Wifi Using battery when turned off!

[anon(5384869)]

Hello S4 users!

I have a co-worker with an S4 from Sprint running Android 4.4.2, and while looking for issues with his battery life (which have since then been resolved) I noticed something strange. In the battery usage graph, it shows that WiFi is ALWAYS on, but for most of the day until he arrives home, he actually has it toggled off. I have used many android devices (none Samsung) and have never seen that before. Pics below to show what I'm talking about. My question is, why is Wifi using power all the time, even though it's turned off?



Thanks for any help!

 

[dancing-bass]

If you go into the Wifi settings, check the "advanced wifi settings". There's an option there to enable wifi scanning even when wifi is turned off. This is mostly for location purposes - not for actually transferring data. If Google knows the actual physical location of "RouterX" which is connected to "Public Hotspot Y" - if your co-worker goes to that location Google instantly can use that to help lock in his location while relying less on GPS which uses more battery.

You can easily disable this, but it's pretty harmless - and from my experience is negligible on the battery usage.

An idea that may help your co-worker is to use Greenify (available from the Play Store). It's most powerful for rooted devices, but even on my un-rooted G3 I've used it and gotten a decent boost in battery life. (what it does is send whatever apps you select into "hibernation" when they've been idle for a few minutes. They "wake up" when you use that app and then go back into "hibernation" when they're no longer actively used.