Android OS battery drain with 4.4.2

[Pablo Liesenberg]

Initially I had the exact same experience, and I cursed myself for mindlessly upgrading to 4.4.2. The GS4 chewed up battery like a Great White Shark does seal blubber. Basically I had all of 2 hours of useful battery life, tops.

I went to the support forums and saw that the Android experts repeatedly stated that, of course, after a major upgrade like that it is only natural you must do a total factory-reset and wipe you phone (clearly I missed that class in software engineering ). Just use the built-in backup feature.

Well, I did backup, I did the factory reset. And indeed battery life is great again. I can easily work all day on the phone again and not worry.

The built-in backup feature in Android is garbage though - it just remembers which apps you had installed. It could not care less about you accounts, your homescreen, or anything else other than the apps you had installed. It just re-installs your apps and let's you reconfigure everything else.

But to keep a long story short - factory reset restores battery life.

...p

 

[Zieglers11]

Here is the fix to the battery drain issue for kit kat. ... One of these will be the culprit.... (Galaxy, Note, HTC, Nexus)

I had the same problems as everyone else - battery life reduced to 3-4 hours, overnight battery drain, etc. All a result of loading Kit Kat OS. I wished I never loaded it.... .

Anyway. .... If you make make these changes, you should be back to 10+ hrs battery life

1. Exchange account - change the sync schedule from push to 15 mins. This should not be necessary, however, the carriers and Google cannot get their s**t together, so this will provide a short term fix. The exchange sync is broken....... It syncs constantly and will burn battery life. Cannot believe Google and carriers released this Kit Kat piece of cr*p OS without testing it with Outlook exchange servers. Change your sync - it should fix most of your problems. ..... Worst battery offender

2. Disable Lookout application. . Go to application manager, all apps, scroll down, find lookout, turn off lookout. Same as above - this is a cr*p piece of software.... Runs constantly in background .. Burns battery life ..

3. Disable Camera running in background . There is a bug in the camera code. Do same procedure as #2. You can still use camera but it won't run in background. It will be available when you press the camera icon. This bug burns battery life badly

4. Reinstall Swift key keyboard app. This is another piece of cr*p software. ....Truly the worst app ever created. (although I love the prediction engine)
Bugs galore. Reinstall or get rid of it altogether...... You can find better keyboards

5. Update everything in Play store. Older versions of Google play services do not play well well well with Kit Kat for some ungodly reason. Google play services was burning 20% of my battery...... Install every update you can find. I am disturbed that Google would release an OS that is buggy with their own stuff. Do not buy their stock ... This idiotic release of a buggy OS will turn the investment community skeptical ....

6. Turn off S voice, story board, city ID if you dont use them

7. Turn off location services in settings. Again... Bad idea but it is the only fix until Google releases a new version of kit Kat. .... Location services is buggy and runs constantly in background..... Burns battery. You can turn it back on when you need it

7. Lastly - wipe the cache. Turn off phone. Press volume up, home button and power button same time. Android recovery mode will come up. Scroll down with Volume button and click on " wipe cache" by clicking power button " . Then Click Reboot


Your battery problems should disappear..... Check battery status by going into settings/more/battery...... You will see what apps are using battery

Hope this helps

Scott

 

[Bobs Toronto]

Thanks Scott.
One more thing...
In Security a) change Security level = normal. Otherwise it keeps CPU burning b) Security Policy Updates to manual c) Disable Send Security Reports.
Most imp. Automatic Display brightness does not work efficiently. It burns to 42% battery. Made it manual. Pain, but battery consumption by display is now down to 16-20%
Bob

 

[ajpri]

Anything?

 

[tonyr6]

4.4.2 is terrible. Why is Google starting to push this rubbish version to other phones? They should be pushing 4.4.3.

 

[pcguys]

I have the exact problem with my Note 3 after upgrading (as did @HothTron).

I will try the suggestions above.

Very disturbing it's so terrible all of a sudden, it used to be outstanding before the update!

Mike

 

[tonyr6]

Still they better push 4.4.3 to my Nexus 5 tablet and stop pushing this horrible 4.4.2 update. I have to reboot my phone at least every other day because of the rapid battery drain. I reboot it and it is fine 8 hours and only about 3% to 4% battery drain when not using then after I charge sometimes it it is 100% then a hour later of idle time down to 95% which means yet another reboot. Just fix the wavelock issues I can care less about new features.

 

[Robin Alfredsson]

Found another culprit for battery drain / high device awake ratio. If you have location settings set to 'Battery saver', but spend a lot of the day with wifi off, make sure that 'Scanning always available' on the Advanced Wifi Settings is unchecked. For me this results in reduced Android OS battery drain and a big reduction in time held awake as reported by GSam. I'm not rooted so can't get more precise wakelock info under KitKat, but my hunch is this is reducing the NLP (Network Location Provider) wakelocks. I've also got Location Reporting and Location History unchecked. Apps needing location data seem to be working just fine.

Thanks for the advice! I'm going to try this and see if it helps!
For the most time I have the GPS on Battery Saver and I never have WiFi enabled.

 

[arch stanton1]

I've found a fix. I enjoyed 3% overnight battery use until 4.4.2, when it would burn 1% an hour or more in standby. I have most everything disabled, but when it goes into the high standby battery burn I do a cache clear. I end up doing a cache clear every day now.

Some process starts itself and just runs the processor until you kill it with the cache clear. I have noticed that if I get any sort of notification of a software update, the standby battery burn is high until I do a cache clear. It's getting really annoying, but now I know the cache clear procedure in my sleep.

 

[Dayce Manalo]

My Android OS uses up to 75% of my battery overnight and it drains 10% per hour even the screen is off. Help?

 

[Brian Carlin1]

The Teton profiler made by Qualcomm works great for finding drain.

Posted via Android Central App

 

[troshs]

I had 100% battery life at 8 am this morning and it is now almost 1 pm. Without hardly any activity and the screen brightness turned down as well as power save mode running, somehow I still ended up at 60%. It used to be that I could go all day and barely be under 80%. I lost that with 4.2. I deal with it though, lately I've been bringing my charger to work with me or just flopping it on the charger when I get home around 6. By then it's usually 30 percent or lower and I usually don't touch the damn thing hardly at all. Battery drain shows primarily Android OS and Android UI. This is a freakazoid of an update if I ever seen one.

Posted via Android Central App

 

[tonyr6]

Samsung testing Android 4.4.3 on Galaxy S5 and Galaxy S4, outlines 4.4.2 update timeline for other devices | Android Central
Then why are they still pushing 4.4.2.

 

[troshs]

I wish they'd give a time frame on 4.4.3. Even though it might not have all the improvements, it's worth hoping for.

Posted via Android Central App

 

[tonyr6]

I don't care about new features just fix the battery drain issues.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

 

[sonicfruits]

I am having many issues since kitkat update one of which is same battery drain as you, I have motorola razr m

I am very good about closing apps, all I usually use are ruzzle, nav/maps and amazon mp3..and I close them when done

Chcek battery usage and it says screen 65%

I have yet to get through a day with out having to charge, before I could go a day or two easy

 

[Tanya Watts]

Have droid RAZR m & ever since kit kat update my battery constantly drains to & never did before. Pls let me know if someone knows how to fix this & I've tried a cpl lil tricks.
Tanya

Posted via Android Central App

 

[somerussianguy]

I had this issue on my Note 3 - phone heats up, something annihilates the battery (loosing about 1% a minute); running CM11 nightly (which CM team never updated in 2 months) Android 4.4.2 and whatever stock kernel that came with the ROM. It seemed to always happen whenever I restart my phone and at random after the phone's been on for a while. I downloaded the SetCPU app and basically something, app or some other service would reset the minimum CPU frequency to something like 1.4 GHz instead of the usual ~0.3 GHz; even though I wasn't actually doing anything on the phone. I created 2 profiles, one would keep the freq at ~0.3GHz min and ~0.7 GHz max with screen off, and another profile which would keep it between 0.3 and 2.3 (max on the Note 3) when screen was on. Basically forcing it. Well, it worked, most of the time. It would still attempt to reset the min but SetCPU would reset it back to normal right away. I downloaded another ROM: W03 SlimKat with Lean kernel, still the same Android 4.4.2 and never had that issue again; until I updated the ROM. This time the ROM came with a Temasek kernel. After 2 days with no issues, I got that massive battery drain and heat again. I never had that issue on my Nexus 7, which is completely stock, but a friend of mine had it on his Nexus 4, which is also completely stock. So it's not the ROMs or kernels, Google just ****ed something up!

 

[eburga]

I had a similar problem with a previous version of android when i setup exchange email. Well, unfortunately what worked for me was to reset/wipe the whole phone and install all the apps again one by one from the play store (NOT FROM THE GOOGLE BACKUP THAT REINSTALLS ALL APPS RIGHT AWAY WHEN YOU ENTER YOUR GMAIL ACCOUNT)

that makes sense because all the complaints come from people that have upgraded to kitkat, and very few from people that got it from factory.

I was getting huge drain from android os (~50% of consumption), and now it's behaving normally (~15% of consumption share).

In this regards I have to give it to IOS that usually does upgrades seamlessly.

I know it's a tedious fix, but shouldn't take more than 2-3 hours to accomplish. A recommendation is that while you do this you should think hard about which apps you actually use and which ones you can live without. We all install apps sometimes only to find out they are crap.

Hope this helps...

 

[troshs]

The last time I had decent battery was when I had my S4 and was running JB 4.2. Ever since then it's gone downhill. Haven't had a battery last a full day in probably 8 months. And I have all the right stuff turned on and the rest turned off (except GPS, I get constant ******** from every app when I shut this off).

Boom! From My S5