Rogue apps are using my phone more than I am

[Viva Terlingua]

I'm coming from an iPhone and trying to adjust to the One and android as much as possible. But the biggest thing that may force me to give up is the battery life. It was a non issue for me with iPhone. I didn't expect to get the same battery life with the One but it's not even in the same ball park. To make matters worse is you can't really top off the phone before going out for the evening because it charges so slowly.

Even though I didn't have to worry about it with the iPhone, I'm going to try and make whatever adjustments to address the problem. I've installed Gsam Battery monitor, DS Battery Saver Pro, and Watchdog Lite to try and figure out where the problem(s) is. However, I'm not having much luck deciphering all the data. One thing for sure is that it's not the stuff I am doing, it's the stuff that is happening when I'm not using the phone.

My first question is about Twitter. Twitter is using some of my battery and I don't even have a twitter account. I opened twitter to see if there was a setting I needed to adjust but it won't let me in the app without signing in, which I can't do since I don't have an account. I tried deleting twitter from my phone and it won't let me. How do I put a stop to this?

Songza. Why is this app using battery when it is not running? I can't see anything in the settings to turn it off.

According to Gsam, the kernel is using 34% of the battery. What is it doing? Watchdog Lite used 13.3%. I thought it was supposed to help.

Facebook. I keep trying to shut it off wherever I can find it and it still uses 8% of my battery. I check facebook about twice a week. I don't need any feeds or notifications, how do I make it behave.

Are there any other recommended apps to help me figure out what is going on?

 

[SCjRqrQCnBQ19QoYCtdl]

I'm coming from an iPhone and trying to adjust to the One and android as much as possible. But the biggest thing that may force me to give up is the battery life. It was a non issue for me with iPhone. I didn't expect to get the same battery life with the One but it's not even in the same ball park. To make matters worse is you can't really top off the phone before going out for the evening because it charges so slowly.

Even though I didn't have to worry about it with the iPhone, I'm going to try and make whatever adjustments to address the problem. I've installed Gsam Battery monitor, DS Battery Saver Pro, and Watchdog Lite to try and figure out where the problem(s) is. However, I'm not having much luck deciphering all the data. One thing for sure is that it's not the stuff I am doing, it's the stuff that is happening when I'm not using the phone.

My first question is about Twitter. Twitter is using some of my battery and I don't even have a twitter account. I opened twitter to see if there was a setting I needed to adjust but it won't let me in the app without signing in, which I can't do since I don't have an account. I tried deleting twitter from my phone and it won't let me. How do I put a stop to this?

Songza. Why is this app using battery when it is not running? I can't see anything in the settings to turn it off.

According to Gsam, the kernel is using 34% of the battery. What is it doing? Watchdog Lite used 13.3%. I thought it was supposed to help.

Facebook. I keep trying to shut it off wherever I can find it and it still uses 8% of my battery. I check facebook about twice a week. I don't need any feeds or notifications, how do I make it behave.

Are there any other recommended apps to help me figure out what is going on?

post your gsam screens.

Did watch dog find anything?

 

[Viva Terlingua]

Which Gsam screen do you want to see?

 

[SCjRqrQCnBQ19QoYCtdl]

The main one and the app sucker

 

[Viva Terlingua]

I hope this helps.

 

[joseph4200]

Strange I'm finding the battery life with my htc one to be better than it was with my iPhone 4s.

Mine charges pretty quick too. I wonder if you got a bad phone?

 

[mrbootcrm]

I'm not familiar with battery apps as I rarely have problems but I want to say 19.5 hours seems decent for medium usage. Best practice is to disable things you don't use. Goto the sync settings and turn off accounts you won't use. Be smart with radio use (turn off wifi if you won't be using it for a while.) Best luck.

Edit: 8 hours of held awake seems high I would think. Sorry I can't help but something is being a bad app I think.

 

[Viva Terlingua]

I'm not familiar with battery apps as I rarely have problems but I want to say 19.5 hours seems decent for medium usage. Best practice is to disable things you don't use. Goto the sync settings and turn off accounts you won't use. Be smart with radio use (turn off wifi if you won't be using it for a while.) Best luck.

Edit: 8 hours of held awake seems high I would think. Sorry I can't help but something is being a bad app I think.

The drain when I'm using it doesn't seem out of line. This morning when I road my bike to work I was streaming music over 3G to a bluetooth speaker and tracking via a GPS app. After an hour and a half of this I had 81% battery left. While this is slightly higher than my iPhone, it's not markedly so. The problem is I lost another 16% by lunch while not using the phone at all except sending and receiving one text.

 

[Viva Terlingua]

post your gsam screens.

Did watch dog find anything?

Watch dog was sending me all sorts of notifications, even about itself. It got annoying so I turned off the notifications,

 

[adriandb]

Strange I'm finding the battery life with my htc one to be better than it was with my iPhone 4s.

Mine charges pretty quick too. I wonder if you got a bad phone?

Your iPhone 4S was the bad unit then. It had the best battery life of any smartphone other than a razr that I'm aware of. It was even considerably better than the iPhone 5.

The One doesn't have a quick charge function, it's slow the entire time. This is well documented.

 

[leez]

I'm not familiar with battery apps as I rarely have problems but I want to say 19.5 hours seems decent for medium usage. Best practice is to disable things you don't use. Goto the sync settings and turn off accounts you won't use. Be smart with radio use (turn off wifi if you won't be using it for a while.) Best luck.

Edit: 8 hours of held awake seems high I would think. Sorry I can't help but something is being a bad app I think.

Also in the app settings (either under Settings -->Apps or by dragging the icon up for App Info) you can disable an app from running altogether. This is useful for those that you can't uninstall.

 

[GadgetGator]

The drain when I'm using it doesn't seem out of line. This morning when I road my bike to work I was streaming music over 3G to a bluetooth speaker and tracking via a GPS app. After an hour and a half of this I had 81% battery left. While this is slightly higher than my iPhone, it's not markedly so. The problem is I lost another 16% by lunch while not using the phone at all except sending and receiving one text.

Was the Bluetooth still on afterwards? Was the tracking app misbehaving? If you lost that much after running those things, I would start with those things as being the problem maybe.

 

[Viva Terlingua]

Was the Bluetooth still on afterwards? Was the tracking app misbehaving? If you lost that much after running those things, I would start with those things as being the problem maybe.

I turned off both the bluetooth and gps immediately after finishing my ride. It looks like the tracking app was still using battery (the My Tracks app), but I'm not sure how to fix that.

 

[SCjRqrQCnBQ19QoYCtdl]

See this -

A great explanation of the msm_hsic_host wakelock issue by "thracemerin" on the xda-dev forum : nexus4

 

[SCjRqrQCnBQ19QoYCtdl]

Watch dog was sending me all sorts of notifications, even about itself. It got annoying so I turned off the notifications,

That is worrisome. You can adjust the threshold of the notifications. Then when you get them you should investigate. Watchdog is probably giving you better information than we can hope to do on the forum to fix your problem.

You definitely have an issue with something waking you device constantly and frequently. I suspect one of your tracking apps.

Suspend Backoff - this indicates that wake events are happening so often, that the system has given up turning on and off and is just staying on:
https://github.com/asksven/BetterBatteryStats-Knowledge-Base/wiki/suspend_backoff

Could also be signal related as discussed in that xda thread I linked above.


Also, I assume you are running power saver?

 

[c613m]

My experience with the HTC One was that the first two weeks I was getting worst battery life than the iPhone 5. I dug around a lot online, learned Android, and went through each app I had installed. Disabled notifications for 98% of the apps I have, then went into the Settings / Apps / All, and went through every single one and disabled some apps that were useless to me. I have GPS/Bluetooth/NFC off all the time unless I need it, and I installed Power Notifications so when I leave home I flick off WiFi since I don't use it throughout the day. I also found a lot of problems with battery monitoring / security apps so I only have BetterBatteryStats installed to keep an eye out.

Now I'm about a month into owning the One and I couldn't be happier with the battery life. It was really trial and error and forced me to really learn about my phone which I enjoyed. Weeks ago I would come home to a phone that's at about 35-50%, and now I get home to a battery life of 70-80% (From 7am unplugged to 4:30pm). Usage varies of course but I use it quite a bit. I could literally see my battery drain beforehand, now, it can sit idle for a while and not be affected.

All this to say, give it a chance, learn about it, yes it's not like the iPhone, it's not supposed to be. You'll be pleasantly surprised when you get to know your phone and customize it a little bit, get rid of some apps you don't need and disable others than are preinstalled and will never be used.

 

[Viva Terlingua]

My experience with the HTC One was that the first two weeks I was getting worst battery life than the iPhone 5. I dug around a lot online, learned Android, and went through each app I had installed. Disabled notifications for 98% of the apps I have, then went into the Settings / Apps / All, and went through every single one and disabled some apps that were useless to me. I have GPS/Bluetooth/NFC off all the time unless I need it, and I installed Power Notifications so when I leave home I flick off WiFi since I don't use it throughout the day. I also found a lot of problems with battery monitoring / security apps so I only have BetterBatteryStats installed to keep an eye out.

Now I'm about a month into owning the One and I couldn't be happier with the battery life. It was really trial and error and forced me to really learn about my phone which I enjoyed. Weeks ago I would come home to a phone that's at about 35-50%, and now I get home to a battery life of 70-80% (From 7am unplugged to 4:30pm). Usage varies of course but I use it quite a bit. I could literally see my battery drain beforehand, now, it can sit idle for a while and not be affected.

All this to say, give it a chance, learn about it, yes it's not like the iPhone, it's not supposed to be. You'll be pleasantly surprised when you get to know your phone and customize it a little bit, get rid of some apps you don't need and disable others than are preinstalled and will never be used.

How do you know which apps are safe to disable? I see a lot that I don't know what they are, but I hesitate to uninstall or disable.

I have the Lookout security monitor installed. Is that eating battery and is it needed?

 

[Viva Terlingua]

That is worrisome. You can adjust the threshold of the notifications. Then when you get them you should investigate. Watchdog is probably giving you better information than we can hope to do on the forum to fix your problem.

You definitely have an issue with something waking you device constantly and frequently. I suspect one of your tracking apps.

Suspend Backoff - this indicates that wake events are happening so often, that the system has given up turning on and off and is just staying on:
https://github.com/asksven/BetterBatteryStats-Knowledge-Base/wiki/suspend_backoff

Could also be signal related as discussed in that xda thread I linked above.


Also, I assume you are running power saver?

Yes power saver is on.

How do you know if you've actually killed an app? I've read that just flicking them off the screen from the open apps screen doesn't necessarily kill them.

 

[c613m]

How do you know which apps are safe to disable? I see a lot that I don't know what they are, but I hesitate to uninstall or disable.

I have the Lookout security monitor installed. Is that eating battery and is it needed?

Some of the ones I disabled are Internet (I use Chrome instead), I have Google Play Books/Magazines/Movies disabled as well. Google+, Google Hangouts, Kid Mode, Cyberon Voice Commander, Frisbee Contacts,LinkedIn for HTC Sense, Picasa and Picasa Uploader... all disabled.

I had Lookout Installed, does it use battery, of course, does it use much? Not really. I don't have it installed anymore. I'm usually pretty concious of apps I install. But you don't need to get rid of that.

 

[frellingfrakker]

Yes power saver is on.

How do you know if you've actually killed an app? I've read that just flicking them off the screen from the open apps screen doesn't necessarily kill them.

I have nothing to back this up, but almost all the complaints of bad battery life I've seen are people with power saver enabled. I haven't used battery saver at all in the month I've had my One and the battery lasts all day every day and overall battery life is excellent. In wonder if there is a bug with the power saver that actually makes it use up more power.