1

This started about 2 weeks ago, on my Samsung and by wife’s HTC. Unplug them (at 100%) and the battery starts dropping right away. Can’t make it half a day without needing to charge. Both phones used to be fine for the whole day.

Neither of us had an OS update recently. Either it’s something with Verizon or something with an app we both have.

Have any of you had this happen recently? Any thoughts on how to track down the problem?

4 Spice ups
2

Our CFO just had this happen on his new S7. No wall charger would charge the damn thing and once off the charger it only lasted a short time. He bought a wireless charger and hasn’t had an issue since, go figure.

3

They charge fine. No issue with that, no speed change in the charging process.

4

You should have some kind of battery usage monitor. I have a Huawei which has something called Battery Manager on it but if you search the settings for battery you should get something.

It will show the consumption of all the apps on the phone including the builtin google services

5

Go to Settings Power Battery usage history. Poke around in there to see what’s consuming your battery. It could be something as simple as an app you both recently installed that’s doing a lot of background communication or something external like the nearest cell tower going off-line, requiring the phone to use more power to communicate with the cell network. In either case you’ll see the culprit(s) in the battery usage history.

1 Spice up
6

I don’t see a History for battery use that goes past the last charge. But I had forgotten that item was in there. I will check that tonight. At work I need to keep it charged up, just in case.

7

depending on the battery age they might be developing some bad cells and not getting a proper charge.

8

Both phones are fairly new. The HTC is about a year old, the Samsung is less than 3 months old. The fact that they both started doing this at the same time really makes me think it’s an app.

9

The biggest thing I find in battery drain is data usage - app sync and background cell data will drain your battery like a slurpy. Check your data usage as well. Cell data radios use (especially LTE) use about 3-4 times the battery power wifi does.

With Android 5 and 6, the majority of programs are moving their data access into the Background Data process, so the app never actually shows up in the battery usage meter. the only way I’ve been able to actually track and minimize the problem from my phone was to install Mobiwall firewall, because it uses a fake internal VPN to track the data usage. By blocking access, the cell data radio doesnt get used and conserves battery life.

10

At home, where we are noticing this, we are always on WiFi.

Can you clarify this? You block access to the cell towers?

11

No, I block access to the APPS on the phone. Mobiwall allows you to block background data, cell data, and wifi data independently, though some apps will not work at all if background data is blocked. Background data will only use the unblocked wan connection.

Screenshot_2017-02-24-12-21-31.jpg
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In teh case of my screenshot, you can see I have cell data turned off for everything, and wifi enabled on the top 3, with everything blocked on the Android Shell system app. I even have Google Play restricted to wifi only because it ran my data usage up 6GB in 4 days doing background updates constantly as well as draining my battery.

My battery life is @90% currently, and it’s been off the charger since 6:15am…

EDIT2: if you’re on wifi and seeing this. look at your screen settings. Screen brightness will also suck down battery life. Use a manually set screen brightness instead of Auto, and also see if you can find an app for Wakelock detection to see if anything is keeping your phone running full bore. (wakelock basically causes your phone to stay running full power with the screen off)

12

Nice! I’ll check that out. Even if it doesn’t help with this current issue, that looks like a great app.

13

Well… Apparently posting about it was all I needed to do. The phones are back to normal. I’m guessing it was something with the cell towers, but who knows?

1 Spice up
14

This depends. It’s all about how well a tower can hear you - the power output from your phone varies. In a poor quality area, inside a building, etc, your phone will consume a LOT of power. If you’re near a tower and the quality is great, a battery will go all day with plenty to spare.

At one office of ours, I will unplug first thing in the morning, get to the office at about 95%, and it will be under 20% by lunch. At another office (which happens to sit clean LoS at 1/4 mile of a Vz tower) will be at 70% by noon. Similar call volume, data use, etc. Did this test over a random 5 day period on each site as my schedule allowed and got pretty close results each time.

15

LTE in a connected state uses 1000-3500mw of power. In a sleep state lte radios use about 15mw. Wifi uses about 200mw. The biggest reason for this is that LTE is a MIMO technology, and will connect to multiple towers simultaneously for data, it doesnt just hop from one tower to another. At&t published this information years ago.