistant or does it happen at certain times (at home, at work, etc.)? If you are in an area where the signal changes frequently that will drain the battery because the radio is using power to maintain a connection. With wifi scanning for google services even when turned off setting make sure it is off if you dont need it. How do you charge the phone? If possible always use the charger that came with the phone, charging from a usb port from a computer is not as strong and can affect the memory of the battery and do not wait till almost dead to charge. It works best to recharge when between 35% and 45%. Look at your background services and see if anything out of the ordinary is running. And it could be possible the battery is defective and you might want to have it tested. I use my Note3 lightly and get 24 to 25 hours over two to three days (turning off at bedtime). This may not help any but this is what I have learned from others with similar situations. Good luck!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hey MPDnnrd,
Thank you for your response.
It is sort of consistent, did you see the screen is just at 18% and the Android system at 30%? I think this is where the core problem lies - just don't know what and how to fix it.
- Signal Strength: Pretty good, hasn't been a problem
- I normally keep the wifi-scanning off and Now I turned off the location services to see the impact but then I think what's the point of premium device if you have to switch off everything.
- I prefer to use the factory-charger over usb-charging and I read it on several threads to let it completely die and then recharge, guess that didn't help.
- Background services - I don't think so, I kill all the apps as soon as I stop using them, use Greenify to hibernate other, switched off all auto-updates and notifications. Even on Playstore, I switched off the auto-updates and notifications.
- Defective Battery: Now this one, I haven't tested yet not sure how to - the phone's just 2 months old so shouldn't it be good enough?
I know they are not very helpful, but still thank you very much. :good:
uqureshi said:
Hey MPDnnrd,
Thank you for your response.
It is sort of consistent, did you see the screen is just at 18% and the Android system at 30%? I think this is where the core problem lies - just don't know what and how to fix it.
- Signal Strength: Pretty good, hasn't been a problem
- I normally keep the wifi-scanning off and Now I turned off the location services to see the impact but then I think what's the point of premium device if you have to switch off everything.
- I prefer to use the factory-charger over usb-charging and I read it on several threads to let it completely die and then recharge, guess that didn't help.
- Background services - I don't think so, I kill all the apps as soon as I stop using them, use Greenify to hibernate other, switched off all auto-updates and notifications. Even on Playstore, I switched off the auto-updates and notifications.
- Defective Battery: Now this one, I haven't tested yet not sure how to - the phone's just 2 months old so shouldn't it be good enough?
I know they are not very helpful, but still thank you very much. :good:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm sorry to have to say this but I think you got a pretty normal battery drain by looking on your screens. You played almost one hour subway surf(which drains the battery pretty quick) and I guess the other hours where internet (also known to drain battery) or calls/messages. On a not rooted device with stock kernel that seems like normal battery usage to me!!!
However if you like to check these maybe u get a couple of percentages(not that much though I guess):
-Power saving mode in notification drawer makes your cpu clock go down (not sure u got it on not rooted device sry)
-check turn of pen detection in s pen settings
-put the brightness on auto or put it down manually
-if you can change the theme color in apps do so(make it black)
-check the svoice settings so it doesn't listen to your voice
-if you don't care how your phone looks buy a zerolemon battery(I think it makes your phone too big but that's preference)
-don't use a bright background keep it dark colors and no live wallpaper as well
Maybe that helps a little.
I don't see any drain either. Almost 6 hours screen on during 24 hours is excellent, additional 1.5 hour awake time for other services. Excellent battery life.
Settings - General - Applications - disable unnecessary apps
In Google Settings, opt-out interest-based ads and disable location access.
Thank you for your reponses guys - thing is it actually had much better battery life. What I don't understand is the fact that Screen % used to be on top and android os and system was below it but now it has been on top.
I have tweaked quite a few things already that 4aces suggested and the S-voice thing seems new, I'll look at it. Today it didn't even last a full day whereas I know people who even after heavy usage get easily more than a day - mine one, I don't use it this much. The Zerolemon thing is beast but then the phone is a freakin block lol so heavy and big, good travel etc. where you can't charge your phone and has a rugged case.
But there's a change that I saw today, Android System is now below the screen so I am not sure what made it do that but may the next time I charge it gets better and so on. I'll keep you guys posted after charging it today, I'll monitor what I do.
Blondasisko - I wouldn't really call it excellent, but it's sort of getting better than it was in the first 2 cycles. But how do I reduce additional awake time for other services? Moreover, you might've noticed I got till 1% to get this much time like really stretched it to get there.
Someguyfromhell - Already done, locations were off starting today.
Can anyone else comment on their daily routine of usage and the battery drainage ratio?
If I get 12 hours and 4hrs screen time I'm happy. I don't even play any games. Have a lot of accounts syncing lot of Internet and a bit on the calls, gps. I get on average 14 -16 hours
I have brightness on high. If you put it on auto it makes a big difference.
Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk
alom5 said:
If I get 12 hours and 4hrs screen time I'm happy. I don't even play any games. Have a lot of accounts syncing lot of Internet and a bit on the calls, gps. I get on average 14 -16 hours
I have brightness on high. If you put it on auto it makes a big difference.
Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I guess I should feel lucky, I have ZERO syncing, auto brightness, no live wallpapers or gimmicky stuff on, no gps, hardly 10mins or so on phone calls and prolly 30-60mins on messaging a day.
@all others - and the Android System is back on top - what could be the possible reasons for it?
I think its because of such minimal use that the system goes on top. The system still had to operate so when you have hardly used the phone then the system will go on top. Though with that usage you've stated you should get nearer 2 days really
Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk
alom5 said:
I think its because of such minimal use that the system goes on top. The system still had to operate so when you have hardly used the phone then the system will go on top. Though with that usage you've stated you should get nearer 2 days really
Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're right probably, this is what I'd like to know as to what is running in the background that drains more battery? Exactly, at-least 1.5 days is what I should get with this usage. May be I should buy a new battery and see how it works.

Phone Idle under Settings/Battery

What runs under "Phone Idle" on the V20. It's been the largest battery consumer for the last week of use that I've noticed. My wife's V20 is the same and I had my brother check his and his wife's V20.
I'm only asking because I'm not see great battery life like other have been reporting. I don't have live wallpaper, have only two widgets on the home screen. GPS is set to battery save, screen is set to auto but that doesn't even come close to chewing up the battery.
Sadly I feel like I'm still using my old 2.5 year G3 where it'll need a charge mid way through the day.
VDoubleUVR6 said:
What runs under "Phone Idle" on the V20. It's been the largest battery consumer for the last week of use that I've noticed. My wife's V20 is the same and I had my brother check his and his wife's V20.
I'm only asking because I'm not see great battery life like other have been reporting. I don't have live wallpaper, have only two widgets on the home screen. GPS is set to battery save, screen is set to auto but that doesn't even come close to chewing up the battery.
Sadly I feel like I'm still using my old 2.5 year G3 where it'll need a charge mid way through the day.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Factory reset it
czerdrill said:
Factory reset it
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Really??
Pretty sad that needs to be done on a week old phone with minimal apps. I'm not even a heavy user.
I feel like I'm back on my old DroidX days where everything was a factory reset but never helped...
VDoubleUVR6 said:
Really??
Pretty sad that needs to be done on a week old phone with minimal apps. I'm not even a heavy user.
I feel like I'm back on my old DroidX days where everything was a factory reset but never helped...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I agree with you. Although my phone is just beyond a week old and does have all my apps installed, a factory reset can't be the solution here. This is the typical "I don't know how to fix this" answer always given by manufacturers and carriers.
Sent from my LG-H910 using Tapatalk
In the roughly 3 weeks I've had my V20 I've only seen this once where phone idle was higher than Screen. I started looking thru all running apps for 'keep awake' time being high and noticed Android OS had keep awake of over 2 hours when it's normally less than an hour after a full day use. I power cycled the phone and it stopped.
The weird thing was Android OS didn't show high battery usage even though something was triggering keep awake. Looks like the keep awake was causing phone idle to be high.
I'd look at everything in your battery usage to see if you have any high keep awake times.
VDoubleUVR6 said:
Really??
Pretty sad that needs to be done on a week old phone with minimal apps. I'm not even a heavy user.
I feel like I'm back on my old DroidX days where everything was a factory reset but never helped...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry did not mean to be short in my response. When you set up your phone did you restore it from another phone using the nfc bump thing? I did the same and my phone battery was the same way. Wouldn't last even half a day. After i factory reset and set everything up manually i get 18+ hrs with 7 hrs screen on time sometimes.
If this situation doesn't apply to you then maybe a reset won't help. But you have to understand your situation isn't normal.
Make sure Google now features are all turned off and not running in the background.
tourbound129 said:
In the roughly 3 weeks I've had my V20 I've only seen this once where phone idle was higher than Screen. I started looking thru all running apps for 'keep awake' time being high and noticed Android OS had keep awake of over 2 hours when it's normally less than an hour after a full day use. I power cycled the phone and it stopped.
The weird thing was Android OS didn't show high battery usage even though something was triggering keep awake. Looks like the keep awake was causing phone idle to be high.
I'd look at everything in your battery usage to see if you have any high keep awake times.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'll have to go through the apps one by one like I did previously on my G3 and see. Now within the battery stats there is only a handful of apps like hangout, play music, chrome and camera. The rest is OS related so that's why I was curious what ran under Phone Idle.
czerdrill said:
Sorry did not mean to be short in my response. When you set up your phone did you restore it from another phone using the nfc bump thing? I did the same and my phone battery was the same way. Wouldn't last even half a day. After i factory reset and set everything up manually i get 18+ hrs with 7 hrs screen on time sometimes.
If this situation doesn't apply to you then maybe a reset won't help. But you have to understand your situation isn't normal.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No and sadly I was looking for that feature a week ago but couldn't find it so I had to individually install most of my apps I had on my previous phone...made for a long night along with the additional emails and configuration or icons and such.
I'll keep digging away at the phone...I really want to like this phone ?
Has there been a definitive resolution to "phone idle" battery drain? I just got a V20 2 weeks ago on sale for $360 and its a fantastic upgrade over the One+1 I've been rockin all these years, but I'm also suffering from mediocre life due to whatever phone idle is. Some forums (for other phones) say phone idle is related to your wireless signal. I'm still with the same carrier and frequenting the same locations and had no such battery drain with that old One+.
i finally discovered whats was goin on with me..
i had the same issue..
phone idle was topping my battery usage list
it turns google plays have this "locationmanager service " and locationwhatever" that kills your battery over wifi even with location button off
Go to locations/ 3 dots in top right corner/ turn off WiFi scan. See if that helps.
My phone has been suffering from poor battery life for quite some time now, here are the screenshots, Android OS has been this high on almost all battery cycles.
I disabled wifi scanning as suggested above and will watch the performance, does the community have any other inputs to fix this? View attachment 4212978View attachment 4212979
Sent from my LG-H990 using Tapatalk
Phone idle is always the biggest battery draw on my phone too. I have minimal apps too. No Facebook or similar types of apps. I'm on a Verizon V20 stock with the latest security update. Is this normal V20 behavior to have phone idle consume more battery than everything else?
how about doze mode , isnt that meant to help with this sort of problem ? ( my phone is currently on a ship )
Any update. İ have the same problem
andreqf said:
i finally discovered whats was goin on with me..
i had the same issue..
phone idle was topping my battery usage list
it turns google plays have this "locationmanager service " and locationwhatever" that kills your battery over wifi even with location button off
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So what did you do?
Would also be grateful if anyone shared a solution.
I specifically have a SIM-unlocked Sprint model (LS997) which am using in Europe with another carrier.
Using it in LTE preferred mode drains about 10-15% overnight.
Using it in WCDMA preferred mode drains up to 5% per night (yes, wifi and cellular data OFF and many apps greenified) . So I'm really interested in how this can be fixed and achieve 0% battery drain across several hours.
Or maybe it's SIM-unlocked Sprint ROM related?? I can't root my phone since it has the Feb 2017 patch and is a ZV6.
I suspect rooting it and using another ROM would solve this + the annoying issue of not being able to send images via FB Messenger and Viber while on cellular data (I imagine the Sprint guys placed some kind of restriction to deny media transfer for these apps when using cellular data).
I have noticed this too.. wondered why "phone idle" takes most battery... any suggestions would be great!
I am also curious about the solution. Phone Idle is at top. Even without SIM card. 30% drains during a night (everything is disabled, but no airplane mode is on). I tried factory reset, reinstall older ROM, replace battery, use no app but still sucks.
hi
my v20 phone battery draining was about 1% per hour before (about 7% totally ) and recently increased to 2% during sleeping time overnight. (draining 15% overnight in sleeping state)
it seems that during day either performance off battery is decreased.(about 5h with wifi and screen on usage)
Fast charging while second screen is On , is slower than when it is off therefore when second screen is Off , fast charging goes better . exactly , first 30 mins fast charging makes about 40% battery charge(instead of 50%) and after 60 min leads to 85% and full charging taking place after about 100 min instead of 80 mins.
another important thing is that sometimes shades have been seen on the LCD that many users have complained about it.
phone information is :
Android security patch level: September 1, 2017
BASEBAND : MPSS.TH.2.0.1.c3-00045-M8996FAAAANAZM-1
KERNEL : 3.18.31
BUILD NUMBER : NRD90M
SOFTWARE VERSION : V10g-AME-XX
MODEL NUMBER : LG-H990ds
my actions are as follows :
phone is factory reseted. No third party apps is installed. [especially social media apps.]
battery calibration steps for not rooted phones is taken place.(turning off the phone and charging several times repeatedly).
testing battery drain in safe mode in done and didn't change results
turn off location services and location scanning for WiFi and Bluetooth scanning
turn off WiFi being On during screen is Off.
turn off auto sync, NFC, GPS etc.
not using auto brightness.
not using comfort view .
turn off location services and location scanning for WiFi and Bluetooth scanning
second screen is off during test overnight. (either with second screen is ON with faced down to lower brightness in other day test )
phone is in Air Plane Mode and all data services is off.
system apps like Google services and Play and Assistance is limited by permissions.
following are some advanced battery drain overnight figures of my phone for more analyzing.
any help with this issue is appreciated.

Battery Performance after Nougat update - how is it working for you? (Phone Idle...)

Hello!
I updated to 7.0 last Friday and the phone has been acting very well, overall.
But I am having some problems with the battery life. In actuality, it can last 3 days in standby, but I feel like the "Phone Idle" is eating WAY too much battery regardless.
The drain when in standby, for example, should be closer to 1% for 7-8 hours, but for me it is closer to 7-8%, almost 1 % drain per hour in a supposedly sleeping state.
Right now, my stats are as follows, after 1 day and 10 hours (with 1 day 3 hours left):
Screen 30% (2h 23m SoT, 677mAh)
Phone Idle 20% (1d 10h, 459mAh)
Google Play Services 11% (radio active 1h 24m, 246mAh)
Cell Standby 10% (radio active 4m 45s, 234 mAh)
Android OS 6%
Android System 5%
... the rest is some apps with negligible usage.
So, this tells me that something is very wrong with Phone idle. It has consumed almost as much as the screen.
I read a lot about this issue and a large number of reports claim that doing a factory reset does not fix the problem. I am scared to do a reset, since Debloater no longer works in Android 7, and I will not be able to deactivate crap like all facebook services and What's New. So, it's a bit of a no-exit situation... I don't think rooting and using custom roms is a good idea for me, as I would like to retain warranty of my device until it expires. I plan to root and modify it after that.
Still, are any of you experiencing this issue since the Nougat update? Any ideas on how to solve it?
So far, suggestions include:
- removing SD card
- turning adaptive brightness OFF
- turning location accuracy to battery-saving mode
- turning Wi-Fi awake ON (only when charging), or OFF
- going to App settings and selecting 'reset all app settings'
- wipe cache partition by holding power and volume up keys (while phone is on) until you feel 3 vibrations
I've already done these things today (except sd cards, no way I am giving that up) so it's early to say if they helped.
Feel free to use this thread even if you just want to share your problem-free battery experience on android 7 with your Sony Z5C. I am curious to see how does a "perfectly fine" z5c unit perform in terms of battery, on Android 7. What is the "real" expected real-life performance?
Thanks for reading.
The things you suggest are not gonna change too much.
* Resetting app settings or removing your SD card is not gonna do anything at all.
* The location accuracy can make a little difference (let's say 2% at the end of the day) but the problem with location settings isn't HOW it's gonna look for a location, but HOW MANY TIMES. If you want longer idle, location services should be off (in one or another way) when your phone is sleeping.
In my eyes, with the things you have been doing is not worth the hassle.
** With Nougat, you still have the opportunity to extend your battery life a lot with apps like
Doze Settings Editor
My Android Tools
And you'll have to debloat.
I'm still testing these possibilities. But I just got on Nougat today, and with my initial settings, I broke some functionality I need. (Alarm Clock didn't work in deep sleep and I couldn't install WhatsApp). Maybe I get it working the way I want in the next few days or week, but I guess so.
** Having a kernel that allows you to change governors can also make a huge difference. Governors will give you the opportunity to buy (a lot of) battery life and to reduce heat, but you pay with performance.
** One more thing that can make a huge difference, is performing a clean install. So you need to install Nougat (or whatever ROM you use) on a clean system, and install your apps manually.
"I am curious to see how does a "perfectly fine" z5c unit perform in terms of battery, on Android 7. What is the "real" expected real-life performance?"
-->> With these things done and Doze/MyAndroidTools optimized, your phone shouldn't use more than 2-3% overnight. On an optimized MM (with XPosed/Greenify/Amplify) I had to recharge about 2 times a week. Maybe on Nougat it will be a little bit less because there's no XPosed/Amplify, but it should be possible that your battery life will be about three times as long as you have right now.
** If you want a better understanding about battery life, forget about these stats. You won't learn anything from the stats (like you gave us). Instead you can use an app like Better Battery Stats. Especially in (deep) sleep, knowing as much as possible about wakelocks is quite essential.
By the way, you can't call that a "real" expected thing. Battery life is always a compromise, and balanced with performance. Optimization (in the way I'm speaking about) is that much more than limiting performance/apps/widgets while you use your phone, and turning your phone in a dead object as soon as possible when the screen is off.
--jenana-- said:
...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for this response, it's quite elaborate. But I am fully convinced that the Phone Idle issue is not due to ANY of my settings and should not plague a device, even if it is non-rooted. Most of the suggestions you added would require root, or operations that are beyond what I am willing to risk right now. Even the simple root would likely require me to downgrade to 6 and most likely brick my device due to unreliable nature of many of these guides.
I will definitely be trying out the BBS non-root edition as soon as I get home and manage to activate it properly.
But, overall, a stock non-rooted android 7 should not drain as much battery in idle mode. I know that via rooting you can get as close to 0.2% battery drain per hour. But what about no root?
Ultimately, I will root the device at some point when warranty has expired, or is close to, and I will get it to drain extremely slow with xposed and some tweaking. But we shouldn't be required to do this for normal battery life. It's becoming ridiculous at this point.
BTW. Is doing the "Repair" thing from Sony PC Companion equatable to doing a "clean install"? In other words, can I do this without having to actually re-install a rom completely and without rooting the device?
Bobzee said:
Thank you for this response, it's quite elaborate. But I am fully convinced that the Phone Idle issue is not due to ANY of my settings and should not plague a device, even if it is non-rooted. Most of the suggestions you added would require root, or operations that are beyond what I am willing to risk right now. Even the simple root would likely require me to downgrade to 6 and most likely brick my device due to unreliable nature of many of these guides.
I will definitely be trying out the BBS non-root edition as soon as I get home and manage to activate it properly.
But, overall, a stock non-rooted android 7 should not drain as much battery in idle mode. I know that via rooting you can get as close to 0.2% battery drain per hour. But what about no root?
Ultimately, I will root the device at some point when warranty has expired, or is close to, and I will get it to drain extremely slow with xposed and some tweaking. But we shouldn't be required to do this for normal battery life. It's becoming ridiculous at this point.
BTW. Is doing the "Repair" thing from Sony PC Companion equatable to doing a "clean install"? In other words, can I do this without having to actually re-install a rom completely and without rooting the device?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Haha, I'm bad in keeping my stories short.
If you're non-rooted, you won't ever get that experience. Not even close. It depends on the apps you're using, but a few messenger-apps (like facebook/fb messenger/whatsapp) + some google apps like maps/calendar/... or weather apps rely heavily on location settings, and they always want to sync or connect with their mothership. To illustrate my point, at a certain point last year I had done some dirty flashes, I had quite some apps and widgets like this installed, but in the end it drained 30% battery overnight. After clean install + debloater it went down to 10% overnight. After heavily tweaking with Amplify/MyAndroidTools/Greenify and so on, it went down to 1% overnight.
Without root, the only thing major thing you can do is: clean install. Almost everything else (with a large enough impact on battery life) is beyond your control. Apparently the choice of developers is to implement smooth and always-up-to-date apps and widget, always ready to serve you the latest news/messages and so on. I agree with you that smartphones these days aren't lean at all. And there are no secret settings that will give you a much better battery life all of a sudden.
I've never used PC Companion. I've no idea what it does or how it works exactly. I don't think it's powerful enough to solve issues with wakelocks.
Literally:
* If you want control over Android, you need to root. Without root: no control whatsoever;
* Clean install = everything out, fresh start. You can't paint your wall without removing your paintings.
Thanks again for the great response. And PC Companion is Sony's default software that comes with their devices and is used to backup/reset/update, etc.
To clarify, I never expected any secret battery options that will solve all my problems. I was rather hoping that it's a well-known problem with a possible non-root solution.
As to rooting, yeah - I would love to do it, but I am afraid your guide won't work for 7.0, would it? I am already using 32.3.A.0.376-R2D. In any case, rooting so soon after buying it (a few months) is not something I am rushing to do.
Also, to add something else - my old Z1, when it was on KitKat 4.4, used to last me 5 days with low usage EASILY. The thing actually drained about 1% per night without having to root it, with the normal stock features and 3G network on all the time. Something just went wrong down the road for many manufacturers and their relationship with the android OS. The battery life became abysmal for me after android 5 and above it.
And then, at work, I have a Nexus 5x on my desk for testing, which lasts 6 days in standby with a battery which is not dramatically bigger, with no root. But it has no SIM card or 3g/4g on at all, only WiFi.
This brings me to believe that you are absolutely right about location services.
And a last question... if I am to root now, from FW 32.3.A.0.376-R2D, what would you say would be the most reliable method? I saw your guide and really liked it, but it seems to require MM to begin with. Seen many other guides, but in each guide there are responses about frozen/bricked devices, or issies with no working camera/finger scanner/etc... It's a bit worrying.
brokich said:
Thanks again for the great response. And PC Companion is Sony's default software that comes with their devices and is used to backup/reset/update, etc.
To clarify, I never expected any secret battery options that will solve all my problems. I was rather hoping that it's a well-known problem with a possible non-root solution.
As to rooting, yeah - I would love to do it, but I am afraid your guide won't work for 7.0, would it? I am already using 32.3.A.0.376-R2D. In any case, rooting so soon after buying it (a few months) is not something I am rushing to do.
Also, to add something else - my old Z1, when it was on KitKat 4.4, used to last me 5 days with low usage EASILY. The thing actually drained about 1% per night without having to root it, with the normal stock features and 3G network on all the time. Something just went wrong down the road for many manufacturers and their relationship with the android OS. The battery life became abysmal for me after android 5 and above it.
And then, at work, I have a Nexus 5x on my desk for testing, which lasts 6 days in standby with a battery which is not dramatically bigger, with no root. But it has no SIM card or 3g/4g on at all, only WiFi.
This brings me to believe that you are absolutely right about location services.
And a last question... if I am to root now, from FW 32.3.A.0.376-R2D, what would you say would be the most reliable method? I saw your guide and really liked it, but it seems to require MM to begin with. Seen many other guides, but in each guide there are responses about frozen/bricked devices, or issies with no working camera/finger scanner/etc... It's a bit worrying.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The guide I wrote is actually outdated. I wrote it in the first weeks after MM was released.
IF you want to root, it's actually not that difficult.
0. Prepare your computer, because you need the right drivers and some tools.
1. If it's the first time you unlock your bootloader, you might want to backup your TA-partition. I leave the details to other people, there are great guides about it in this subforum. As far as I know, to do this, you need to go back to marshmellow. I've never done this, because I unlocked my bootloader before there where any tools or any knowledge available about how to do this. So my original TA partition is gone forever (and I've never missed it).
2. Flash Nougat. This is really simple. You only have to download a (large) file, click a few buttons in flashtool, drink a coffee, and it's done.
3. Make a kernel with Rootkernel. It's basically like following a recipe, and in the end you have a file (the kernel) which you can install with the tools on your computer. In this step, you made root access and TWRP-recovery.
4. Reboot
Personally (and I know not everybody will agree), I wouldn't bother with backup of the TA partition. So *I* would just unlock the bootloader and move on. But your first step should be: make yourself familiar with basic adb commands and with how to make and restore a (full) backup. I really don't know why it causes so much problems for some people. It's true, sometimes you run into unexpected behavior. But then you have 2 options. Go back to last TWRP-backup or get your **** together and start from scratch.
By the way, if I was you (with your priorities), I wouldn't upgrade to Nougat. There are much more tools available to optimize marshmallow. Install some of them, get familiar with them, and in a few days you have a reliable and battery-friendly system.
Hm, these are some fair points.
Thanks for that little root guide - but why would you skip backing up the TA partition? Wouldn't that break some core functionalities? At least that's what I've read (cause I did go through most of the root guides for MM in this section).
I guess people have problems because the guides are sometimes incomplete, or people themselves are not following them properly. I would not expect myself to mess-up instructions, and whenever I have problems with guides, it's usually some kind of disparity between my side and their side. Or the guide is wrong, or something is missing. Many things can go wrong, yeah.
It's not that I am not willing to take risks, it's more that I might end up getting the overheat issue at some point - and at that point I would like to use my warranty. If I mess up anything, the warranty will be lost too soon.
Furthermore, I believe Nougat is far superior to MM, and I am willing to wait unofficial development to continue for at least another year. Perhaps in that time the z5c will have stopped receiving official updates, and we can all settle on some rooted, stable and working version of (probably) 7.1 or smth a bit after it, with working Xposed framework as well. At that point I would like to root and truly make the device shine in terms of battery life.
But for now, I'll have to limit myself with a factory reset at MOST.
I am doing an experiment now, after charging the phone completely. Turned location services off, and google services to "battery saving mode". I've turned wi-fi to off and am just going to be using a constant LTE connection. Auto sync is on.
I'd like to see how the phone handles this configuration without further intervention. So far, after 30 minutes post-charge, it's still sitting at 100%. But I'll have to check the overnight drain to verify any actual improvement. In any case, my 100% charged phone predicts 3 days of standby in the battery settings.
edit: looks good after 1 hour (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bwg-0GLG0gP9Wmt1ekZCTFNnS3c)
brokich said:
Hm, these are some fair points.
Thanks for that little root guide - but why would you skip backing up the TA partition? Wouldn't that break some core functionalities? At least that's what I've read (cause I did go through most of the root guides for MM in this section).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mwa, yes and no.
Yes 1: By unlocking bootloader you break your TA partition and loose functionality.
Yes 2: If you ever want to go back to a phone which is unrooted and locked with all functionality, you need that backup.
No 1: There are DRM-fixes. Rootkernel (and the entire 2nd or 3rd step in my other comment) will fix DRM-keys too. And about every modified kernel you'll find over here has that DRM-fix + a few tweaks, so you don't have to worry, you won't miss anything.
I guess there are two kind of people. Some people say "You never know if you ever gonna need it, so you would be stupid not to back it up. After you click that button it will be gone. Forever." They are right. Some people say "Why bother, it's too much work, in the end you'll loose that backup, and actually you won't ever use it. And if it doesn't go smooth, it will give you unnecessary stress". They are right too. I'm in the second group. And I don't want to convince you that what I say is anything better than what others say, I'm just explaining my view...
Also, a lot of tools we use to experiment and tweak the sh#t out of our Z5C are highly experimental and not debugged. I don't care because partially it's a fun way to play around with it and I don't rely on my phone. If it doesn't work tonight, I'll find a way to make it work tomorrow. Again, that's my view...
By the way, I had to send my phone back to sony with a problem (unrelated hardware issue), and my warranty wasn't void.
Ha, that's very interesting. Perhaps they didn't bother to check for root at all, or they did and did not care. Maybe it's really hit and miss...
Overall, I am not extremely worried about it, as the device has actually been acting good so far, with no sign of hardware problems.
Also, I am not really going to gain that much by rooting Android 7, and I have no desire to have to stay on 6. When Xposed is well-developed and reliable on nougat, I'll probably go through the most promising method I can find and do the modifications that are required.
And yeah, I get your point about having fun, and I agree completely. But this device is important to me and I can't really risk it at the moment.
Anyways, the device is at 98% after 3 hours + of idle, which doesn't look too bad. I think perhaps adding the Greenify app might improve it a bit more, making it quite strong as a result, without the need of any root.
On more thing. Actually battery life on Nougat seems to excellent.
I did 4 things (not much work):
1) Edit doze settings more aggressively Doze Settings Editor, with the built-in "GeraldRudi"-preset. It should work on non-root too, but with slightly less aggressive settings.
2) Greenify, of course without the XPosed settings, and without aggressive doze. I think this didn't have any impact on battery performance/deep sleep, because Doze Settings was much more aggressive.
3) Tasker-module to put auto-sync off at night.
4) Kernel Adiutor to set governor to interactive. Obviously at night there was about no load on the CPU at all, but I did it to reduce heat.
All the rest is pretty standard. A lot of Google Apps are installed, messengers (FB messenger, WhatsApp) and social media, I even have a weather widget installed; all working normally.
Overnight it didn't use any power: 0,0% drain per hour; 0% over a 10h period of time. -->> battery stats
That's insane!!!! Big ups
I will absolutely try the Doze editor.
Sadly, no tasker with no root, but I might as well turn off auto-sync manually at night.
The kernel editor, I'm guessing, is also off-limits for me with no root.
What I did was to just turn off location and use greenify. My current idle draw is 0.66%.
But your is perfect. That's exactly what I want to achieve. Close to 0% draw when idle. That's how it should be.
Do you think it will be possible to achieve similar results with just the doze settings from step 1? (+turning auto sync off at night)
Bobzee said:
That's insane!!!! Big ups
I will absolutely try the Doze editor.
Sadly, no tasker with no root, but I might as well turn off auto-sync manually at night.
The kernel editor, I'm guessing, is also off-limits for me with no root.
What I did was to just turn off location and use greenify. My current idle draw is 0.66%.
But your is perfect. That's exactly what I want to achieve. Close to 0% draw when idle. That's how it should be.
Do you think it will be possible to achieve similar results with just the doze settings from step 1? (+turning auto sync off at night)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Your idle time doesn't look bad at all. Without something like that Better Battery Stats it's hard to guess if some apps use CPU/power/... or cause unnecessary wakelocks, but if you use 6-7% over 10h idle time, it's not that bad.
As far as I know, changing governor without root is a no-go. Not possible, only the system has the right permissions. By the way, this should affect idle time that much, it mostly affects your phone while you use it.
Doze Editor should make a difference, because it speeds up the time after you turn off your device to put it in deep sleep. Out-of-the-box, that takes a long time (I don't know how long, but it's suggested to be about 30 minutes). Standard settings in Doze Editor, which you can use with adb and without root, bring that back to 3 minutes. It's fully explained in that Doze Settings-thread.
Thanks for the info
I tried Greenify since last night and it seemed to actually slow my device down. I could literally sense lag in the OS and nothing else could explain it. There was also a delay with every hit of the power button before the screen comes on. This, to me, was more bad than good, so I uninstalled this app. Perhaps it truly is a bit useless, or even detrimental to performance without root.
These Doze settings is what I will be trying out tonight, but I fear it might be a similar story to Greenify and not help me much without having root, or even potentially slow the device down?
Furthermore, I uninstalled all Google Play services updates and re-installed it. It used to take ~450mb of space, now it's back to ~150mb.
Hopefully, this will improve the Google services battery drain, because right now it is on the top of the list:
79% battery left, 2d 16h remaining:
25% google play services
15% phone idle
15% screen
12% cell standby
So, play services is still hogging too much battery, even with location off.
I re-installed it, so I have yet to see if this has any positive effect.
Z4 tablet problem too
I'm getting high battery drain on idle on my Z4 tablet, haven't attempted any fix yet.
My experience is a very big battery drain even if a clean install. I used MyAndroidTools to stop all unnecessary Google Play Services , with Kernel Audiutor I selected interactive governor CPU, with Doze I used GeraldRudi presetting. Switching off LTE, wifi, bluetooth and data , in less than 3 hours I loose 30% of battery, can not arrive to evening with a charge. I am back on 6.0.1 and I am able to recharge my Z5C every two days !
alpadolmeri said:
My experience is a very big battery drain even if a clean install. I used MyAndroidTools to stop all unnecessary Google Play Services , with Kernel Audiutor I selected interactive governor CPU, with Doze I used GeraldRudi presetting. Switching off LTE, wifi, bluetooth and data , in less than 3 hours I loose 30% of battery, can not arrive to evening with a charge. I am back on 6.0.1 and I am able to recharge my Z5C every two days !
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That definitely sounds like you have one of those problematic units, with overheating and extreme battery drain, or perhaps it was due to a bug in the 7.0 ROM you used.
I am still able to get 2 days of my phone with 7.0 and no root, but that to me seems very unsatisfactory. Such a battery should easily last you a week with a single charge with LTE on, if you keep it idle most of the time. In my case, that's up to 3 days. If you see jenana's battery stats, it is possible to achieve almost 0.0% drain per hour at the cost of some performance. In those conditions, with ULTRA stamina on, your phone should last about a full month in idle mode with active network signal reception during that full period of time (but not LTE and other extras).
6.0.1 should be even better due to the Xposed framework, but I don't think that more than a month is a realistic with any OS and the current batteries.
Surely, 2 days is ridiculous. I don't use my phone much some days and the drain seems to be flat. It should be ALMOST 0% per hour. I assure you, even auto-syncing should be fully usable at all times without any kind of insane battery drain.
roycol said:
I'm getting high battery drain on idle on my Z4 tablet, haven't attempted any fix yet.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Seems I am in the same boat as you I really was enjoying Nougat, but I cannot live with half a day of charge. Last thing to try unrooted nougat and phh's superuser. Maybe this can resolve the massive drain. It is sad, really. I will report back with my findings...
I would appreciate any hint on to overcome this issue.
Cheers everyone!
Poor for me. I can get a day's worth out with about 3 to 4 hrs SOT but usually now my battery is less than 10% when I put it on charge. Marshmallow I was easily getting 4hrs SOT and down around 20 to 30% battery left. I love nougat but battery life is really poor. I have a mate who had x compact and 2 hrs SOT only uses about 25% battery. I just don't get it, so must be Sony with a poor ROM and not tested correctly or nougat not designed for this phone.
Sent from my E5823 using Tapatalk
Hey, I can not understand it when people say the battery runs better than never before. I updated to 32.3.A.0.378, Sony has put the CPU on the best performance "performance". So with me runs the Z5C on the settings max. 10 hours. In the plaintext, I need root to convert this as it did at Marshmallow "interactive".
For everybody that experiences battery drain and heat problems: try rooting the phone with phh superuser instead of superSu. I couldn't get through a single day with superSu. Now, the phone is cool and endurance of battery is back to normal.
Sent from my E5823 using XDA Free mobile app

Trying to track down cause of recent battery drain issue.

Hello all,
So I know there's various discussions all over the web about the Galaxy s10 and battery issues on both Snapdragon and Exynos variants. It seems people are experiencing a wide margin of difference in avg battery life..
So here's my situation. My wife and I both have S10+'s through AT&T. We got them the first week they came out. I looked though the forums and performed several battery optimization tweaks on both phones and since then the battery life has been really impressive... No complaints really. Until this last week.
We both recieved the March security patch and fingerprint scanner fix about a week ago. My wife's phone seems unchanged by this. Everything working as expected. My phone however has been draining battery MUCH faster both in SOT and standby time. I'm losing 2-3x more battery % overnight. In the last 20 mins of just reading through threads on the XDA forum app, I've lost about 10% battery. I'm sitting in the dark with my screen brightness very low too. (down another 5% since I started typing this!)
My wife and I have very similar phone habits. Since both our phones are optimized identically, and we used most of the same apps a play the same games, I started looking through everything different I've done in my phone since this problem started. I installed Adhell3, which seems to be setup properly and working. Mike B. from Adhell's Discord assured me that Adhell shouldn't be draining my battery. I'm mostly using it just to remove a bunch of basic bloatware and block some ads.
The update seems to have worked fine otherwise. My FP scanner is much better now, but something is definitely wrong. I've tried wiping the partition cache afterwards. I've tracked down others experiencing issues after this particular update, but cant seem to find a way to fix this problem yet. I saw something about Deep Sleep problems after the update when someone uses a VOIP service like Skype or WhatsApp, but I dont use anything like that. I can't even find a good tool to use to see more information about my battery usage, as the built-in battery monitor lacks a good deal of information. CPUspy doesn't work on my version.
If anyone has any ideas of what could be the culprit, what else I could try, or what tools I could use to try and track down what exactly is causing this sudden increase in drain, I'd really appreciate it.
Which update do you have ASBA or ASCA? This is rather weird, Battery drain can also come from restoring from backups. I lose 2% every night and my phone is on airplane mode, not connected to anything except location. I do not have adhell, and last time I tested before the fingerprint update I had 10h SoT on wifi purely. When I got the new fingerprint update I checked if the phone went to deep sleep and it does, so I really do not know what might be your issue. I have an exynos variant btw. Also I charge my phone constantly from 80 I let it drop to 40 and charge it back, I do not use fast charging options. Since unplugging my phone now on LTE fully I have lost 1% in 30 min, I have my fitbit always connected, location on, max resolution, I have a semi black wallpaper and brightness around 40-50%.
I will see today how much SoT I can get from 80% part wifi, part LTE, I will update.
clear cache helped a lot of people
Update 1
Reset all phone settings to factory. Don't do full factory reset, just all the settings, fixed my post update battery drain issues
Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk
Update 2
Hrrm. It seems I don't have ASBA or ASCA, I have ASD3. The March update.
I'm really hoping I don't end up having to factory reset and manually install everything... Because I did do a restore from backup with AT&T Transfer, because it seemed really convenient and time saving. I had no idea that so many people have had issues with restoring from various back up services (AT&T, Samsung, Google etc.)
I did the same restore from backup on my wife's S10+ too and she's had no problems. Her battery life is phenomenal. My battery issues only started after this last update.
SinisterDev said:
I'm really hoping I don't end up having to factory reset and manually install everything... Because I did do a restore from backup with AT&T Transfer, because it seemed really convenient and time saving. I had no idea that so many people have had issues with restoring from various back up services (AT&T, Samsung, Google etc.)
I did the same restore from backup on my wife's S10+ too and she's had no problems. Her battery life is phenomenal. My battery issues only started after this last update.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well that seems rather strange to be honest, you can eliminate possibilities by just testing and see what works. Last possibility can be that factory resetting and installing all new, but then again, it could be that it solves your issues or not. You should be having rather horizontal lines to prove your phone is truly going into deep sleep in my opinion, but also you can check with CPU Spy
Sorry it will be this pic
Try to log too safe mode and check the battery drain
If stopped then it was from an application that have a problem
If not I think it might be a system app or something
So. I'm starting to think that some of my problem has to do with wakelocks. Unfortunately I have limited access to wakelocks statistics since my phone is unrooted. However. Last night I fully charged my phone right before bed and then took it off the charger to see how much it would lose overnight. It dropped a whopping 10% vs the 1-2% it used to.
I looked through some of the battery info and noticed several apps running in the background for very long periods of time since last night. Chrome(2hrs) , Discord(2hrs), Google Play Services(a whopping 13hrs 30mins running in background) and Google Play store (5hrs)
Somehow Discord was responsible for draining 7.6% battery in that time!
So, could this be a wakelock issue causing my phone to lose so much battery overnight? I know that's only half the problem, because I'm also experiencing higher drain than usual while using certain apps too. But I'm trying to figure out one thing at time.
SinisterDev said:
So. I'm starting to think that some of my problem has to do with wakelocks. Unfortunately I have limited access to wakelocks statistics since my phone is unrooted. However. Last night I fully charged my phone right before bed and then took it off the charger to see how much it would lose overnight. It dropped a whopping 10% vs the 1-2% it used to.
I looked through some of the battery info and noticed several apps running in the background for very long periods of time since last night. Chrome(2hrs) , Discord(2hrs), Google Play Services(a whopping 13hrs 30mins running in background) and Google Play store (5hrs)
Somehow Discord was responsible for draining 7.6% battery in that time!
So, could this be a wakelock issue causing my phone to lose so much battery overnight? I know that's only half the problem, because I'm also experiencing higher drain than usual while using certain apps too. But I'm trying to figure out one thing at time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can look at this thread and see if you can install the app without being root or not
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1179809
aromerodaniel said:
Which update do you have ASBA or ASCA? This is rather weird, Battery drain can also come from restoring from backups. I lose 2% every night and my phone is on airplane mode, not connected to anything except location. I do not have adhell, and last time I tested before the fingerprint update I had 10h SoT on wifi purely. When I got the new fingerprint update I checked if the phone went to deep sleep and it does, so I really do not know what might be your issue. I have an exynos variant btw. Also I charge my phone constantly from 80 I let it drop to 40 and charge it back, I do not use fast charging options. Since unplugging my phone now on LTE fully I have lost 1% in 30 min, I have my fitbit always connected, location on, max resolution, I have a semi black wallpaper and brightness around 40-50%.
I will see today how much SoT I can get from 80% part wifi, part LTE, I will update.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
10 sot?!?!?you sure about it?!?whatever I try I always only have 7 something sot,how can you make it 10?!?
paullu said:
10 sot?!?!?you sure about it?!?whatever I try I always only have 7 something sot,how can you make it 10?!?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have done it before, I can look for the image, if you would like. That was a full day of wifi actually.
paullu said:
10 sot?!?!?you sure about it?!?whatever I try I always only have 7 something sot,how can you make it 10?!?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Here is the pic
Also you can look at this thread
https://forum.xda-developers.com/s10-plus/how-to/official-exynos-battery-life-thread-t3917814/page7
You have it good compared with me I get background drain on all apps and I have all apps set not to run in the background
da1e8 said:
You have it good compared with me I get background drain on all apps and I have all apps set not to run in the background
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You just need to tweak your settings more, put which apps do not run on the background or go to sleep, how many days you need to wait to put unused apps to sleep. Is all tweaking the settings.
aromerodaniel said:
You just need to tweak your settings more, put which apps do not run on the background or go to sleep, how many days you need to wait to put unused apps to sleep. Is all tweaking the settings.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've put all apps to sleep and they still register as been used
da1e8 said:
I've put all apps to sleep and they still register as been used
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Then I don't what you can do, either do a factory reset and so not restore anything from backups and see if that works. I usually set my phone that way, clean no restoration from any backup all apps are installed manually, and I do not even use adhell to disable most of Samsung crap apps and services.

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