Samsung excess battery drain
Thread Starter
Samsung excess battery drain
Twice this month my s3 has run the battery flat in 5 hours. After charging and restarting it went back to running it down at 3% per hour. Prior to this it used just under 2% per hour. I have also seen the phone wake up for no reason, several times, during the night. It has also been very slow and unresponsive a few times, fixed by restarting.
Any idea how I can find out what is causing any or all of these things?
Any idea how I can find out what is causing any or all of these things?
I'm only new to the world of smartphones myself (is an S3 considered smart?) and I have an S6. (I miss my old Philips dumbfone. 
)
The sorts of things I'd be focusing on are looking at the data usage, to see what has been using the most, and also the RAM.
Look for recent spikes in usage.
What new apps have been installed recently.
Is the phone (OS and apps) up to date.
Are you running any form of antivirus or other security on it.
All these and more can be found under the various sub-groups under settings.
Last but not least, it's starting to get old. I would guess it's possible the battery is simply on its way out.
)The sorts of things I'd be focusing on are looking at the data usage, to see what has been using the most, and also the RAM.
Look for recent spikes in usage.
What new apps have been installed recently.
Is the phone (OS and apps) up to date.
Are you running any form of antivirus or other security on it.
All these and more can be found under the various sub-groups under settings.
Last but not least, it's starting to get old. I would guess it's possible the battery is simply on its way out.
My s5 mini normally lasts for 3 days. However, if either the carrier signal or the wifi signal are weak it wastes all its battery power in 8 hours or less looking for or hanging on to signal.
yes, that's the reason I replaced my Samsung Ace 3. Randomly ran the battery flat in 18 hours. Most days lost only about 20% charge.
Replaced battery. 16 days later, it happened again.
Checked what apps running in the background. None It happened again.
Obviously it was doing something, as it was notably warm at these times - as opposed to body temp at others (I keep my phone in shirt pocket)
no point in keeping it if unreliable - so it's been replaced. Not cheap, either.
Grrrrrr.
Replaced battery. 16 days later, it happened again.
Checked what apps running in the background. None It happened again.
Obviously it was doing something, as it was notably warm at these times - as opposed to body temp at others (I keep my phone in shirt pocket)
no point in keeping it if unreliable - so it's been replaced. Not cheap, either.
Grrrrrr.
Recently my Galaxy SII twice flattened the battery in three hours of standby use, with the battery getting very warm. Using Settings - Battery: showed that McAfee had used 94% of the battery, so obviously it had gone mad somehow or other. Uninstalling McAfee changed the battery life back to three days or so of standby, with a small amount of screen/Internet/phone use too. If you can do without them except when required, switching off Wi-Fi and Mobile Data also extends battery charge life. If you keep the phone in an area of poor or non-existent phone signal, it uses a lot of battery power trying to find a signal.
Join Date: Dec 2013
Location: Norfolk
Age: 67
Posts: 1
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Social networking apps such a Facebook have a reputation for constantly trying to send or receive updates and flattening batteries. Also check that email services are set up to only operate when you manually connect to check for emails. If fact, insist your phone does nothing unless you specifically open an app.
Anything that uses GPS will kill the battery very quickly. Quite a few apps do this, obviously the navigation apps, but also social network apps, so your friends know where to find you. Some games also utilise GPS services to supply localised updates and information, like Pokemon Go.
Anything that uses GPS will kill the battery very quickly. Quite a few apps do this, obviously the navigation apps, but also social network apps, so your friends know where to find you. Some games also utilise GPS services to supply localised updates and information, like Pokemon Go.
Hippopotomonstrosesquipidelian title
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: is everything
Posts: 1,826
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Depending on your version of Android, something like settings > device settings > energy saving > battery or settings > battery > tap on the percentage, will bring up a list of apps and the percentage of battery each one has consumed.
If you have a graphic of battery consumption, tapping on that will show you when each radio was active, when the phone was awake and so on.
If you have a graphic of battery consumption, tapping on that will show you when each radio was active, when the phone was awake and so on.
It takes a lot of power to spy on you. That said, I'm done with Samsung. Also remove any apps you don't 100% need. Facebook Messenger would flatten the battery in hours.
My Samsung S4 became unreliable ( random things intermittently not working) so I replaced it after only 2 years. I suspect they're not built to last nearly as long as your trusty Nokia dumbphone. Planned obsolescence.
Thread Starter
I have been looking at every thing that might be going on in the phone. It is not the battery, I have a second nearly new one that gets run down just as quickly when it is really bad. Both batteries last 2 to 3 days when I am at home where the phone network is good. On Sunday the battery ran down in about 5 hours. The phone was in my pocket and I was out and about. The first time I looked at it was just as it turned itself off due to low battery so I was not able to check what was going on in the battery monitor.
Today, it only used 10% of the battery in 5 hours but then after 8 hours it was down to 45% left. Looking at the battery use monitor showed that about 6 hours in something started that really dragged the battery down. A short while later the battery load increased again, in several steps. GPSD had used 61%, it had only been running for 1hr 23M. I don't know if the phone re-booted and a number of processes that I had manually forced to stop had restarted themselves or if something else kicked GPSD into life. I didn't call on any apps that might need location services such as MAPS, Fitbit (don't know why this wants it!) or Repeater (which can locate from the phone system).
GPSD is not listed in the running apps (so I can't kill it), location services are all turned off, GPS is turned off but GPSD continues to consume much battery power. A google search gives conflicting reasons for GPSD using battery but some suggest that it isn't the actual culprit, it's just being given the blame by the battery monitor.
Help.
Today, it only used 10% of the battery in 5 hours but then after 8 hours it was down to 45% left. Looking at the battery use monitor showed that about 6 hours in something started that really dragged the battery down. A short while later the battery load increased again, in several steps. GPSD had used 61%, it had only been running for 1hr 23M. I don't know if the phone re-booted and a number of processes that I had manually forced to stop had restarted themselves or if something else kicked GPSD into life. I didn't call on any apps that might need location services such as MAPS, Fitbit (don't know why this wants it!) or Repeater (which can locate from the phone system).
GPSD is not listed in the running apps (so I can't kill it), location services are all turned off, GPS is turned off but GPSD continues to consume much battery power. A google search gives conflicting reasons for GPSD using battery but some suggest that it isn't the actual culprit, it's just being given the blame by the battery monitor.
Help.
Join Date: Dec 2013
Location: Norfolk
Age: 67
Posts: 1
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
GPS is certainly the device that is draining the power. One of your apps is accessing the GPS system and powering it up, presumably not getting the response it wants, and continuously repeating a request for positional data. Depending on where you are at the time the location is demanded by the app, you may not have a GPS signal available, so no valid data is returned. Perhaps at this stage, the app shuts down, but fails to turn off the GPS module.
Anything to do with social networking, fitness monitoring, mapping, games, or finding a lost, stolen, or misplaced phone could be the culprit. Even something a apparently innocuous as a news feed might be tracking your position to provide you with local news, or advertisments tailored to your location.
Because the positional data is a software request via the core operating system by another program, you will not see the GPS module flagged as being active because the software request has effectively gone behind your back. If everything worked normally, there would be a blip of activity as the request was serviced and the GPS module would power down, and the app requesting the data would be satisfied and just get on with doing its thing. If you are travelling via underground or in a tunnel or other shielded location when the request happens, the software throws a hissy fit and does the equivalent of leaving a phone off the hook on continuous redial.
It is the GPS module that is consuming the power. Now you have the onerous task of identifying which rogue app is causing the issue. I would suggest dumping everything except the stock apps, then reintroducing the ones you really need one at a time until the problem recurs. A right pain, but it is the only way to be sure.
So basically a factory reset, run it for a couple of days to see if the fault recurs, then reinstall the other apps you use one at a time every couple of days until the fault happens again. It is possible that two apps are interacting in a way that provokes the fault. Other people won't necessarily have exactly the same apps or software version numbers, so they never have the problem, even though they appear to have an identical set up.
Anything to do with social networking, fitness monitoring, mapping, games, or finding a lost, stolen, or misplaced phone could be the culprit. Even something a apparently innocuous as a news feed might be tracking your position to provide you with local news, or advertisments tailored to your location.
Because the positional data is a software request via the core operating system by another program, you will not see the GPS module flagged as being active because the software request has effectively gone behind your back. If everything worked normally, there would be a blip of activity as the request was serviced and the GPS module would power down, and the app requesting the data would be satisfied and just get on with doing its thing. If you are travelling via underground or in a tunnel or other shielded location when the request happens, the software throws a hissy fit and does the equivalent of leaving a phone off the hook on continuous redial.
It is the GPS module that is consuming the power. Now you have the onerous task of identifying which rogue app is causing the issue. I would suggest dumping everything except the stock apps, then reintroducing the ones you really need one at a time until the problem recurs. A right pain, but it is the only way to be sure.
So basically a factory reset, run it for a couple of days to see if the fault recurs, then reinstall the other apps you use one at a time every couple of days until the fault happens again. It is possible that two apps are interacting in a way that provokes the fault. Other people won't necessarily have exactly the same apps or software version numbers, so they never have the problem, even though they appear to have an identical set up.
Last edited by G0ULI; 19th Apr 2017 at 00:20.
Thread Starter
You might have hit the nail on the head, GOULI, some app is kicking the gpsd endlessly and not getting the right answer although I don't understand why. GPS should be good in the wide open British countryside.
I would do a full factory restore except I don't know how to reinstall my banking app so that it reconnects properly to my account. First Direct Digital Key - anyone?
In the meantime I have forced the FitBit app to stop, it is the most likely culprit as it has only been on the phone a few weeks, I think all of the other stuff I have installed is older than that except for the Palm Graffiti keyboard app which only went on last Thursday.
When my alarm went off at 6 this morning I deleted 3 apps from my phone, maps, repeater and something else whose name has slipped my mind and also forced the Fitbit app to stop (I didn't delete this as I want to retain the data it has collected). I then unplugged the charger and left the phone on my bedside cupboard.
Working at home today I have not had to use it. I just checked the battery charge state and I am blown away to find, after 11 hours of phone idle, that there is 93% battery remaining. I double checked by looking at the battery use table to find that 48% of the 7% battery used is device idle and 41% of the 7% battery used is cell standby. I am going to give it a few days and then start to reinstall the deleted apps and see which is using up the battery.
Rans6
I would do a full factory restore except I don't know how to reinstall my banking app so that it reconnects properly to my account. First Direct Digital Key - anyone?
In the meantime I have forced the FitBit app to stop, it is the most likely culprit as it has only been on the phone a few weeks, I think all of the other stuff I have installed is older than that except for the Palm Graffiti keyboard app which only went on last Thursday.
When my alarm went off at 6 this morning I deleted 3 apps from my phone, maps, repeater and something else whose name has slipped my mind and also forced the Fitbit app to stop (I didn't delete this as I want to retain the data it has collected). I then unplugged the charger and left the phone on my bedside cupboard.
Working at home today I have not had to use it. I just checked the battery charge state and I am blown away to find, after 11 hours of phone idle, that there is 93% battery remaining. I double checked by looking at the battery use table to find that 48% of the 7% battery used is device idle and 41% of the 7% battery used is cell standby. I am going to give it a few days and then start to reinstall the deleted apps and see which is using up the battery.
Rans6
Join Date: Dec 2013
Location: Norfolk
Age: 67
Posts: 1
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
My money would be on the FitBit app. That is continually tracking your movements throughout the day in order to work out the number of calories burned off. Run trackers, TomTom and Pokemon Go are other apps that will kill a full battery in ninety minutes or less. Not worth running unless plugged into a high capacity external battery pack. The ones made by Anker and sold via Amazon are to be recommended, based on my personal experience. They don't explode and catch fire because they use standard metal cased 18650 batteries, have good capacity and are reasonably priced. Always handy to have one or two lying around for those extended days out or long country walks using GPS mapping.
Thread Starter
My Fitbit doesn't stay in contact with the app all day, I turn off the bluetooth link on the Fitbit and on the phone except when synching/downloading the Fitbit stats every few days. The Fitbit does all of the calculation of calories itself, based on the measured activity levels, pulse rates, paces and some personal body stats (height, age and weight), the value is passed to the app only when synching takes place. Tracking my walking with a Garmin GPS shows that the Fitbit is not far out in calculating the distance walked from paces etc despite it not being fed a value for my pace length.
A quick check of the phone shows that forcing the Fitbit app to stop only stopped one of the three bits of the Fitbit suite running. It seems that neither of these remaining parts is responsible for the excess battery use seen at the weekend. The phone is still ticking over using about 1% of the battery per hour when I'm not fiddling with it.
A quick check of the phone shows that forcing the Fitbit app to stop only stopped one of the three bits of the Fitbit suite running. It seems that neither of these remaining parts is responsible for the excess battery use seen at the weekend. The phone is still ticking over using about 1% of the battery per hour when I'm not fiddling with it.
Thread Starter
It was all going so well, running the battery down at about 1% per hour, then the software update process kicked in and drained 18% in the next 7 hours. It was the only process in the application manager that had been running for just 7 hours, everything else listed had 60 plus hours running. Unbelievable.
Thread Starter
Having failed to keep some of the apps I want and at the same time keep the battery use under control I want to root my S3 and remove some of the bloatware. Can anyone point me to a definative list of what services are used by what apps, what processes are needed by what apps etc? There are many processes that I cannot stop without them instantly restarting, I suspect that I don't need all of them.
The biggest battery user seems to be triggered by my Fitbit app. The first time I forced it to stop battery drain went down to about 1% per hour. After using the Fitbit app to download my data from the Fitbit I now find that I cannot stop it. I click the force stop button and it immediately restarts. I think an update has installed since it was last stopped. The pending update process also seems to use a lot of battery until you OK the updates and let them happen. I now have to charge my phone every day, where it used to last me 3 to 4 days per charge.
During the investigative part of this hunt for battery wasting apps I un-installed the Maps app. I have just re-instated it and it now thinks it needs to have access to my personal contacts list! Why? Can I avoid it having my contacts but still use the Maps (with or without route guidance)?
The biggest battery user seems to be triggered by my Fitbit app. The first time I forced it to stop battery drain went down to about 1% per hour. After using the Fitbit app to download my data from the Fitbit I now find that I cannot stop it. I click the force stop button and it immediately restarts. I think an update has installed since it was last stopped. The pending update process also seems to use a lot of battery until you OK the updates and let them happen. I now have to charge my phone every day, where it used to last me 3 to 4 days per charge.
During the investigative part of this hunt for battery wasting apps I un-installed the Maps app. I have just re-instated it and it now thinks it needs to have access to my personal contacts list! Why? Can I avoid it having my contacts but still use the Maps (with or without route guidance)?
