Can your carrier (at&t) tank your battery?

justlaxin13

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Ok, so I have been on at&t for my whole phone-owning life. Coincidentally, (or maybe not) I have always found that my devices vastly underperformed the battery life number talked about in respected reviews and screen-shotted in various forums (like this one).

Now, I know that usage may vary depending on how one uses their device blah blah blah. I have always tried to mentally adjust for this by looking at screen on time, awake/deep sleep numbers and percentages compared with others. I often find myself posting in the forums for various phone forums trying to get to the bottom of my battery life woes. Through my last five ATT branded android phones (S3, S4, G2, Moto X, and now M8) I have found i generally get half the "normal person's" battery life with HALF the screen on time on average with no other wildly obvious sources of issue. I've RMAd phones to no avail and turned to these forums too. Nothing seems to work.

It gets interesting, though, when I look at the two other phone I've owned in that span: the Nexus 4 and 5. Both obviously non-ATT branded devices and both just so happened to get similar battery life to whatever everyone else on the internet was experiencing out of the box.

So, what am I to conclude from all that? Is it possible I'm missing something major because it seems to me that something about the ATT branded phones is hurting my battery in a big way. It can't just be a matter of bloatware can it? The area I live/work in give me good signal pretty much all day every day (besides that variable would have come into play with the Nexi as well).

What do ya'll think? Also, I couldn't quite figure out the best play to post this in these forums, so if someone has a better recommended forum, let me know and i'll move shop.

Thanks in advance, I'm curious if anyone has an answer on this one....
 

VDub2174

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Maybe it is all the bloatware carriers put on their branded phones like you said? I don't see what else it could be.
 

justlaxin13

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Maybe it is all the bloatware carriers put on their branded phones like you said? I don't see what else it could be.

Yeah, i mean i never open the bloatware apps so presumably they won't get going in the background, and they don't seem to show up in GSam or anything on their own. Idk, that's the obvious first though, but it seems like they couldn't do so much damage undetected.
 

VDub2174

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Yeah, i mean i never open the bloatware apps so presumably they won't get going in the background, and they don't seem to show up in GSam or anything on their own. Idk, that's the obvious first though, but it seems like they couldn't do so much damage undetected.
I instantly get rid of all bloatware on my phones....lol
 

B. Diddy

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I agree that it probably has to do with AT&T bloatware. You may not ever open it yourself, but it might be running in the background. For example, in my experience, Verizon's superfluous Backup Assistant Plus will keep running in the background if you ever opened it--even once, to see what it was all about. When I had a VZW phone, I remember having to clear the data from Backup Assistant Plus to essentially reset it to factory state, and then be careful never to open it, to prevent it from activating itself. And you can't disable it on VZW.

It really depends on what the bloatware does. If it's something that constantly runs in the background to "assess device health," then it might be running needless processes that use up battery. Or if it's something that constantly refreshes or syncs data every 15 minutes. My suggestion is to disable all possible carrier apps that you don't need.
 

Rukbat

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I've been with AT&T Mobility (which is a name owned by Cingular) since they called by their own name, and was a dealer for them back then. I usually get at least as long a time between charges as everyone I see posting, and sometimes more.

That's not to say that another carrier's phone of the same model may get a lot more battery life. There are ROMs for my AT&T phones that get a lot more battery life, and some that get a lot less. If you run the CPU faster, you get less battery life. If all cores in the CPU are running, it shortens battery life. Bloatware also comes into it - the more things running, the more battery is used.

If you're comparing 2 S4s at the same time, with the same usage, and yours gets less battery life than the other one, you probably have a defective battery or a defective phone. But if you're comparing your S4 to someone else's S4, it's meaningless. Just running the battery down to almost 0 most of the time will quickly decrease the time between charges for the same use. So will taking a route to work that gives your phone a weak signal for half an hour every day. You not only have to compare apples to apples, you have to compare apples grown on the same spot on the branch of the same tree.
 

justlaxin13

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I instantly get rid of all bloatware on my phones....lol

What's your process for that? I know the root > titanium backup freeze way. Is there a better one? And idk if I feel like getting into trying to root yet, but if it would help with the battery life that much i might have to.
 

justlaxin13

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I've been with AT&T Mobility (which is a name owned by Cingular) since they called by their own name, and was a dealer for them back then. I usually get at least as long a time between charges as everyone I see posting, and sometimes more.

That's not to say that another carrier's phone of the same model may get a lot more battery life. There are ROMs for my AT&T phones that get a lot more battery life, and some that get a lot less. If you run the CPU faster, you get less battery life. If all cores in the CPU are running, it shortens battery life. Bloatware also comes into it - the more things running, the more battery is used.

If you're comparing 2 S4s at the same time, with the same usage, and yours gets less battery life than the other one, you probably have a defective battery or a defective phone. But if you're comparing your S4 to someone else's S4, it's meaningless. Just running the battery down to almost 0 most of the time will quickly decrease the time between charges for the same use. So will taking a route to work that gives your phone a weak signal for half an hour every day. You not only have to compare apples to apples, you have to compare apples grown on the same spot on the branch of the same tree.

That's not really true. Those things you're talking about can be monitored. And when you are talking about differences large enough the comps do work. For example, if we drive the same car, we may drive differently in different places, but if I'm getting 3x the gas mileage, that's outside even the most steep highway/city split and would likely indicate something is wrong.
 

professorator

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had a phone with battery die in 4 hr just would not hold even turned off then just got new phone changed every thing to the other (sim,memory) cleared and rebooted it gave it to my son put his chips in and wala battery and phone fine back ground apps dead and deleted stuff i think got out of hand and phone picked up speed again so roug program or just extra junk you figur!!!!!
 

VDub2174

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What's your process for that? I know the root > titanium backup freeze way. Is there a better one? And idk if I feel like getting into trying to root yet, but if it would help with the battery life that much i might have to.
I root and flash an AOSP ROM which doesn't have any carrier apps, only Google apps. I have one T-Mobile app on my phone and that's just so I can see my usage and bill amount.
 

VDub2174

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Haha yeah, i mean, I know there are ways to go it with just root access, which I wouldn't mind, just too lazy to get into it as of yet haha
You can most certainly freeze them as you said. I just never use the extra carrier apps so I figured I'd get rid of them completely :)
 

justlaxin13

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You can most certainly freeze them as you said. I just never use the extra carrier apps so I figured I'd get rid of them completely :)

Would freezing them serve the same end in terms of ensuring they aren't using any phone resources (other than taking up storage space)?
 

LeoRex

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When I had a VZW phone, I remember having to clear the data from Backup Assistant Plus to essentially reset it to factory state, and then be careful never to open it, to prevent it from activating itself. And you can't disable it on VZW.

Much as I hate Verizon... I credit them, and that blasted Backup Assistant for being the motivation to really dive into how Android works. Because that POS of an application would sneak up on my and destroy my battery.... for whatever reason, that hunk of crap would fire off and run away, killing a charge in a blink of an eye. Took me a while but I tracked it down to this stupid, useless and redundant app. It would fire and, for whatever reason, fail to contact Verizon's servers to complete the backup. Now, a GOOD app would just timeout and give it a shot at a later time. This turdbiscuit? Nope... it would just go full throttle against the wall until I either killed it, rebooted the phone, or it eviscerated my battery. And because they loaded it as a system app, the only recourse I was able to take was to root and wipe it off my phone.... which I continued to do until I replaced my Stellar (no dev support) with an S3.... and it was like Morpheus handing me the red pill.

Unless they lock these things down hard, I will never keep any carrier-ware or crap from HTC or Samsung.... I think it is pretty messed up that a bunch of dudes who get together and compile some AOSP code with some nifty add ons can put out a release of Android that is VASTLY superior to what a multi-billion companies can muster up (performance, power efficiency, aesthetics, etc).
 

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