The hunt and eventual roasting of a battery hog app: Pocket

[sswitzer]

I love Pocket -- a quick way to store unorganized bookmarks, shared between your devices -- but I've found that recently GSAM has showed me that Pocket was taking up 50%+ of my battery usage... even when I'm not doing anything with Pocket.

I tried reducing syncing for the app (it's great that it lets you adjust things like that), but to no avail.

It seems, after reading some of their help docs, that it loads a view of each of your Pocketed web pages into your phone whenever it syncs.

As I never had this issue before with Pocket, and there haven't been any recent app updates, that the battery hogging was due to a page that I had Pocketed -- perhaps one of the pages' contents are causing the app to do an infinite loop during the sync.

At this point, I've uninstalled Pocket.

My wife's phone (same Pocket account) is also a G4... but I'm on marshmallow and she's on lollipop, and Pocket is not going nuts on her phone.

So the issue is twofold: a) Pocket kerplutzes when it tries to sync certain pages, and b) this mishugas ends up being badly handled in marshmallow vs. lollipop.

Anyways, I wanted to share this journey as a cautionary tale, the moral of which is that GSAM is great for telling you what's going on with your phone, and that when it tells you an app has transformed from a friendly dwarf into an evil troll... you need to kill that sucker, and not let it devour your phone.

 

[B. Diddy]

Thanks for that info! I would also send the Pocket developers an email--maybe it's a Marshmallow-related bug that they have to patch. support@getpocket.com

 

[ShaneRay]

Watch out for data usage as well... It ate through more than half of my monthly allowance in less than a couple of hours. I forget, but something weird in the sync settings that I eventually corrected.

 

[shadavis08]

The GPS being set on high accuracy roll kill your battery as well.

 

[Mikey47]

The GPS being set on high accuracy roll kill your battery as well.

This is not true. I keep mine (and my wife's g4) at high accuracy and get awesome battery life on both phones.

 

[tardus]

That was my theory - apps not optimized for 6.0 causing excessive battery use - and I still believe it's true. Over time actively developed apps have sorted themselves out - developers did the necessary updates, but apps that get less attention from developers cause much of the battery woes. I still have a few apps that I need to use and are not well behaved. I just disable until needed.

 

[Bruce39]

That was my theory - apps not optimized for 6.0 causing excessive battery use - and I still believe it's true. Over time actively developed apps have sorted themselves out - developers did the necessary updates, but apps that get less attention from developers cause much of the battery woes. I still have a few apps that I need to use and are not well behaved. I just disable until needed.

Agree 100% -plus adding or removing permissions can cure all sort of problems or issues.
Weather Channel used to drain battery, but they finally updated & is now OK. I used to check weather & then force stop; don't need to now ( they updated). I have several other apps that do not act nice; I don't use them often but do probably once a week. I just force stop after use.

Per idea from Tourbound - I use GPS for location & leave on constantly; uses very little battery - prior to this used to turn on when needed & then turn off. Note: always changed back to high accuracy each time.

Greenify is a very good app to force stop apps; uses no battery (have never seen it over 0% in battery stats). Can force stop apps with 1 click.
Another useful feature is can put phone into doze instantly instead of the built in delay. For me it did not seem to improve battery life much; It may improve batter life for others (depending on how they use the phone)

 

[B. Diddy]

Regarding the GPS question--I think it may depend on which apps might be using GPS for location, and how often they're refreshing that data. In High Accuracy, the GPS radio should only be active when an app needs it, so if you leave it on High Accuracy and apps are hardly using GPS, then I agree, battery drain should be minimal. But it might be a different story if you're using an app that frequently accesses location (either on purpose or due to poor coding), which may then lead to increased battery consumption.

 

[frifred]

Interesting. I have a G4 running marshmallow and I use Pocket - a lot! - and it does not show up as a major battery user. I am a Pocket premium user and, according to Pocket, have been in the top 5% of users for each of the past two years, so I save a lot of articles. I do, however, tend to delete the articles that I have saved after I have time to read them, although I do archive a few. As a Premium user, it downloads an actual copy of the article to my device (then deletes it after I delete it from Pocket). However, it does not do this sync until I actually open the app. Not sutre why it is causing battery darin on your device, although I certainly do not doubt you at all, but it is fine on mine. Another battery mystery

 

[Javier P]

I've been using Pocket for a long time, in different devices and Android versions and never had such a problem. I even sync my account, on a daily basis, between three different platforms. I recommend you to get in touch with their support team, they are very nice and extremely helpful.

 

[Mooncatt]

Regarding the GPS question--I think it may depend on which apps might be using GPS for location, and how often they're refreshing that data. In High Accuracy, the GPS radio should only be active when an app needs it, so if you leave it on High Accuracy and apps are hardly using GPS, then I agree, battery drain should be minimal. But it might be a different story if you're using an app that frequently accesses location (either on purpose or due to poor coding), which may then lead to increased battery consumption.

There's actually a bug that some of us have found in M that causes the GPS to stick on when set to high accuracy. As in on 100% of the time, even when an app isn't calling for it. Sometimes it requires a restart to clear it out, but other times simply opening something like Maps and then closing again will remove the location found icon. In the battery usage stats, you'll see GPS usage running extremely high.

I know that's not the OP's issue, but I wanted to point this out since GPS high accuracy was brought up.

 

[B. Diddy]

There's actually a bug that some of us have found in M that causes the GPS to stick on when set to high accuracy. As in on 100% of the time, even when an app isn't calling for it. Sometimes it requires a restart to clear it out, but other times simply opening something like Maps and then closing again will remove the location found icon. In the battery usage stats, you'll see GPS usage running extremely high.

Ugh. Is that only on specific devices, or does it seem to be a general Marshmallow thing?

 

[Mooncatt]

Ugh. Is that only on specific devices, or does it seem to be a general Marshmallow thing?

I've only seen it happen so far on the G4, both mine and a few others on here. I'm on Verizon, but don't remember the others off hand.

 

[sswitzer]

Interesting. I have a G4 running marshmallow and I use Pocket - a lot! - and it does not show up as a major battery user. I am a Pocket premium user and, according to Pocket, have been in the top 5% of users for each of the past two years, so I save a lot of articles. I do, however, tend to delete the articles that I have saved after I have time to read them, although I do archive a few. As a Premium user, it downloads an actual copy of the article to my device (then deletes it after I delete it from Pocket). However, it does not do this sync until I actually open the app. Not sutre why it is causing battery darin on your device, although I certainly do not doubt you at all, but it is fine on mine. Another battery mystery

I think it has to do with a particular site I have pocketed. Not sure which one, and I'm not that in need of pocket on my phone to make it worthwhile doing further testing (I can easily bookmark a site in chrome on my phone and then see it on my desktop chrome.)

Up until a few days ago I had not seen it happen, but for sure it was pocket, and for sure my wife's pocket (same account, but on lollipop) was OK.

 

[sswitzer]

If you check out the pocket reviews, two of the current top 3 reviews are about battery hog issues.

I don't know their circumstances or what sort of testing they've done, but clearly this is something pocket is now aware of.

BTW I love my g4

 

[sswitzer]

Just looked at my pocketed pages... maybe it's because I pocketed a PDF? That seems like the only real "odd" thing about my pocket use recently.

 

[Javier P]

They are pushing and update to fix this battery drain.

 

[sswitzer]

They are pushing and update to fix this battery drain.

I'm still seeing the old version... I'll keep an eye out for the new version.

 

[sswitzer]

The new version of Pocket seems to have fixed the battery drain issue.

 

[B. Diddy]

Excellent, thanks for the update!