Battery draining fast

Kelly Kearns

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After many months now I too am getting some occasional drain issues I can't track down. Happens only every few days. I'll see the battery life and check my phone like an hour later and find a 20% drain for example. Battery indicator doesn't say anything other than screen being the top drainer. Rebooting fixes it. Wonder what is up. I have no push or sync services AT ALL! No scheduled fetch either.


Rev.

I've had a massive drain once, a few have and there are a couple of things that seem to be common..LTE signal strength and another process..can't remember the name, but everyone doesn't have that issue.

My drain was from 100% to 10% in about 6 hours, while I was sleeping..woke me up beeping. I didn't have things running either, but my signal was HORRIBLE. Yup, reboot seems to stop it if you catch it starting.
 

Rev2010

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I hadn't mentioned, I was on the original OS version that was from when I bought it. I just did the two updates - the minor one than I stopped the service and started it again and checked and it found the Jellybean update. Just updated it and all... will report back if the drain continues. So far all seems good with the update, it improved my Quadrant score nicely as well. Only thing is I can't understand why they always change something appearance related. I see the notification bar at the top is now a lighter black/dark grey color. No biggie really, I just liked it darker... blended in. Now it sticks out. When I was on Verizon though with a Droid 2 I was really annoyed by the change to a blue status bar (I hate blue), and a really silly color scheme change to the dialer.


Rev.
 

Kelly Kearns

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I hadn't mentioned, I was on the original OS version that was from when I bought it. I just did the two updates - the minor one than I stopped the service and started it again and checked and it found the Jellybean update. Just updated it and all... will report back if the drain continues. So far all seems good with the update, it improved my Quadrant score nicely as well. Only thing is I can't understand why they always change something appearance related. I see the notification bar at the top is now a lighter black/dark grey color. No biggie really, I just liked it darker... blended in. Now it sticks out. When I was on Verizon though with a Droid 2 I was really annoyed by the change to a blue status bar (I hate blue), and a really silly color scheme change to the dialer.


Rev.

They always do that, don't know why. That bar bugged me for the longest, have gotten used to it now. Many of us griped about it in the beginning. When they did the update from Froyo to Gingerbread on the Captivate, they make the bar black and it made the screen just pop and look so much better. Now it is like a "soft black" or charcoal and not a jet black.
 

ducey99

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Ummmm..battery saver. I don't believe in those, I have found they tend to cause a lot more problems and battery drainage. I'm sure there will be 50 on here that disagree with me, don't bother, I'm speaking from my experience.

If it was me, first thing I would do is remove that battery saving app.

Also, bear with me..bad storm night here last night and have and still have, a bad headache.

Are you rooted?

Go to Application Manager, then "running apps" and screenshot those and let's see what you have running.

Not rooted. I'm on stock JB.

Sent from my Verizon Samsung Galaxy SIII
 

ducey99

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On stock JB. And here is all the stuff I have running. There's a lot and I don't use a lot of these on a daily basis.

Sent from my Verizon Samsung Galaxy SIII
 

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Kelly Kearns

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First thing? You use S-Voice instead of the Google Now Voice Search?

Also, looking at RAM at the bottom of the screen, you are using a lot it seems. mine right now is 477mb used and 1.1GB free

The Samsung Push Service, I have that disabled and numerous other "Samsung" named applications that came on the phone. I won't say that it has helped my battery life, not sure, but I didn't use the Samsung account at all, so I just disabled it.

Does Swift Key show up on your list under your battery much?

Also, is that "Sync Service" a Verizon thing or something from the Play Store?

Did your phone stay awake most of the night again?

And last for now..when you go to your accounts (menu, settings, accounts) and the choose google, then choose your google account and look at everything set to sync..what all is checked there?
 

meyerweb#CB

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The amount of RAM in use has no real impact on battery life. It all gets refreshed, all the time, regardless of whether it's "used" or not. Having apps in RAM is more efficient than repeatedly reloading them from ROM.

Anyway, I don't know what all of those apps do, but many of them sound like the kinds of apps that do background data updates. If you've got a dozen apps doing data syncing in the background, that can chew up a lot of radio use, and a lot of battery. For every app that does background updates, see what the syncing interval is. Unless you really need rapid updates, try decreasing the frequency, or turn it off completely (on an app by app basis).

And get rid of the battery save. There doesn't seem to be any evidence those things actually help.
 

MrDoh

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I'd suggest using the "BetterBattery Stats" app, and find out what's going on with wakelocks and how much time your phone spends in various states. You should be aiming to increase your time in "deep sleep" state, phones that are using battery quickly typically don't spend much time at all in "deep sleep". At any rate, you can use that app to research your battery usage problems and find out which apps are keeping your phone awake. Then you can decide if you really need them and uninstall if reasonable, or look at changing their settings to see if you can't get them to sleep more. You have a lot of apps running, and any one or more of them could be keeping your phone awake.

I think that I'd also turn off all syncing for the time being, and see what effect that has. You can always sync manually for a little while during your research. But be careful about changing too much at one time, like turn off all syncing, and then turn each app sync on (if you decide you want to) one at a time and see what the effect of each is. I'm currently not doing any automatic syncing at all, gmail only gets sync'd when I go to read it, for example. But this isn't suitable for everyone, and may be an issue for work email *smile*.
 

Kelly Kearns

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I'd suggest using the "BetterBattery Stats" app, and find out what's going on with wakelocks and how much time your phone spends in various states. You should be aiming to increase your time in "deep sleep" state, phones that are using battery quickly typically don't spend much time at all in "deep sleep". At any rate, you can use that app to research your battery usage problems and find out which apps are keeping your phone awake. Then you can decide if you really need them and uninstall if reasonable, or look at changing their settings to see if you can't get them to sleep more. You have a lot of apps running, and any one or more of them could be keeping your phone awake.

For myself, I would agree with using that app, for diagnostic only, get things corrected if they can be and then dump the app after that. It is just something else running and using battery and then if you fix the problems, you don't need the diagnostic app running anymore.
 

MrDoh

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For example, I was using Accuweather, and it would leave a process in the app run queue when I wasn't using it, even when I was using it as an app, not as a widget. So I dumped Accuweather and am now using BeWeather. BeWeather is pretty good, and has running processes only when you're using it. I also only let it update when I open the app, not periodically. If I was using it as a widget, that would be different, of course.
 

Kelly Kearns

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For example, I was using Accuweather, and it would leave a process in the app run queue when I wasn't using it, even when I was using it as an app, not as a widget. So I dumped Accuweather and am now using BeWeather. BeWeather is pretty good, and has running processes only when you're using it. I also only let it update when I open the app, not periodically. If I was using it as a widget, that would be different, of course.

I've always used Beautiful Widgets app for weather and I've never noticed a drain on my battery from that, even if I had everything turned on to update and notify, etc. Sometimes it takes removing apps, adding them back one at a time and finding the one causing the problem.
 

MrDoh

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For myself, I would agree with using that app, for diagnostic only, get things corrected if they can be and then dump the app after that. It is just something else running and using battery and then if you fix the problems, you don't need the diagnostic app running anymore.

Yes, definitely. You only need to run that app when there's something going wrong. If things are going well, don't bother *smile*. After I'm done with it, I usually find it in the app run queue, and stop it there. "Remove all" tasks doesn't remove it from running in the background. Just a tip on that one.

One of my objectives is to have as little in the apps run queue as is reasonable when I'm not using my phone, and not to have apps there that I'm not using as well. It kind of bothers me to see "video player", or "contacts", or "maps" in the apps run queue when I didn't start them. "Contacts" is started by some MakeSimDBService thing on my phone, I'd like to find out why that needs to run so often since I seldom add or remove contacts. Not sure what causes "video player" app to start up, or why the "maps" app just starts running. I don't use Google Now, don't use the location stuff, only use standalone GPS. I hardly ever use my phone to watch videos of any sort, I have a tablet, laptop, and desktop that I use for that. These apps just appear occasionally, and I stop them. I'd like to track them down, but I'm pretty sure that they're not using a lot of CPU run time just being in the queue, but would like to have more control over stuff like that. I could freeze the video player on my phone, and am debating on whether I should do that. I'm sure that there's some of that "leave them in the run queue and cached in memory and they'll start faster" philosophy from the OS writers, but I don't use any of these enough to not be fine to have them start from scratch when I do use them.

Oh well, so it goes...
 

Kelly Kearns

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Yup, I'm kinda like that also. I've disabled things that I just don't use ever, instead of leaving them there running in the background. That is the "computer person" in me that must do that lol
 

ducey99

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First thing? You use S-Voice instead of the Google Now Voice Search?

Also, looking at RAM at the bottom of the screen, you are using a lot it seems. mine right now is 477mb used and 1.1GB free

The Samsung Push Service, I have that disabled and numerous other "Samsung" named applications that came on the phone. I won't say that it has helped my battery life, not sure, but I didn't use the Samsung account at all, so I just disabled it.

Does Swift Key show up on your list under your battery much?

Also, is that "Sync Service" a Verizon thing or something from the Play Store?

Did your phone stay awake most of the night again?

And last for now..when you go to your accounts (menu, settings, accounts) and the choose google, then choose your google account and look at everything set to sync..what all is checked there?

I use both svoice and Google now for certain things but I haven't used s voice in a while. Is there anyway to unsync in a mass instead of going to each app individually. The sync service is a Verizon thing.

Sent from my Verizon Samsung Galaxy SIII
 

Kelly Kearns

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I use both svoice and Google now for certain things but I haven't used s voice in a while. Is there anyway to unsync in a mass instead of going to each app individually. The sync service is a Verizon thing.

Sent from my Verizon Samsung Galaxy S3

Well it's really that Voice Search..you might want to use that instead of S-Voice, it's much better.

As far as the sync for google, you have it all right there for google. Now if you have a lot of apps like Facebook, twitter, etc that you have set to "refresh" or check for new messages a lot, that will do it to. I finally turned off my FB checking, but it seems it has push notification so that took care of that issue, I still get notified quickly. If you have anything like news apps that you have update every few minutes, that is going to wake up your phone constantly and drain battery. I have a "Synchronize" app that I guess is the same thing, but the AT&T version.

Did it stay awake again most of the night? The BetterBattery Stats app to diagnose the issues wouldn't be a bad idea. I've never used it but have heard a lot about it.
 

Kelly Kearns

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I use both svoice and Google now for certain things but I haven't used s voice in a while. Is there anyway to unsync in a mass instead of going to each app individually. The sync service is a Verizon thing.

Sent from my Verizon Samsung Galaxy SIII

You should really purchase that Better Battery app and run it and then let's look at the stats. It will tell you how long your phone is in deep sleep and the actual things keeping it awake. The app is a couple of dollars.
 

Rev2010

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OK, so just an update from me. Since the JB update I installed I am still get occasional battery drain. Overall though I have noticed the JB update seems to give a bit better battery life overall and mine was already great before the update - minus the random drain issue. Typically untouched on standby I get about 1% drain every 2-2.5 hours. When the drain issue occurs forget about it. Just happened again tonight. I know a lot of 4G devices have drain issues like this - blackberries, iPhones, etc and that it's often a location/signal based issue... however this happens in my house with a perfect 5 bar 4G LTE signal. I noticed when I got home I had about 80% battery life and now, about 3.5 hours later I'm at 43%!!! There's definitely something going on with the S3. In the battery usage monitor it always says the same thing too, main battery user is the screen. I leave my phone off while at work outside of my lunch break, so it's off for 7 hours a day, off at night, and charged up in the morning. I've never had a problem with it lasting a whole day, and with morning/afternoon/night usage of the internet I always have plenty of battery life... except when these damn draining issues occur. Never screwed me up yet though as I've always caught it and rebooted which stops the drain.

I also notice the phone gets quite warm when it's doing the drain thing. I can literally pull my phone from the holster and know instantly it's draining due to how warm it is.


Rev.
 

deanodrums

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I have the same issues aswell. ICS i had a very good battery life,i could get over a day and a half out of it. But since the 2 JB updates i cant get anything over 15 hours,10-12 seems to be about average for me now. Maybe it has something to do with the JB updates?
 

MrDoh

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Have those of you that have had problems since the JB update gone through your settings carefully and made sure that they're set as you want/need? I noticed that the JB update reverted a bunch of my settings back to defaults that weren't what I wanted in the interest of saving battery use. Also, I ended up doing a factory reset, and that helped, too. That was more work, and I needed to redo my settings yet again after that *smile*, but I feel pretty good about my battery usage now. I also rooted my phone after the update, and froze a bunch of apps that were running for some reason that I wasn't using. Anyways, now things are looking pretty good.
 

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