Battery life all of a sudden bad. Why?

[nia07]

Hi all

In the past few weeks, my battery life is all of a sudden bad. I made no change on my apps or settings or anything, yet the past 2 weeks the battery drains fast. It never did before. What is going on?

And to make it more confusing, my bf's Nexus has been going loopy. He has to spare battery charge dock and switches batteries daily to keep them both charged and ready. All of a sudden both of his batteries are draining real fast, worse than mine. He went to VW and they sent him a new battery, seems a little better but not as good as it was.

Could we have a bad charger in the car? But even that isn't common, his doesn't charge with most of my charges, but the car we have the dual cords.

What else can help us figure it out?

Just an fyi, I just ran a software update right now, but do not think that will fix the battery life, right?

[CR6]

As I mentioned in the "Occasional reboot" post, try downloading an app called gsambattery, let it run for a day, and that will tell you what's eating up your battery.
There are so many variables that affect battery life, it's extremely difficult to pinpoint this issue in a forum type setting such as this. However, your first step would be to try what I mentioned above. That's a good place to start.
You might also check to see how often Facebook or other social media apps sync, weather widgets, maps (is your GPS always on), brightness level, etc etc.
Good luck!


tap'n

[kokoman]

Mine started draining last wk right after i got another update. Drains like crazy now, it used to last all day

[linds0r]

+1 for what CR6 said.

Using GSM you can figure out if one app is drawing a lot of battery, which might be because it now has location services or constant syncing turned on. Once you figure out what the drain is, you can use a memory killer, freezer, and/or boot-up programs to fix errant programs. Let us know what you find and we can help.

[Jarhead]

Good thing you guys never had a TBolt, That thing would go from full charge to 10% in 3 hrs. Literally! My GSIII is amazing as far as battery life.

[Putty]

Android system is always the highest offender on my list. What is this?

[Killowatt]

I've noticed a faster battery drain as well, after the verizon update. No changes to my phone except that update.

Sent from my Galaxy S3 with Tapatalk 2

[Miller6386]

Good thing you guys never had a TBolt, That thing would go from full charge to 10% in 3 hrs. Literally! My GSIII is amazing as far as battery life.

AGREED!! I was lucky to get 6 hours out of my TBOLT with light usage... With my S3 I can get a good 10 hours out of it with pretty heavy use...

[JIW]

There is something in the Android System that is killing me. When the battery is draining like crazy Android System shows to be 55% to 65% of my battery drain. When my phone is getting great battery life it's more like 10% to 15%.

The other day I did some digging and decided to do two things. Uninstall Samsung Apps and go to google maps and toggle off Location History in settings. The battery suddenly stopped draining and I felt like a troubleshooting rock star. I went from my phone completely dyeing by 4pm (with barely any use) to having 20% left when I went to bed at night (with pretty heavy use). Android system was also showing usage of well under 20%. Amazing.

This morning I wake up and unplug my phone. After sitting on my desk for nearly and hour (unused) I have lost 13% battery life. Android System is showing 56% battery drain again. This sucks.

The only other clue as to what is going on comes from my Alarms in better battery stats. When my battery is crap I'm getting about 140-170 wakeups per hour from com.google.android.apps.maps (while all other processes are averaging about 2-10 per hour). When my battery is going great that number drops down to about 20-30 per hour. But I've made no changes to my Maps settings after that initial fix... and it's rearing its ugly head again.

[Miller6386]

Turn off your GPS all together if you aren't using it... You have one of the apps scanning for your location. Could be the browser set up to use your location to show you local search results or FB messenger if you use that... There are many programs that use your current location..