[Q] Battery life is turrible

Kwwolves2012 · Jan 9, 2014

So, I got a Galaxy S4 back at the beginning of December, and the battery life has just been awful since I got it. I'm talking 5 hours max.. of juice. Its bugging me because I have tried so many different options and nothing makes it last any longer. One time I got 8 hours and I was like planning on throwing a parade because it was so groundbreaking for my GS4.

Here's what I normally have going on:
Admittedly I use my phone quite a bit and it's always on full brightness because hey its a $600 1080p phone so I want to be able to use it to its full potential.
I do not have one game installed. Never been a huge fan of mobile gaming.
I usually have a 4-5 bar 4G signal and barely use my wifi because it's like 300kb/s down.. And really spotty.
I may listen to 30 minutes of music a day.
Most of the time I'm on twitter and looking up stuff on Chrome.

This is not a battery issue I do not believe because my brother got the same phone and he has had similar issues. My brother uses his phone maybe half the time I do, so I doubt it is my usage that is bringing it down. I seriously do not want to have to contact Samsung for them to tell me it probably has water damage and then ask me to wait 2 weeks to get my phone back. My phone does tend to get warm from time to time but I've seen multiple reports of that. My iPhone 4 that I upgraded got 8 or 9 hours of battery life on similar use. (Android rocks)

So what is the problem?

P. S. my phone ran down 8% while typing this.

nerdyblonde · Jan 9, 2014

Kwwolves2012 said:
So, I got a Galaxy S4 back at the beginning of December, and the battery life has just been awful since I got it. I'm talking 5 hours max.. of juice. Its bugging me because I have tried so many different options and nothing makes it last any longer. One time I got 8 hours and I was like planning on throwing a parade because it was so groundbreaking for my GS4.

Here's what I normally have going on:
Admittedly I use my phone quite a bit and it's always on full brightness because hey its a $600 1080p phone so I want to be able to use it to its full potential.
I do not have one game installed. Never been a huge fan of mobile gaming.
I usually have a 4-5 bar 4G signal and barely use my wifi because it's like 300kb/s down.. And really spotty.
I may listen to 30 minutes of music a day.
Most of the time I'm on twitter and looking up stuff on Chrome.

This is not a battery issue I do not believe because my brother got the same phone and he has had similar issues. My brother uses his phone maybe half the time I do, so I doubt it is my usage that is bringing it down. I seriously do not want to have to contact Samsung for them to tell me it probably has water damage and then ask me to wait 2 weeks to get my phone back. My phone does tend to get warm from time to time but I've seen multiple reports of that. My iPhone 4 that I upgraded got 8 or 9 hours of battery life on similar use. (Android rocks)

So what is the problem?

P. S. my phone ran down 8% while typing this.

Are you running a custom or stock rom? And are you rooted?

jd1639 · Jan 9, 2014

Look at your battery usage in settings. Screen should be number 1. What's after that? Get betterbatterystats and see where your wake locks are. Without some additional info it's hard to help you

Kwwolves2012 · Jan 9, 2014

nerdyblonde said:
Are you running a custom or stock rom? And are you rooted?

No I am not rooted anymore. My phone had a locked bootloader so I just uninstalled some bloatware and unrooted. I have had the problems since I got it.

Android 4.3
AT&T i337
MK2 Firmware

Kwwolves2012 · Jan 9, 2014

jd1639 said:
Look at your battery usage in settings. Screen should be number 1. What's after that? Get betterbatterystats and see where your wake locks are. Without some additional info it's hard to help you

It depends on what I am using the most. Most of the time its below 10% of total battery use. I would say it is mostly Chrome at 4-8%.

Right now it has been on for 37 minutes and is at 85% battery.

84% screen
7% Chrome

hednik · Jan 9, 2014

Kwwolves2012 said:
It depends on what I am using the most. Most of the time its below 10% of total battery use. I would say it is mostly Chrome at 4-8%.

Right now it has been on for 37 minutes and is at 85% battery.

84% screen
7% Chrome

so under battery usage it's just screen and chrome usually ? (iId dump chrome to begin with anyway)

Is GPS on ? Any other apps that would be constantly syncing like facebook, twitter, etc ?

Kwwolves2012 · Jan 9, 2014

hednik said:
so under battery usage it's just screen and chrome usually ? (iId dump chrome to begin with anyway)

Is GPS on ? Any other apps that would be constantly syncing like facebook, twitter, etc ?

Yes, normally screen and chrome are the biggest consumers but I do use a few more apps. I've been wanting a Chrome alternative, but nothing I've tried has been as efficient.

I do use Twitter and Facebook(rarely), but at the same time, my brother doesn't use any social media and his battery isn't much better.

hednik · Jan 9, 2014

Kwwolves2012 said:
Yes, normally screen and chrome are the biggest consumers but I do use a few more apps. I've been wanting a Chrome alternative, but nothing I've tried has been as efficient.

I do use Twitter and Facebook(rarely), but at the same time, my brother doesn't use any social media and his battery isn't much better.

The biggest user of battery would be the screen, LTE, and GPS or location based processes. Honestly LTE that doesn't use much unless you are streaming all the time. Something isn't letting you phone go to sleep and if you can root I would just do it to be able to use an app like greenify or another wakelock killer that lets you keep apps from keeping you phone awake. Also turning off sync in general helps i.e making you refresh stuff manually.

Kwwolves2012 · Jan 9, 2014

hednik said:
The biggest user of battery would be the screen, LTE, and GPS or location based processes. Honestly LTE that doesn't use much unless you are streaming all the time. Something isn't letting you phone go to sleep and if you can root I would just do it to be able to use an app like greenify or another wakelock killer that lets you keep apps from keeping you phone awake. Also turning off sync in general helps i.e making you refresh stuff manually.

Thanks for your help so by the way. I always have gps off and I only get regular 4G in my area. I will check with Facebook and try to turn off automatic syncing. Rooting is an option, last time I went through kingo and did it just fine until I tried to flash Cm over my locked bootloader *facepalm* Haha. I haven't heard anything definitive on the downside of using that tool. It was very simple. Would you suggest me going that route for Greenway?

hednik · Jan 9, 2014

Kwwolves2012 said:
Thanks for your help so by the way. I always have gps off and I only get regular 4G in my area. I will check with Facebook and try to turn off automatic syncing. Rooting is an option, last time I went through kingo and did it just fine until I tried to flash Cm over my locked bootloader *facepalm* Haha. I haven't heard anything definitive on the downside of using that tool. It was very simple. Would you suggest me going that route for Greenway?

No problem just hit the thank button

I'd root and just leave it stock the rest of the way. With battery life it's always YMMV. The battery stats given in the setting menu don't tell you much so apps like wakelock detector or Greenify allow you to stop apps from "waking" the device all the time to either push notifications, sysnc, do whatever crap they do in the background. You could also get something called better battery stats, the app in on xda just google it, and let it run from full charge to dead and then take some screenshots of partial wake locks, how often CPU is in deep sleep etc and others can help sort some out.

Just root with Kingo as its easy and leave the custom rom's alone haha.

BTW how did you fix the brick form flashing a custom rom on MK2 ? I'm on the good MDL firmware so not sure how others fixed the MK2 brick

Kwwolves2012 · Jan 9, 2014

hednik said:
No problem just hit the thank button

I'd root and just leave it stock the rest of the way. With battery life it's always YMMV. The battery stats given in the setting menu don't tell you much so apps like wakelock detector or Greenify allow you to stop apps from "waking" the device all the time to either push notifications, sysnc, do whatever crap they do in the background. You could also get something called better battery stats, the app in on xda just google it, and let it run from full charge to dead and then take some screenshots of partial wake locks, how often CPU is in deep sleep etc and others can help sort some out.

Just root with Kingo as its easy and leave the custom rom's alone haha.

BTW how did you fix the brick form flashing a custom rom on MK2 ? I'm on the good MDL firmware so not sure how others fixed the MK2 brick

Well after about a zillion tries on Google I finally found where someone got out of soft brick. It was something like hold down volume down, home, and power buttons until two options come up after you first power on the device. They are like "proceed to recovery mode" or "boot regularly" (something close to those anyways) and then you hit the volume down key to select boot regular and it boots up the phone without seeing that Oden screen. I was so relieved, I had already BSed my chat with a Samsung rep so they probably would have fixed it do to "accidental" downloads caused my phone to brick.

toxicpaulution · Jan 9, 2014

Watch out having your brightness to 100%. My statusbar got burnt into my phone. Just be careful. I can see the clock numbers(blurry) as well as battery and such. It sucks.

Sent from my SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

Kwwolves2012 · Jan 9, 2014

toxicpaulution said:
Watch out having your brightness to 100%. My statusbar got burnt into my phone. Just be careful. I can see the clock numbers(blurry) as well as battery and such. It sucks.

Sent from my SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

Thanks for the heads up.

hednik · Jan 10, 2014

toxicpaulution said:
Watch out having your brightness to 100%. My statusbar got burnt into my phone. Just be careful. I can see the clock numbers(blurry) as well as battery and such. It sucks.

Sent from my SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

Reminds me of my cappy having screen burn in on that old amoled. Good heads up

Sent from my SGH-I337 using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

toxicpaulution · Jan 10, 2014

hednik said:
Reminds me of my cappy having screen burn in on that old amoled. Good heads up

Sent from my SGH-I337 using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

Yeah I just wish I would have been warned as well, now I just keep my status bar off. It's not directly noticeable if I don't look at it but it's still there.

Sent from my SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

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[Q] Battery life is turrible

Kwwolves2012

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