Develop Bugs

What is using my battery??? not a whine thread

I have been getting terrible battery life since I mistakenly reset the battery statistics in recovery.
I have recalibrated my battery, but I am only getting like 8 hours.
What can I use to see what is using the battery? I think there is something in spare parts, but I am not sure what to look at there.
Any apps or methods would help me determine what is chewing it up is much appreciated.

Bielinsk said:
I have been getting terrible battery life since I mistakenly reset the battery statistics in recovery.
I have recalibrated my battery, but I am only getting like 8 hours.
What can I use to see what is using the battery? I think there is something in spare parts, but I am not sure what to look at there.
Any apps or methods would help me determine what is chewing it up is much appreciated.
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It could just be that your phone is incorrectly reporting how much battery life you have since you reset them, and a couple days of usage will just allow it to gather more data and get more accurate.
But if there is an errant app draining your battery, a combination of spare parts and an app called SystemPanel should allow you to narrow it down to what's causing problems.
Plug your phone in for a minute, then unplug it, let the phone sit with the screen off for 25 minutes or so, then go to spare parts->Battery History, then choose other usage and since last unplugged. The running % should be close to the screen on %. If the running % is way higher than screen on, that means something is running while your screen is off.
I paid for the full version of systempanel for the system monitoring feature, but i think you can use the free version to just check which apps are running. Things like google voice should say running, but just about everything else should say background. If you have an app that you downloaded, but haven't been using in a while saying service, there's a good chance that's what's causing your phone to run the batteries out. Garbage apps like Grooveshark (which I still use because I can't live without grooveshark) will run even after you could have sworn you closed out of them.
The paid version of systempanel makes things easier because you can set it to monitor, then come back and look at what apps have been using cpu cycles even when the phone isn't being used. The system processes are always going to use cpu cycles, but apps like Swype will (or did at one point) keep the phone from properly sleeping, and you can tell by all the cpu they're using even when the screen is off.

Ah, that is a good point. 2 apps that I did change were I installed Tiger Text (neat app but rather sure that drains the juice) and I put on a different version of swype.
Thanks for the tips, I will run with that.

More reading I am doing I think the mistake I made, is that I reset my battery statistics when my battery was only half full.
I put in a full battery, reset statistics, and will let it drain, that should calibrate the phone correctly.
Thanks for the tips though, I will keep those in mind.

Battery Charges Only to 99%

I've had my Nexus for about a month, and no matter what ROM or kernel I use it seems that most of the time my battery only charges to 99% an not the full 100%. It will sometimes charge to 100%, but is rare that it happens. I know how to properly take care of my battery, but I'd like to know of this happens to anyone else and if there's anything I can do to fix it. I'm currently using the stock battery.
Thanks.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium

dustrho said:
I've had my Nexus for about a month, and no matter what ROM or kernel I use it seems that most of the time my battery only charges to 99% an not the full 100%. It will sometimes charge to 100%, but is rare that it happens. I know how to properly take care of my battery, but I'd like to know of this happens to anyone else and if there's anything I can do to fix it. I'm currently using the stock battery.
Thanks.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium
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Android has been like this since at least Gingerbread. It's not new or a problem. Some phone manufacturers make it read 100%, but Nexus devices report what it actually is. You can turn the screen on when it's at 99% and start charging that way if you really need that last 1% .

I've had that happen a few times. Go to /data/system and delete batterystats.bin and then plug in your phone. It should then charge to 100%.
Sent from my toroplus

Redneck Trash said:
I've had that happen a few times. Go to /data/system and delete batterystats.bin and then plug in your phone. It should then charge to 100%.
Sent from my toroplus
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Agreed, deleting you bat batterystats.bin will allow the phone to charge to 100%. It's pretty common lately, I have had it happen 3 times after the second I gave up. 99% is good enough for me.

mwalt2 said:
Android has been like this since at least Gingerbread. It's not new or a problem. Some phone manufacturers make it read 100%, but Nexus devices report what it actually is. You can turn the screen on when it's at 99% and start charging that way if you really need that last 1% .
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I dunno, I've been using gnex for 6 months and never had that problem?

As far as I'm aware, most smartphones when continually connected to a charger will charge to 100%, stop charging, allow the phone to discharge to 95%, and then begin charging again. This prevents over-charging, which would potentially damage the battery.
I rarely find my Nexus at 100% when it's on the charger. It's usually at 97-99%.

Redneck Trash said:
I've had that happen a few times. Go to /data/system and delete batterystats.bin and then plug in your phone. It should then charge to 100%.
Sent from my toroplus
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Enkriptd said:
Agreed, deleting you bat batterystats.bin will allow the phone to charge to 100%. It's pretty common lately, I have had it happen 3 times after the second I gave up. 99% is good enough for me.
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Click to collapse
:facepalm: No, it will not. Batterystats.bin has absolutely zilch, zero, nada, to do with it. I have no idea why people, including some who should know better, continue to perpetuate this bit of misinformation. The only thing deleting batterystats.bin does is erases the list of processes that have used the battery. It has no bearing on the percentage reported.
To the OP- one of the primary reasons that you don't see it often make it to 100% is that lithium-ion batteries are often throttled just short of a complete charge in order to prolong the battery's serviceable life. Additionally, some will slow to a trickle charge when close to fully charged. At this point, the charge and discharge rates will sometimes negate each other.

najaboy said:
:facepalm: No, it will not. Batterystats.bin has absolutely zilch, zero, nada, to do with it. I have no idea why people, including some who should know better, continue to perpetuate this bit of misinformation. The only thing deleting batterystats.bin does is erases the list of processes that have used the battery. It has no bearing on the percentage reported.
To the OP- one of the primary reasons that you don't see it often make it to 100% is that lithium-ion batteries are often throttled just short of a complete charge in order to prolong the battery's serviceable life. Additionally, some will slow to a trickle charge when close to fully charged. At this point, the charge and discharge rates will sometimes negate each other.
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Deleting the file got my phone to report 100%. I know it shouldn't matter. Although I never encountered this issue on ICS. Only started on JB.
Sent from my toroplus

Redneck Trash said:
Deleting the file got my phone to report 100%. I know it shouldn't matter. Although I never encountered this issue on ICS. Only started on JB.
Sent from my toroplus
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Click to collapse
Actually, it didn't. You're equating correlation with causation. What would have gotten your phone to report 100% is some other variable that actually has bearing on battery charge.
Dianne HackbornJan 12, 2012 - Public
Today's myth debunking:
"The battery indicator in the status/notification bar is a reflection of the batterystats.bin file in the data/system/ directory."
No, it does not.
This file is used to maintain, across reboots, low-level data about the kinds of operations the device and your apps are doing between battery changes. That is, it is solely used to compute the blame for battery usage shown in the "Battery Use" UI in settings.
That is, it has deeply significant things like "app X held a wake lock for 2 minutes" and "the screen was on at 60% brightness for 10 minutes."
It has no impact on the current battery level shown to you.
It has no impact on your battery life.
Deleting it is not going to do anything to make your more device more fantastic and wonderful... well, unless you have some deep hatred for seeing anything shown in the battery usage UI. And anyway, it is reset every time you unplug from power with a relatively full charge (thus why the battery usage UI data resets at that point), so this would be a much easier way to make it go away.
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najaboy said:
Actually, it didn't. You're equating correlation with causation...
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Source: https://plus.google.com/u/0/105051985738280261832/posts/FV3LVtdVxPT
And I like this reply to a comment even better:
+semeon korsunsky You say "ever since my first android(g1 oct 2008) and every android device ive owned since, the batterystats.bin file has always lost accuracy with a short amount of time," but in fact there was NO batterystats.bin file in early Android. I think the first release this ever appeared in was Cupcake, and that was just some early experimental work I was doing to try to quantify application behavior by sticking in instrumentation of interesting potential power-related things they were doing.
I will say that I don't know for sure what all of the various devices are doing... however, I know exactly what the battery stats code on the G1, Nexus One, and Nexus S does. I wrote it. And I can assure you there is nothing it does that has any impact on battery level reporting or battery draining (aside from whatever work the code itself does that would use power).
Frankly, arguing that deleting the file is having any impact on the reported battery level on these devices is the same as arguing that the sun orbits the earth. It just isn't true, and you can go right into the code and see this for yourself.
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[Q] Battery drain list

I was thinking why couldn't we sum up all the reasons of battery drain in some thread, so that other's wouldn't have to keep on asking why they were getting one or open a new thread for it.

In almost all cases it's backlight, WiFi, mobile network,bluetooth,GPS, screen time out.
You can also look at battery usage stats in settings to see the responsible app or system setting for battery drain.
Sent from my LT15i using xda app-developers app

akshaypatil869 said:
I was thinking why couldn't we sum up all the reasons of battery drain in some thread, so that other's wouldn't have to keep on asking why they were getting one or open a new thread for it.
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How would you go on accomplishing this if everyone has different configurations/settings which affect the drain?

mrw0rm said:
How would you go on accomplishing this if everyone has different configurations/settings which affect the drain?
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For example, somewhere I read that enabling "flashlight" and "backlight" in quickpanel settings, the battery would drain more.
What I initially thought was that we could post our experiences with bad battery life, the major reasons behind and what we did to solve it. Along with maybe the rom/kernel we would be using.

akshaypatil869 said:
What I initially thought was that we could post our experiences with bad battery life, the major reasons behind and what we did to solve it. Along with maybe the rom/kernel we would be using.
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For over an year, I have flashed my LT15i more than 20 times, trying all the official firmwares meanwhile (all rooted, of course). In my opinion, the daily consumption depends if I used more or less the radios, the players, the screen aso. Because my habits are more or less the same (I listen music and I read/navigate during my half an hour way with the subway, for example) I can affirm that the consumption is constant, around 40% daily. But, I consider that a good estimate could be done following the battery consumption by night. For me, this consumption is around 5%. With one exception: I had installed once an application (from the market!) which downloaded over night almost 10MB of ads, and drained my battery almost 20%! Never ever I have experienced battery drain with official firmwares...

Use BetterBatteryStats and the Android's own included Battery Usage screen and you got all the info you need.

Wiping Battery stats and Battery Calibration Myth gets Debunked [MUST READ]

this was posted on the XDA Portal on JANUARY 14, 2012 AT 7:38 AM BY Liwen..
and i thought i would repost it as it seems lately alot of people are being misinformed about it
Google Engineer Debunks Myth: Wiping Battery Stats Does Not Improve Battery Life...
There you have it, in the title. Google engineer Dianne Hackborn, who has previously explained Android’s hardware acceleration, took to Google+ again to clarify some myths about the Android operating system. This time, it’s a point of common advice that you’ll see in virtually every FAQ thread about custom ROMs and flashing: wiping battery stats in order to improve battery life.
The reasoning behind that piece of advice was something like this: If you, at some point, did not charge your Android device fully (for example, only to 80%), it would supposedly remember that battery level as “fully charged” – in this case, you’d only ever get to use 80% of your battery, which is of course less than optimal. So, if you wipe the battery stats, usually done in ClockWord Mod Recovery, the device would “forget” the previous level, here 80%, and instead charge to the full 100% once again, thereby re-calibrating the battery. Or, as Hackborn puts it in more technical terms:
The battery indicator in the status/notification bar is a reflection of the batterystats.bin file in the data/system/ directory.
However, as she explains, that’s not the case. Because those battery stats, stored in the batterystats.bin file, are only used to maintain information about what is using the battery when not recharging. That is, it essentially holds the information displayed in the Settings > Battery screen. Nothing more, nothing less. Thus:
It has no impact on the current battery level shown to you.
It has no impact on your battery life.
What’s more, you’ve probably noticed that the battery usage data is reset once you recharge your device anyway. From this you can correctly deduce that the battery stats are wiped as well – every time your device is recharged. More or less every day. If there was any effect, you would’ve noticed it without going into recovery and doing that stuff. Typical placebo, eh?
link to XDA Portal post
http://www.xda-developers.com/androi...-battery-life/
Where I got this ?
go to this thread http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2170039
If this helped you, press the "Thanks" button for Kameirus on the second link, not me .
also Kameirus permitted me to post this on our forums as well

page not found

Good :good: OP of this thread is the only one here who has given credits from where he got the content!

Asmy Yuh said:
page not found
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I think they removed it already, but if this helped you, Give your thanks button to Kameirus. not me.

Does battery calibration work?

Tell me in the comments below if you have used it and if it helped.
Sent from my SGH-M919 using XDA

Pablo_24 said:
Tell me in the comments below if you have used it and if it helped.
Sent from my SGH-M919 using XDA
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Battery calibration works much the same way as letting a ROM "settle" for 10-15 minutes after flashing. On the plus side though, calibrating the battery would be more beneficial than using an app killer; one of these does very little to nothing while the other drains battery by killing apps in the background, requiring said apps to completely reload on each use.. drawing more CPU time, among other things.

From a google developer
Today's myth debunking:
"The battery indicator in the status/notification bar is a reflection of the batterystats.bin file in the data/system/ directory."
No, it does not.
This file is used to maintain, across reboots, low-level data about the kinds of operations the device and your apps are doing between battery changes. That is, it is solely used to compute the blame for battery usage shown in the "Battery Use" UI in settings.
That is, it has deeply significant things like "app X held a wake lock for 2 minutes" and "the screen was on at 60% brightness for 10 minutes."
It has no impact on the current battery level shown to you.
It has no impact on your battery life.
Deleting it is not going to do anything to make your more device more fantastic and wonderful... well, unless you have some deep hatred for seeing anything shown in the battery usage UI. And anyway, it is reset every time you unplug from power with a relatively full charge (thus why the battery usage UI data resets at that point), so this would be a much easier way to make it go away.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

lordcheeto03 said:
Battery calibration works much the same way as letting a ROM "settle" for 10-15 minutes after flashing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Both of which are as valuable as free sand in the desert.