Android battery life still sucks

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MrCrispy

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The problem isn't so much that its bad, its that its unpredictable and inconsistent.

On the same phone with same software, you can get massive drops because of Google play services, Android System etc, BT/GPS etc, and then you play a game with turning off services and hoping things work out.

I have tried custom roms, kernels, all kinds of fancy wakelock detectors, the problem is still there. My Nexus 6 suddenly started getting a huge battery drain due to wakelock from Google services, with no change on my side. The only fix I know is to reinstall and hope it goes away.

The best I've seen is drain of 2%/hour, this is with nothing running, no Facebook, airplane mode, phone idle and screen off. Its ridiculous - on WP and iOS devices you can get 2-3% drain total overnight.
 
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I'm all in with Android, now, but my OnePlus 5 gets its ass kicked by my iPhone 7+ in battery life.
 
MrCrispy said:
If I find a cheap used Pixel, I will upgrade. Its a real shame Google software is so bad, its the only reason I can think of.
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Pixel 2 out soon, do I suspect you will find some deals. Battery life on the phones is incredible. I never worry about battery any more.
 
MrCrispy said:
The problem isn't so much that its bad, its that its unpredictable and inconsistent.

On the same phone with same software, you can get massive drops because of Google play services, Android System etc, BT/GPS etc, and then you play a game with turning off services and hoping things work out.

I have tried custom roms, kernels, all kinds of fancy wakelock detectors, the problem is still there. My Nexus 6 suddenly started getting a huge battery drain due to wakelock from Google services, with no change on my side. The only fix I know is to reinstall and hope it goes away.

The best I've seen is drain of 2%/hour, this is with nothing running, no Facebook, airplane mode, phone idle and screen off. Its ridiculous - on WP and iOS devices you can get 2-3% drain total overnight.
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This used to drive me absolutely nuts. For years I went through this same ritual. Obsessing over what was destroying my battery life today. Constantly checking the app that says what is eating battery. Turning off services and things. It was completely ridiculous. I used android devices since the g1 all the way to the note 7. After the note 7 issue last year in Oct I got an ip7plus. Something I always swore I would never do. Like most of us PC guys lol. In the end my frustration with how Samsung handled the note 7 issue and having to give it up twice and my kids finally getting to me to try Apple I went for it. I've been super happy since. Battery life is awesome overall. I don't worry about what is running anymore. I don't worry about whether or not I should install a particular app or not since it might trash my battery life. I simply use the device the way it was intended and I have to say it's been great. I've enjoyed it so much that I'm getting an ipX in Nov hopefully.
 
pretty much why i go back to iOS every time i try android, far too many times i picked up my android phone and its hot enough to fry an egg and the battery is dead by 10am, always some craptastic app or process that has hung and killed my battery. good toy for kids but not something i can rely on for work

sgs2, sgs4, s6 s7, htc m8, pixel they all burned me enough i cant be bothered to try another android for quite some time

not a fan of apple or the apple business model but atleast the phone works as expected and as everyone tells you they just work, ios might be boring but it works
 
Honestly at this point the iPhone experience is so smooth and as close to flawless as one would reasonably expect I see no reason to change. I used to like to tinker and fuck around customizing my phone but in recent years I wasn't doing that much anyway so there's no loss to me in that regard with iOS. It's kind of the same way I used to bed with PC's way Beck in the day. Used to customize everything. Then I got to the point where relalibility was king to me and I pretty much leave well enough alone these days. Partly cause I'm over it and partly because I don't want what little time I have to enjoy my PC while gaming to be spent fixing shit. Same with my smart phone now.
 
People say that about the iPhone all the time and I wonder if they've really been using them for a couple years without wiping. My wife's 6s certain gets all the complaints people are complaining about Android having.

Battery drain, occasionally hot for no reason and mediocre to decent battery life in use. Along with a host of other problems.

I'm going to get her to wipe before updating to iOS 11 so hopefully that'll fix things. One thing iOS is by far better with is backups and restores.
 
I had similar issues with iPhones. Especially once they got over a year old and if the core OS had gotten a few updates.

With Android, the best solution I've found is to hop into the app screen and just "Force Stop" every app you have. Reboot and you'll be back to only running the stuff that needs to run in the background. If you have anything acting up, that tends to fix it. I've personally had apps (like the Disney World one) that loved to randomly go ape with the GPS and/or update functions and this fixes all of that.

Sometimes it's just the battery, too. I think some OEMs skimp on what type of batteries they're using. The guy who replaced my Moto X battery told me as much.
 
Android battery life still sucks... on devices that don't have a customized ROM that is tuned to ensure it's optimized for the hardware.

FTFY, basically, and I can point out multiple examples - and by a customized ROM I don't mean a third party one either, I mean a device ROM made by the manufacturer of the device where they retooled the AOSP code base and optimized it for the given device hardware platform they've created. OnePlus is probably the most notable one in this respect: the original OnePlus One could easily get 12 hours of SOT (Screen On Time) and exceptionally long battery life because of how well OnePlus customized their build of CyanogenMod with help from Cyanogen himself. Another example is Huawei and the customized ROM they have on some of their devices like the Mate 9 - I've got one friend with a Mate 9 and he never stops raving about the insane battery life he gets with it, upwards of 12 hours of SOT on it regularly.

Apple gets great battery life on their iOS devices because a) it's a narrow hardware profile aka all of them are basically the same guts with different screens and form factors but the insides are effectively identical in terms of the SoC and supporting hardware and b) they optimize the hell out of the code because that narrow hardware profile makes it relatively easy to do.

When you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of possible hardware configurations it's damned near impossible to tune for performance and battery life in any respects; you can often get good battery life with the trade-off of lackluster performance, or get barn storming speed performance while sacrificing the battery life, and other such contrasts but it's very rare to be able to do all those things well across the board. Android itself has no battery issues, it's just the code of the operating system.

What the OP and other people should say with more accuracy and clarity is "Battery life on devices that use Android still sucks" which is something I can completely agree with overall. Of course, I don't buy lackluster devices and I still get great battery life in my particular patterns of usage. I don't play games so I really don't give a shit about having the most powerful SoC on the market today, don't care about QHD displays and millions upon millions of pixels sucking up battery life for no good reason (seriously, 1280x720 is a sweet spot for me personally, it just works), and so on.
 
ended up with a 8500mah battery sleeve for my S6 Edge that's allowed battery life to be more manageable..
 
magnetik said:
ended up with a 8500mah battery sleeve for my S6 Edge that's allowed battery life to be more manageable..
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Unless you have an around the clock porn addiction, 8500 mah should make you phone last for days!! I'd call that more than manageable. LOL.
 
I have a Moto Z Play. Battery life is in the 24-72 hour range depending on how much I use it and whether or not I'm working, as the buildings I work in are almost faraday cages, so if the phone is constantly searching I'll get about a day out of it.
 
Johnny78 said:
You should probably specify that you're on a Pixel XL. My sister has a regular pixel and although the battery life is okay, the XL is definitely the battery champ between the two. Significantly bigger capacity.
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I would like to specify that I own and use a Pixel XL.
 
Tiberian said:
Android battery life still sucks... on devices that don't have a customized ROM that is tuned to ensure it's optimized for the hardware.

FTFY, basically, and I can point out multiple examples - and by a customized ROM I don't mean a third party one either, I mean a device ROM made by the manufacturer of the device where they retooled the AOSP code base and optimized it for the given device hardware platform they've created. OnePlus is probably the most notable one in this respect: the original OnePlus One could easily get 12 hours of SOT (Screen On Time) and exceptionally long battery life because of how well OnePlus customized their build of CyanogenMod with help from Cyanogen himself. Another example is Huawei and the customized ROM they have on some of their devices like the Mate 9 - I've got one friend with a Mate 9 and he never stops raving about the insane battery life he gets with it, upwards of 12 hours of SOT on it regularly.

Apple gets great battery life on their iOS devices because a) it's a narrow hardware profile aka all of them are basically the same guts with different screens and form factors but the insides are effectively identical in terms of the SoC and supporting hardware and b) they optimize the hell out of the code because that narrow hardware profile makes it relatively easy to do.

When you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of possible hardware configurations it's damned near impossible to tune for performance and battery life in any respects; you can often get good battery life with the trade-off of lackluster performance, or get barn storming speed performance while sacrificing the battery life, and other such contrasts but it's very rare to be able to do all those things well across the board. Android itself has no battery issues, it's just the code of the operating system.

What the OP and other people should say with more accuracy and clarity is "Battery life on devices that use Android still sucks" which is something I can completely agree with overall. Of course, I don't buy lackluster devices and I still get great battery life in my particular patterns of usage. I don't play games so I really don't give a shit about having the most powerful SoC on the market today, don't care about QHD displays and millions upon millions of pixels sucking up battery life for no good reason (seriously, 1280x720 is a sweet spot for me personally, it just works), and so on.
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You do not get more original and optimized than Nexus phones, and as an owner of multiple ones I can tell you all the battery life problems I mentioned exist, as I mentioned in my post. From what I read Pixel does a lot better, but there is no excuse for my Nexus 6.
 
I know what you guys mean. My Samsung S7 and S6 Edge Plus both actually have worse battery life than my Note 8 in daily usage. Don't know what's going on there ...
 
MrCrispy said:
You do not get more original and optimized than Nexus phones, and as an owner of multiple ones I can tell you all the battery life problems I mentioned exist, as I mentioned in my post. From what I read Pixel does a lot better, but there is no excuse for my Nexus 6.
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I would have to say "Nope" on that: even in spite of the Nexus devices being narrow profile devices, the flagships of what Android is supposed to be able to be capable of, the "shining example" of it if you will. But neither Google nor the companies that have made Nexus devices in the past (Samsung, LG, Huawei, Motorola Mobility) ever actually went in and optimized the actual build of Android installed on those devices, it was plain vanilla AOSP and again, it's that optimization and tuning that makes the difference.

How do I know this? Because using a custom ROM like CyanogenMod (which was available when the Nexus 6 was released) and a customized tuned kernel resolved all those stock battery run-time issues for me with the Nexus 6 I owned, and as a result my battery life (in terms of a per-charge span of time) effectively doubled - I went from getting roughly 2-3 hours of SOT at best with 30% brightness to nearly 7 hours SOT daily and that was with the original stock battery and not a new replacement one 8 months after the phone was released. So yeah, neither Google nor Motorola really did a great job with that one from the factory or with updates when they were released over time.

I look at Nexus (and Pixel) devices as experimenter's toys, for those of us that want to get in there and customize the hell out of the device and the OS, whichever OS we want to install (since those devices allow for such things with bootloaders that can be readily unlocked even if it does void any warranty potential). One reason that I really like OnePlus and their devices, especially the original One, is they don't give a shit about that kind of thing and their warranty actually allows for bootloader unlocking and as a bonus if you fuck a device up with a bad flash and brick it, that's covered under warranty which is pretty awesome. Kinda wish other manufacturers offered such service but alas they don't.

Anyway, I've owned several Nexus devices such as the original Nexus by Samsung, still love that design and form factor, it was just awesome, a Nexus 4, a Nexus 5, and a Nexus 6, but no Pixel devices so far, they just aren't worth the money to me, and even the original Nexus 7 tablet too and none of them offered the battery life that I was hoping for using the stock ROMs until I started using custom ones, and I improved even that when I was able to use custom kernels.

I know people want "pure Android" and there are custom ROMs that offer all the benefits of pure AOSP + additional ones like longer battery life and better performance. Not all of them end up going batshit insane with customization crap that's not really useful nor do the majority of them have some silly bright pink MLP unicorn as their logo. :D
 
Tiberian said:
I would have to say "Nope" on that: even in spite of the Nexus devices being narrow profile devices, the flagships of what Android is supposed to be able to be capable of, the "shining example" of it if you will. But neither Google nor the companies that have made Nexus devices in the past (Samsung, LG, Huawei, Motorola Mobility) ever actually went in and optimized the actual build of Android installed on those devices, it was plain vanilla AOSP and again, it's that optimization and tuning that makes the difference.

How do I know this? Because using a custom ROM like CyanogenMod (which was available when the Nexus 6 was released) and a customized tuned kernel resolved all those stock battery run-time issues for me with the Nexus 6 I owned, and as a result my battery life (in terms of a per-charge span of time) effectively doubled - I went from getting roughly 2-3 hours of SOT at best with 30% brightness to nearly 7 hours SOT daily and that was with the original stock battery and not a new replacement one 8 months after the phone was released. So yeah, neither Google nor Motorola really did a great job with that one from the factory or with updates when they were released over time.

I look at Nexus (and Pixel) devices as experimenter's toys, for those of us that want to get in there and customize the hell out of the device and the OS, whichever OS we want to install (since those devices allow for such things with bootloaders that can be readily unlocked even if it does void any warranty potential). One reason that I really like OnePlus and their devices, especially the original One, is they don't give a shit about that kind of thing and their warranty actually allows for bootloader unlocking and as a bonus if you fuck a device up with a bad flash and brick it, that's covered under warranty which is pretty awesome. Kinda wish other manufacturers offered such service but alas they don't.

Anyway, I've owned several Nexus devices such as the original Nexus by Samsung, still love that design and form factor, it was just awesome, a Nexus 4, a Nexus 5, and a Nexus 6, but no Pixel devices so far, they just aren't worth the money to me, and even the original Nexus 7 tablet too and none of them offered the battery life that I was hoping for using the stock ROMs until I started using custom ones, and I improved even that when I was able to use custom kernels.

I know people want "pure Android" and there are custom ROMs that offer all the benefits of pure AOSP + additional ones like longer battery life and better performance. Not all of them end up going batshit insane with customization crap that's not really useful nor do the majority of them have some silly bright pink MLP unicorn as their logo. :D
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I completely 100% agree with this! In fact I said a while ago (may have been a different forum) that Samsung optimized the drivers etc much more than Google and that Nexus was just tested to make sure it ran. Btw I am running a custom rom and it makes things better but not that much better, in fact the custom rom for HTC (RIP) and Samsung phones a few years back when I had them used to be so much nicer. But there is a myth and 'prestige' attached to Nexus which I never understood. I have it now because the phone was cheap (I paid $25- new for a Nexus 6) and I am using Project Fi,

If not I'd switch in a nanosecond to a Chinese phone like Huawei or OnePlus.
 
I think the situation with the Pixel is different from Nexus. First, Pixel is not stock Android.

As for why Nexuses are the shining example, nobody talks about it for battery life. It's the unlocked bootloaders and frequent speedy updates, which is still the biggest problem in the Android work. Look at the percentage of devices updated to Oreo. It's hilarious.
 
My S7 edge is usually at about 15-35% when I go to sleep at night. Take it off the charger at about 5:30 AM and go to bed between 10-11PM. Seems more than adequate to me. I use it all day long for browsing the web, a little media, some Facebook/Twitter, etc.
 
The biggest problem with Android is that 3rd party apps/services can still hide behind "Android OS", "Android System", and "Play Services". I really wish Google would fix that so we can see exactly what is causing wake locks and draining issues.

Having said that though, I haven't had any (software related at least - I had to replace a defective battery that had plagued many other 6Ps) battery issues on my 6P in over a year. That last time was when the T-Mobile app was keeping my phone from sleeping and killing the battery with the screen off. The only reason I figured that out, since it was hiding behind "Android OS" or something like that, was because I'm rooted and used Better Battery Stats to find the offending app. So I just killed all so permissions to it (since I still wanted to keep using it) and fixed it.

Since then, I've been able to consistently lose maybe 1% battery every hour or two while in standby on my 6P. My wife's Z Play is about the same in standby, but absolutely blows every other phone away with active use battery life; literally twice at least of any other flagship, including any iPhone.
 
On my reliable LG Stylo 2 Plus the idle battery consumption (with Wi-Fi enabled always) is about 0.2% per hour as measured by BetterBatteryStats so, I'm good in that respect, running the Android 7.0 stock T-Mobile ROM but it's rooted. Most of the devices I've owned in the past few years, almost all of them being LG devices, use no more than about 0.9% per hour but this one is exceptionally low so I've got no issues with it. I don't have anything other than Google services and a weather app that will do background activity and I always make sure to check for excessive wakelock activity with Wakelock Detector every so often (because new updates to apps could introduce issues with ones that didn't have them before).

All total I have 62 apps installed from the Play Market and I make use of the majority of those pretty regularly.
 
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