New AT&T S3 owner here. Seeing some weirdness with battery/apps.

[blue_sector]

Hi. Made the jump from iPhone to S3 about 4 days ago. I like the S3 a lot but I'm trying to wrap my head around something that happened last night.

Some background: With power-saving options enabled, I've noticed that the phone drains about 1% per hour while on standby. That seems a little high but it's probably to be expected due to gmail updates over WIFI and/or app updates.

When I went to bed last night, the phone was charged to 100% and I made sure that there were no running tasks (old habit leftover from the iPhone). Now, I would expect the battery to be at around 91-93% when I woke this morning. Instead it was at 66%...so it drained around 4% per hour or 4x more than normal. Checked the task list and there were three (!!) running tasks: gallery, maps and a third one that I don't recall. WTF? I *know* those apps weren't running when I went to bed. Checked the battery usage stats and gallery was on top at 73% and maps was sitting at 8%. So that certainly explains why the battery was abnormally drained. But why were those apps even running? Gallery, in particular, is something that I haven't explicitly used since the day I got the phone.

Is this common behavior? I didn't see any update notices in the notification bar but is it possible that the apps automatically updated overnight and after updating, they started running?

Any insights would be appreciated...

JM

 

[jontalk]

First, congrats on making the move to a GREAT device!!

While also an Apple convert who has had my sexy red GS3 for just over a month, the first thing I did was to calibrate the battery using this method: Calibrate Android Phone/Tablet Battery and Achieve Longer Battery Life I also installed Juice Defender (free) afterwards. As far as apps that updated, this would show in the notification bar which you can see when you swipe it down. I don't remember seeing any updates recently for Maps. I also would suggest you change the settings on your Gallery so that it doesn't automatically check your photos to upload. I do mine manually if I want to upload any. Gallery should NOT be the highest juice user at all which may be your problem.

When I view my Battery setting screen it shows the following:

46% Discharging 1d 21h 32m 10s

Cell Standby 48%
Screen 19%
Maps 10%
Android System 7%
Device Idle 6%
Android OS 4%
Aquamail 3%
Chrome 2%

Granted, I've had the p;hone for a while and don't spend tons of time on it, I would say on average I charge the phone about every day and a half. I also set my phone on WiFi while at home, which is often since I work from home. Hope that helps.

 

[dano92580]

Make sure you have your Wi-Fi, bluetooth, location services, etc all disabled while you are sleeping. This will make it last a lot longer. Also, the TouchWiz software included on the S3 drains the battery alot I found, that's why I rooted my phone. It allowed be to disable all the pre-installed apps I didn't ever want to run. And then eventually I went to CM 10 instead of TouchWiz which has again doubled my battery life.

 

[MangoPowah]

It's usually due to cell standby. A while back I didn't get much sleep (about 5 hours); I went to sleep with about 91% left, then woke up with about 55. Cell standby looked to be the culprit. Could be the same with yours.

Sent from my HTC One X

 

[badtux]

Usually when this happens it's because of one of two things -- 1) you're checking your email way too often, which requires turning on the radios to check your email, or 2) you're running advertiser-supported programs in the background, and they're turning on the radios to update their cached ads. You'll want to back off on your email checks and use a battery saver to kill off background programs. The one you'll see people around here mention is JuiceDefender, my only beef with JD is that it gives you ammo to shoot yourself in the foot if you're not careful. Luckily it does tell you when you're about to shoot yourself in the foot, and give you the choice to shoot yourself in the knee instead . (Just kidding on that last one, heh).

 

[blue_sector]

Thanks for the replies.

MangoPowah, I would be more understanding if it were due to wifi or cell radios (ie. signal problems overnight might cause the radio to draw more power). But according to the built-in battery app, the primary culprit was the "gallery" app at over 70%. What made this even more curious was that I had killed all tasks before going to bed so "gallery" started sometime overnight while the phone was in standby. I've only had the phone for about a week and I've only seen this behavior once so maybe it was just an anomaly...

jontalk, do you mean turning off sync for photos? Or is there another setting in gallery that I've missed?

badtux, thanks. I grabbed JuiceDefender this evening. Will see how it does over the next few days.

I had planned to eventually install Tasker to do some unrelated automated stuff and it looks like it's flexible enough to do at least most of what JD does, so I might switch from JD to Tasker at some point. Looks like Tasker also gives one plenty of rope with which to hang oneself...

 

[Showking]

I ran into a similar problem where the phone had 80% battery before bed and was almost dead in the morning. For me the problem was with S-Voice. In the app go into settings and make sure the box next to "wake up command" is not checked. When it is checked the phone is constantly "listening" for a command. Check that out and maybe you'll have some luck.


-Showking

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Android Central Forums

 

[jontalk]

blue sector.. Yes, I would turn off sync for photos. If you have photos you want to upload to Google + you can do it manually which is what I do. But I also have Photobucket and Instagram which do not run in the background syncing.. As you can see from my first response, I don't even show the Gallery in the battery settings at all. Since you're seeing big % number from the gallery I would make the settings changes and see what happens. And by all means install Juice Defender, though many people say that using Tasker isn't the best idea.. Up to you of course

 

[blue_sector]

Just an update: after running Juice Defender for a few days, it appears to have lowered battery drain by 25% - 50%. The JD widget says +27% but in reality it feels higher. Prior to installing JD, the battery would drain at a rate of about 1% per hour while in standby mode (except for the one night that I mentioned in the original post). Now it seems to drain about 1% every 2 hours in standby mode.

So...nice app. Honestly, the power-saving toggles that JD adds probably ought to be made part of the base Android OS.

Couple downsides:
1) since Bluetooth is turned off when in standby mode, it no longer automatically pairs with my car gps
2) the phone is sometimes a little jerky for a couple seconds when you bring it out of standby mode. presumably this is due to JD turning the radios back on, etc.

 

[jlh73]

I ran into a similar problem where the phone had 80% battery before bed and was almost dead in the morning. For me the problem was with S-Voice. In the app go into settings and make sure the box next to "wake up command" is not checked. When it is checked the phone is constantly "listening" for a command. Check that out and maybe you'll have some luck.


-Showking

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Android Central Forums

That's weird. I just looked at mine and it was checked. It even said it might drain battery.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Android Central Forums

 

[riderrick65]

Make sure you have your Wi-Fi, bluetooth, location services, etc all disabled while you are sleeping. This will make it last a lot longer. Also, the TouchWiz software included on the S3 drains the battery alot I found, that's why I rooted my phone. It allowed be to disable all the pre-installed apps I didn't ever want to run. And then eventually I went to CM 10 instead of TouchWiz which has again doubled my battery life.

Hey dano, I'm a new-b with the SG3 and I'm also having trouble with battery life, can you explain what you mean by rooted and CM 10? I would really appreciate it.