Google App Battery Drain

[dp3103]

The last week or 2 with my Verizon G4 I've noticed my battery draining faster than it did right when I got the phone. When going into the battery details, the Google App is ALWAYS the top one and is using way more battery than I've ever seen on any of my android phones going back a few years. I will tell it to STOP, but that doesn't seem to stop it from coming back. Then looking at other threads where people post screen shots showing app use, all of their usage always has the Google App at the bottom with just a few percent of use. Mine is running anywhere from 20%-50%. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Inders99]

I forced stop, cleared cache, and disabled it. Chrome and Hangouts sucked my battery dry too, now I use CM browser and disabled Hangouts.

 

[Cyngn Ray]

To the original poster, are you running stock on your device?

 

[dp3103]

I've gone back and forth from stock to Nova Prime to see if I could tell a difference, but every time the Google App was sucking the battery dry! I saw on another post yesterday that someone suggested going into the app manager and uninstalling updated, then I cleared cache, and that seems to have helped so far (it's only been a day). Speaking of Nova Prime though, I still can't get the stock messaging app to work, but I'm using Textra for the time being. I just preferred the way the stock app would pop up on the home screen.

 

[sswitzer]

The last week or 2 with my Verizon G4 I've noticed my battery draining faster than it did right when I got the phone. When going into the battery details, the Google App is ALWAYS the top one and is using way more battery than I've ever seen on any of my android phones going back a few years. I will tell it to STOP, but that doesn't seem to stop it from coming back. Then looking at other threads where people post screen shots showing app use, all of their usage always has the Google App at the bottom with just a few percent of use. Mine is running anywhere from 20%-50%. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

This is from the Common Issues and Solutions sticky, and I'd advise to read through the threads quite thoroughly, as others have reported the same things and have come up with decent solutions:

Google Play services & battery performance: http://forums.androidcentral.com/lg-g4/541344-google-play-services-issue-after-10h-update.html, http://forums.androidcentral.com/lg-g4/546044-play-services-battery-drain-fix.html, and http://forums.androidcentral.com/go...play-services-eating-battery.html#post4497795 (from the Nexus 6 forum.)

(What's inside: some diagnoses -- could it actually be the Fit app causing the problem? - and a couple of fixes involving disabling, cache clearing, etc.)​

 

[TNCattleDog]

So I have a theory as to why google play service may be taking up so much battery on some phones and not on others. Its the advertising.

We all like free stuff and tend to download a lot of apps to our phones to make them smarter. The devs that create the apps have to make some money, so they rely on advertising to support their works. My thoughts are that a lot of those apps report back to google via the google play services to control and distribute the advertising through a common core function.

I did some diging and this is what I found on googles developer site about play services. Its a breakdown of all the core modules on play services and what they do. Seems like there is an awful lot related to advertising:

https://developers.google.com/android/reference/packages

Seems like things get better after doing a hard reset and reinstalling apps... for a while, but the more you open and close the apps, the more traffic they may generate to the play services servers.

One of the things that prompted me to start thinking about this was a recent hard reset which initially resulted in better than battery life for the first couple days but after reinstalling a lot of my apps, many of which are "free", I started to notice a decline in battery performance and an increase in google play services. Its certainly not a scientific observation but it does raise suspicion..

Thoughts?

David

 

[belodion]

^^^That's very interesting and worth further investigation and observation.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[RedOctobyr]

TNCattleDog, I think it's an excellent theory, and very interesting.

My anecdotal results seem consistent with what you observed. I am now on my second G4 (Verizon). My first had issues with running warm, and battery life.

For the first one, I used Tap and Go during setup to transfer all my apps from my last phone, an S3. There were a lot of them, 99% of them free. The list of apps I exported from my S3 shows 135 apps.

This time, I wanted to simplify as much as possible. I transferred 3-4 apps from my S3 during setup, because I wanted to keep using the same versions of those apps. Then I selected the bare minimum of other apps I "needed", and installed those from the Play store. This was only 15-20.

Other than that difference, I think I have both phones setup similarly. I reduced the Google apps that sync, etc, but didn't take any "extraordinary measures" (using Access Lock, etc). And so far, my battery life seems better on the new phone, with the smaller load of apps.

This makes more sense if Android insists on starting apps in the background, even if you haven't actually tried to run them yet. I know it can restart apps that you kill, so I'm assuming it may do something similar for installed apps that you haven't used since booting up.

From what I've read, with root, something can be done to block the pulling of ads by apps? Perhaps that would help a bit.

 

[TNCattleDog]

Holy Cow!!!!

Uninstalled Play Services, cleared the cache and data yesterday. Been unplugged since 7am and at 15:40, my battery is at 84% and play services is near the bottom of the list weighing in at 3%!!! (well, up to 9% now) Also uninstalled several "free" apps that I don't use.



David

 

[greydarrah]

Holy Cow!!!!

Uninstalled Play Services, cleared the cache and data yesterday. Been unplugged since 7am and at 15:40, my battery is at 84% and play services is near the bottom of the list weighing in at 3%!!! (well, up to 9% now) Also uninstalled several "free" apps that I don't use.

View attachment 185996View attachment 185997

David

I keep wondering...if you uninstall Play Services, how do you reinstall it? It's the app that you use to search for and install other apps. I'm wanting to do this, but can't figure out how I'd gt in back installed.

 

[TNCattleDog]

Can't completely uninstall it. Cleared cache and data then hit the uninstall updates button. Re-started the phone and let google reupdate it.

David

 

[greydarrah]

Can't completely uninstall it. Cleared cache and data then hit the uninstall updates button. Re-started the phone and let google reupdate it.

David

Going into Google Play Services from Settings>Application Manager, I can clear the cache, but there is no clear data button and my uninstall updates button is grayed out. The only option I have is the Disable button. However, I can uninstall updates to the Google Play Store app. It that the one you mean?

 

[TNCattleDog]

I went into application manager > All > Google Play Services > Manage Space > Clear All Data.

After that, back to the Application manager > Google Play Services > Uninstall Updates. (Which is now grey'd out on mine) app version is 7.5.74

Hope that helps.

David

 

[mintas26]

Try turning off "GOOGLE NOW CARDS"

 

[koves]

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[Mohd Iskandar]

The last week or 2 with my Verizon G4 I've noticed my battery draining faster than it did right when I got the phone. When going into the battery details, the Google App is ALWAYS the top one and is using way more battery than I've ever seen on any of my android phones going back a few years. I will tell it to STOP, but that doesn't seem to stop it from coming back. Then looking at other threads where people post screen shots showing app use, all of their usage always has the Google App at the bottom with just a few percent of use. Mine is running anywhere from 20%-50%. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Mohd Iskandar]

if you have rooted phone , please download servicely , it helps me a lot