Well I am pleased to say I do not need a new phone (yet), I solved my battery problem on my Samsung Galaxy Note 9. I'm a bit frustrated because I never figured out exactly what the problem was but my theory is a crypto miner.
When my battery issues started, I immediately suspected an app. Even though I use my phone mostly just as a phone and I'm very careful about what I install. So I started uninstalling apps, shutting down and blocking permissions on apps, and using the built in tools (which are pretty good) to monitor and track battery usage by app and system process. When that failed to find any smoking guns, I moved on to trying quite a few 3rd-party battery optimizers and usage trackers. Still no smoking guns and no real improvement. At this point I thought I might be infected with something, but 4 malware scanners, a rootkit scanner, and a system file checker all failed to find anything amiss. Finally I backed everything up and did a factory reset. And even that failed to solve the problem! Only then did I resign myself to the fact that the Li-ion battery must have a partial short (dendrites?) and must be failing. Then as a last ditch effort, having read somewhere that extremely well written malware can survive a factory reset, I reflashed all the ROM images.
SUCCESS! My battery life is back to where it used to be! So I am highly impressed (and highly pissed) that some hackers somewhere have written a very stealthy and very resilient piece of malware and managed to waste a great deal of my time. I'm happy at least that I don't have to shell out $$$ for another phone.
So for those of you out there who may be having unexplained battery issues -- try a factory reset and if that fails, try reflashing your ROM images (Warning: Difficult and dangerous for a non-techie, proceed with extreme caution).
When my battery issues started, I immediately suspected an app. Even though I use my phone mostly just as a phone and I'm very careful about what I install. So I started uninstalling apps, shutting down and blocking permissions on apps, and using the built in tools (which are pretty good) to monitor and track battery usage by app and system process. When that failed to find any smoking guns, I moved on to trying quite a few 3rd-party battery optimizers and usage trackers. Still no smoking guns and no real improvement. At this point I thought I might be infected with something, but 4 malware scanners, a rootkit scanner, and a system file checker all failed to find anything amiss. Finally I backed everything up and did a factory reset. And even that failed to solve the problem! Only then did I resign myself to the fact that the Li-ion battery must have a partial short (dendrites?) and must be failing. Then as a last ditch effort, having read somewhere that extremely well written malware can survive a factory reset, I reflashed all the ROM images.
SUCCESS! My battery life is back to where it used to be! So I am highly impressed (and highly pissed) that some hackers somewhere have written a very stealthy and very resilient piece of malware and managed to waste a great deal of my time. I'm happy at least that I don't have to shell out $$$ for another phone. So for those of you out there who may be having unexplained battery issues -- try a factory reset and if that fails, try reflashing your ROM images (Warning: Difficult and dangerous for a non-techie, proceed with extreme caution).
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