Tips that worked for me to dramatically improve battery life.

CTalman

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Dec 21, 2014
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I found the below battery saving tips whilst perusing the Samsung galaxy s6 forum (don't ask).

After I applied some of the tips I have seen my battery life dramatically improve.

Possibly doubling or even trebling the amount of battery life I was getting before.

Full credit to erasat for the below (I have copied and pasted his post from the Samsung forum).

Some of the below is not relevant for the LG G3 but I thought it best to include the whole post.

I hope others gain as much battery life as I have seemed to! Cheers.

From erasat.......
"Hi Guys.

Some of you know that I'm always around here trying to help as much as I can based on my own experience and all I read around different sites and forums. Last year I created a thread with some tips and tricks that I had done to my S5 and the amazing results I got from them. So here I'll try to do something similar with what I've found so far for the past 2 days that I've used my new Galaxy S6 edge.

I'd appreciate that if you don't like them or deep inside you know that your agenda is just to hate on any product Samsung make, or even those whose mentality is that they buy a Smartphone and they are not suppose to do anything to it or disable any features to get a good battery life, then this isn't your thread, please don't even post here and keep going to other threads. Like I read earlier today from a great post, I can leave my TV, Computer, radio or any other electronic device on all the time, but I don't, I just turn them on when I need them, that should be the mentality for those of us that bought a Galaxy S6/edge knowing it only has a 2550-2600 mAh battery on a 5.1" QHD screen, in doing so Samsung managed to build a wonderful piece of work, thin, light and beautifully, obviously it won't provide the same battery life of a phablet or a phone with a lot bigger battery, so I don't really know what miracle the people that been just complaining here were expecting. There seems to be a Wifi bug affecting some of you, those who have tried everything and it still draining really bad, I'd simply say that you should return that phone and get a new one, because as you are reading here and over XDA, there are a lot of us with very good and even great battery life averaging above 5.5 hours of Screen on time.

For the rest of you that really want to do whatever is there to try to maximize the battery life, you can try the following tricks or tips, the same ones I've been doing in my past 7 phones over the last year, and ALL of them have given me great battery life, my S6 edge so far is around the same battery life I had with my S5 and LG G3, more than the 4-4.5 hours I was getting with the Moto X 2014, less than the Note 4 that gave me around 6-6.5 SoT, and my OnePlus One that was giving me until yesterday morning 5.5 - 6hrs, the undisputable champion on this department is the Sony Xperia Z3 that I managed to get always over 7 hours of SoT and some days around 9. BUT, all of them with greater battery life had a lot bigger battery and just a 1080p display (With the exception of Note 4).

**NOTE** The following recommendations to disable certain apps is not to cripple the features of your phone, but to limit resources used by multiple redundant apps (weather, news, social networks, email, calendar, search/voice recognition, cloud services), the many versions of which all run in the background simultaneously.

So let's begin, for those of you that don't have your device yet, or you that don't mind to do a Full Reset I'd say that if you get a new device, just wait for your carrier's new Update, let it update and then go to Recovery Mode (Turn Off device, Press Power, Volume Up and Home button at the same time until you see on screen the Recovery mode information then let off the buttons and follow the prompts to Clear Cache and data for a Full reset). If you have your device and is already running with everything set and you don't like the idea of doing everything again, just go to the Recovery Mode and do only the Clear Cache and reboot.

Begin the setting and first thing to do is to turn off VoLTE and Wifi calling (If available), Smart network and Scanning Always Available (last 2 in Wifi Settings), none of these are needed for me. And Wifi Calling and VoLTE you can always turn them on when you really need them.

After that disable all Bloatware you don't need or use from Samsung, Google, Microsoft and Your Carrier (In My Case T-Mobile).

All the Toggles are there for a reason, like I mentioned above, you have a smartphone, but letting all the features and options on all the time is a bad idea, the toggles help you turn on/off them in a second, why waste resources and battery on something you won't need for the moment? here is how I always have them.

Brightness is one of the most important part of your battery life, and this is one area that is very personal, but let me tell you, I also was one of the guys that always had the brightness cranked up, one day I realized that this was not needed and I adjusted my eyes in a day or so to very low brightness settings, to the point that when it's above 50% it hurts my eyes, just give it a try to see if you get used to it, but do it with a positive mentality, set the brightness very low, 20-25% indoors and on a low light room and stay there reading and doing stuff, you'll see that you will get used to it, then go as low as you can honestly can go and give it a day or 2 and you'll see that you won't go back. I NEVER, EVER use any of my phones with Brightness over 25%, actually I always use between 15-20% in AMOLED displays, the 25% was on my LG G3, and with the option to use Auto brightness while Outside in all of them.

*Accounts Sync settings *

Google Accounts - This is something that I'd say is very important, I've been doing this with all my devices during all these years and all of them have given me very good battery life, even better than what it was expected from them. Go to Settings- Accounts and check all your Account Sync Settings, in particular Google and Samsung ones. By default, Google Sync ALL services from all the Google Apps you have enabled on the device, totally unnecessary and a huge battery drain. I have 2 Google Accounts, 1 personal and 1 from work, in my Work's account I just have syncing Calendar and Gmail, in my personal account I have most of them because one way or the other I need them, but there are others like Google Play Movies and Google Newstand that I have them off simply because when I want to read my News Magazines I just go to the ones I want and simply refresh them, that way I just use battery refreshing those and not to auto sync every article of every magazine I have in my library.

Samsung Accounts are also another one that you either use them or not, if you are like me that don't use any of their services I simply turn off sync completely, why having them on all of the time like it comes by default?

The same applies for any other Account you may have set, go one by one and check what you really need and for the rest simply turn sync off for those.

Some extra optional things worth mentioning:

1-) Turn Off Hot Word Detection Always Listening in Google Search. Having this on all the time will undeniably use battery that you are really wasting if you don't need it.
2-) Set a Dark or Black Theme/Wallpaper - AMOLED screens turn off pixels not in used, so having Black or dark screens, wallpaper and menus will definitely give you a boost on battery life.
3-) Until a possible Wifi bug is confirmed and fixed, try to see if your Wifi Router is 2.4ghz capable and even when it's maybe a 5ghz one, set it as a 2.4ghz connection, nothing scientific but it seems that most of us without any Cell Standby drain issue have Wifi routers with 2.4ghz and a couple of people with the issue have reported having 5ghz routers.
4-) I'm not running any of the Edge features, I really bought the edge for the looks, no need for Night Clock or any favorite edge features, if in the future there are some new edge feature I may like I'll definitely reconsider. Regular S6 users, this doesn't apply to you.
5-) S Voice is disabled - I forgot to add it to the above screenshots. You must go to Settings-Applications-Applications Manager-All and look for it in order to disable.
6-) Report diagnostic Info - It has been reported by some users that turning this off helps preventing wakelocks, turning it off doesn't seem to affect anything. Go to Settings- Privacy and safety.
7-) Some new reports and tests have shown that for some people with Standby drain issues disabling ANT+ Plugins service and ANT Radio Service has helped a lot. Look for both in Application Manager in the All or Downloaded tabs.

So that's it, if I think on something more I'll definitely add it here, so for last, I got this at 9:00AM yesterday and with my first full charge I managed to get 5 hours and 10 mins of SoT in my T-Mobile S6 edge. Today hasn't been different, it has been even better, I'm almost averaging 5.75 hours of SoT, so you can see that doing what I did above, may help you also. Good luck."

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CTalman

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Dec 21, 2014
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Currently my phone has been on for 14 hours 55 mins (from full charge) and I have 41% of battery remaining.
To be fair that is only including 2 hour screen on time but still.
A massive improvement on what it has been previously.

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Rukbat

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So let's begin, for those of you that don't have your device yet, or you that don't mind to do a Full Reset I'd say that if you get a new device, just wait for your carrier's new Update, let it update and then go to Recovery Mode (Turn Off device, Press Power, Volume Up and Home button at the same time until you see on screen the Recovery mode information then let off the buttons and follow the prompts to Clear Cache and data for a Full reset). If you have your device and is already running with everything set and you don't like the idea of doing everything again, just go to the Recovery Mode and do only the Clear Cache and reboot.
Or don't bother rebooting, go to Settings/General/Backup and Reset and do a Factory reset, then Settings/General/Storage/Cached data and clear the cache. It's faster - no rebooting time.

Brightness is one of the most important part of your battery life, and this is one area that is very personal, but let me tell you, I also was one of the guys that always had the brightness cranked up, one day I realized that this was not needed and I adjusted my eyes in a day or so to very low brightness settings, to the point that when it's above 50% it hurts my eyes, just give it a try to see if you get used to it, but do it with a positive mentality, set the brightness very low, 20-25% indoors and on a low light room and stay there reading and doing stuff, you'll see that you will get used to it, then go as low as you can honestly can go and give it a day or 2 and you'll see that you won't go back. I NEVER, EVER use any of my phones with Brightness over 25%, actually I always use between 15-20% in AMOLED displays, the 25% was on my LG G3, and with the option to use Auto brightness while Outside in all of them.
Velis Auto Brightness also seems to work very well - even with the default curve, it keeps the screen just bright enough for almost any light (in direct sunlight over your shoulder falling directly on the screen, very few phones give you a good display - because 100% brightness is about 1/3 of what you need.)

One thing left out here is to uninstall ANY apps that "clean RAM" to save battery. Uninstalling them saves battery. (I've run tests on quite a few of them. Killing apps without knowing what apps Android wants not killed is a battery waster. And anyone who writes an app like that is just demonstrating a lack of knowledge of how Android works, so I don't install any apps by that developer.)

Oh, and Greenify does save some battery - just don't Greenify apps you want running by themselves - like anything incoming (phone, text, email), alarms, etc.
 

CTalman

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Thanks Rukbat!

I currently have Clean Master installed which claims to do a few things including constantly cleaning cache.
Would you recommend getting rid of this app to save on battery life?

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dancing-bass

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Android is designed to run with "full" RAM - meaning the most recently used apps should stay sitting in the background ready to go (in the cache). If you're constantly clearing this out the OS has to constantly re-fill it with your recently used apps - which the "Cleaning app" then just clears out - and they cycle repeats.

If Android is designed to run this way, why try to defeat it? You will notice a small performance boost, for a short while anyway, while only one or 2 apps are sitting in the cache (which is how most cleaner apps market themselves) but long term you're making the CPU work harder then it needs to which of course is going to drain the battery faster then you need too. That's the quick and dirty explaination - I'm sure someone could give a more clear and detailed explaination if you need it
 

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