Nexus 5 GPS Maps Battery issue

[Mike Jones31]

I used my gps for the first time yesterday and it drained the battery like I have never seen before. Is this a known issue with a fix? On a side note it did also lose gps signal several times. My note 3 did that as well and I cringed when this did it too.

 

[jj14x]

Active GPS use in Maps for navigation does drain battery, but first, define battery drain. Did your phone run out of battery (from 100%) in 20 minutes? If so, that is not normal. Did it run for 1.5-2 hours? If so, that may be normal.

Loss of GPS signal shouldn't happen - were you in a tunnel or in a parking garage etc? It shouldn't happen out in the open.

 

[LeoRex]

I used my gps for the first time yesterday and it drained the battery like I have never seen before. Is this a known issue with a fix? On a side note it did also lose gps signal several times. My note 3 did that as well and I cringed when this did it too.

When the GPS radio is active..... yeah.... that thing is a voracious beast. But it's that way for most any device out there. I was always puzzled as to why what amounts to a passive sensor is, by far, the biggest drain. I eventually found some info that kind of flicked on the lightbulb.

Remember, GPS is a very straightforward system; a bunch of satellites 12,000 miles up transmitting what amounts to clock ticks. A GPS device listens in on the signals and then uses them to triangulate your position. See, that last part is important. All this time I had been thinking in the wrong terms..... the radio isn't the problem... it's what it does with the data when it gets it.

Calculating your position from those radio signals takes a tremendous amount of processing power, and it has to do so constantly, several times a second. Now, combine all that processing with the fact that when it is doing its thing, your screen is most likely on, and running a map/location app (which are fairly power hungry in their own rights). It is a battery-eating perfect storm.

 

[Mike Jones31]

I can't say the exact times but it was highly noticeable. To guess I had maybe 40% and I barely lasted 15-20 min. I'm going to test it on my way home today. Any apps I could run after to see if it used too much battery?

Posted via Android Central App

 

[LeoRex]

I just thought of something to test.... OK, so the GPS radio isn't the issue, it's the processing..... I have FKU, which has the oh-so-handy Per-App mode.... Tonight on my ride home, I am going to fire up Waze and jack the CPU way down. If it's all processing, this should reduce the power consumption (how much.... *shrug*)

 

[tonyr6]

Don't bother with GPS. It even drains your device when it is off forcing a reboot to stop the drainage. Anything that causes the battery to go down even when the device is plugged into charging is not a good thing.

 

[jj14x]

Don't bother with GPS. It even drains your device when it is off forcing a reboot to stop the drainage. Anything that causes the battery to go down even when the device is plugged into charging is not a good thing.

Technically, it is not the GPS that is the problem. It is the badly designed/coded app that is polling the GPS (often unnecessarily).

 

[tonyr6]

Technically, it is not the GPS that is the problem. It is the badly designed/coded app that is polling the GPS (often unnecessarily).

Thanks that is what I thought. Still why doesn't Google own apps drain the battery because of GPS fix this?

 

[jj14x]

Still why doesn't Google own apps drain the battery because of GPS fix this?

Sorry - not sure I understood your question. Are you asking why Google doesn't fix their apps that drain the battery by using GPS? If so, you have a perfectly valid point. Google Location history has had a bad history of sucking down battery after some bad play services updates. But they do get fixed eventually (not soon enough unfortunately). I haven't had that issue in a few months now though, so I'm guessing they fixed that for good.

I must admit that I keep my tasker profile handy in case that issue crops up again (simple profile that sets location settings to battery saving, and switches to high accuracy only when I launch navigation/maps, and then reverts back to battery saving when I exit navigation/maps). Just in case the play services acts up again, I'll just re-enable that profile.

I remove any misbehaving app that sucks battery, but my phone won't work without the play services

 

[LeoRex]

Don't bother with GPS. It even drains your device when it is off forcing a reboot to stop the drainage. Anything that causes the battery to go down even when the device is plugged into charging is not a good thing.

Yes, why would we possibly need to know our position with relative accuracy? Turn by turn navigation works just fine without it. :-\

 

[Buddy1969]

I must say, I have better experiences at the moment.
Yesterday I came home from work and got on my bicycle to ride for a while. My battery was on ca. 60%. I listened to my MP3s and had maps running in the background navigating me around (just for fun, because I wanted to know if the "turn right into XY-road" orders are correct).
I was out for nearly 2 hours and the battery was down to 40% when I was back. I turned everything off (ended all the apps and let commodo cleaner empty the cache) and when I hit the pillow at about 10 in the evening I still had 20% battery ...

So at the moment I am excited with the battery endurance of this phone. But it's still very new (have it for about a month now).

 

[LeoRex]

OK... initial observations.... I jacked the CPU speed down to around 1160.... anecdotally speaking, I did see a reduction in the battery load with Waze running and the screen on.... so there may be something here to warrant more controlled testing... Using something like Franco's FKU Per-App modes to throttle the CPU speed when the GPS is running may actually result in a noticeable reduction....

But I have to carve off some testing time to give a definitive answer.