What app is running down my battery

5 Ways To Cut The Battery Drain On Your Android Phone

Have you ever glanced at your Android phone halfway through the day, only to notice that the battery charge is already half gone and you didn’t even touch the phone once? Many people constantly download and install new apps to their phone without realizing which of those apps may actually be continuing to run in the background, using Wi-Fi or data connections and drawing down the battery even while the phone is resting idle on your hip. Mobile Defense. a recent GPS tracking app I wrote about, is a perfect example.

Confident you have no apps that run in the background? What about your screen backlight, or the sync frequency of all of your social network apps and email clients? Do you control when and how your phone launches Wi-Fi and GPS, or do those connections control you?

Recalibrate Your Battery

One of the most common solutions that you’ll find on many Android blogs and forums is the battery “wipe.” This is related to the batterystats.bin file in your system which is where the battery indicator data comes from.

Apparently, particularly when you flash a custom ROM on your newly rooted Android. the calibration of the display versus actual charge level of the battery can get a little out of whack. The fix is pretty easy. First, charge up your phone to 100%, then reboot into recovery. For my purposes, I use the trusty ClockworkMod Recovery that comes with ROM Manager. In ClockworkMod Recovery, you can find the battery wipe in the Advanced section.

Just select “Wipe Battery Stats ” from the sub menu.

Finally, confirm the wipe and then reboot the system again. To do this you’ll have to go back to the main menu and select “Reboot System Now .”

Keep in mind that this won’t “fix” battery drain issues. If you have something running on your phone that’s sucking juice out of your phone battery, all you’ll notice now is that you have a much more accurate view of how fast your battery is draining.  Ready to troubleshoot and put an end to your battery drain? Read on.

What’s Using Your Battery?

The first thing to do is check out what is running on your phone that’s eating up the battery. It’s easy to look for the biggest battery-draining culprits. All you have to do is go to your phone settings -> click About Phone -> click Battery Use .

Battery use will show you a breakdown of what’s consuming your battery. It’s broken down into percentages, so this is a nice place to come back and see how the different changes you make to your phone affect overall battery use.

See how the display is consuming 77 percent? This is fairly standard – the display is energy demanding, especially when you don’t put a lid on the brightness level.

Low Hanging Fruit

There are a couple of things you can do right now that will easily improve your Android battery life.

To reduce that consumption as much as possible right off the bat, go into Settings -> Display -> Brightness. First, remove “Automatic brightness “.

The next screen allows you to move a slider to adjust screen brightness. Try lowering it down to the bottom level and see if that setting is something you can comfortably tolerate. For most people it’s plenty bright. You’ve just reduced your battery consumption dramatically.

The second low-hanging fruit are your connections. Are you constantly leaving Wi-Fi, GPS or your Data Connection running all the time? Nothing consumes battery power faster than these connections. Ideally, disable them whenever you don’t need them. Go to Settings -> Wireless & Networks and poke around to see what you’ve got running. GPS is under Location and Security .

There are also some useful apps on the market to manage your phone connections – just search for “connection manager ” and pick your favorite. Use them to disable your connections when you don’t need them.

What Apps Are Running?

Do you remember the old commercial that went, “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are? ” The same could be said for your phone – do you know what your apps are doing?

Many people install apps on their phone, often not realizing that some of them are automatically configured to launch upon boot, and they keep running in the background. In fact, many of them automatically launch connections like Wi-Fi, GPS or your data connection. Check what’s running right now by going to Settings -> Applications and clicking on Running Services .

Take a look at all the apps that are running in the background. Any surprises?

Don’t worry, you don’t have to manually kill these all the time, there are apps that help you manage what programs run automatically. One I really like from the Android Market is called Autorun Manager.

It shows everything that’s configured to autostart, and what’s currently running. What’s cool is that you can just tap these individually and disable them for good. Game over. You’ve just reclaimed your phone.

If you’ve tried all of these tips, did you see a longer Android battery life? Do you know of any other useful tips to stop battery drain? Share your ideas in the comments section below!

How to See Which Apps Are Draining Your Battery on an iPhone or iPad

by Chris Hoffman on September 29th, 2014

Since iOS 8, you can now see which apps are draining your battery the most. This includes apps that drain your battery in the background — something that’s possible on iOS since Apple added the “background refresh” feature in iOS 7.

You can stop these apps from using so much battery power, especially if they’re draining that battery in the background while you aren’t actually using them. Apps do this to be helpful, but it uses power and costs battery life.

View Apps By Battery Usage

This information is available in the Settings screen. To access it, tap “Settings” on the Home screen and then tap “Battery”.

Battery usage percentages display for each app currently consuming battery power, with the apps using the most battery power listed at the top.

Tapping the clock icon displays how many minutes each app has been active on the screen, in the background, or both.

NOTE: You can also tap on any app’s name to displays this information for all apps.

Understanding Battery Usage

The Battery Usage list provides two different columns. You can see how much battery apps have been using in the past 24 hours, or in the past seven days. Tap either column to see the list.

In the “Time Since Last Full Charge” section, at the bottom of the “Battery Usage” list, you’ll see two amounts of time, “Usage” and “Standby”. “Usage” shows how much time you have actually used your phone in hours and minutes since the last time it was fully charged. The amount of time your phone has been sitting idle since the last full charge is shown next to “Standby”.

There are no actions you can take from this particular screen. As we mentioned before, tapping on an app’s name displays the number of minutes on screen and in the background.

This screen works differently than the similar Battery screen on Android. which you may be familiar with. Android’s data resets when you charge the device, so the screen always shows data from the last charge cycle. On iOS, it always shows battery life over a period of time. For example, if you use your device very heavily and charge it three times a day, the “Last 24 Hours” list will show battery usage over those last three charges.

Keep this in mind — this list won’t show you exactly what drained your battery over the last charge. It will just show which apps are using the battery the most.

Make Apps Use Less Battery Power

In most cases, apps that appear in this list are using the battery power because you have your device on and are actively using the app. So, if you see Safari near the top of the list here, that’s because you spent a good amount of time using Safari on your device.

Of course, not all apps will use an equal amount of power. A graphically intensive game will use more battery life in 10 minutes than the Safari web browser or another basic app will.

For most apps here, there’s not a lot you can do to reduce their battery usage aside from using the app less. If you see a game using a lot of battery power, be aware how much battery that game is draining while you play it. Consider playing a less graphically intensive game if you want to play a game and need to stretch your battery farther.

Restricting “Background Activity” Apps

Some apps in this list have a “Background Activity” label. This means the app is using battery power by running in the background. For example, the Mail app automatically fetches new mail in the background. In the screenshot below, the AccuWeather and Surveys apps were refreshing in the background and using battery power.

To prevent apps from using data in the background, navigate to Settings > General > Background App Refresh. Disable background refresh for battery-sucking apps here, preventing them from refreshing their data in the background.

Bear in mind that other things also reduce your device’s battery life. For example, the display uses a lot of battery power — turn down your display brightness to get more battery life. Push notifications, location access, Bluetooth, and other features also use battery power. While iOS has changed, our list of tips for maximizing your battery life on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch are still relevant.

What's killing your battery? Android's top 10 performance-sapping apps

Candy Crush Saga. Screenshot by Jennifer Van Grove/CNET

It may seem to consume every spare moment of our lives, but the world's most famous social networking app is chewing up our mobiles too, with Facebook topping a global list of the most performance-draining Android apps, which considered battery drain, storage consumption and data use.

But it's not just Facebook draining our mobile power -- a raft of other social apps, games and even bloatware are consuming more processing power, battery life and data than many of us realise.

The findings come from new research conducted by AVG which took anonymous data from more than 1 million AVG Android app users in order to collate a list of the worst offenders in the Android app world (measured over Q3 2014, based on apps with more than 1 million Google Play downloads).

Culprits included pre-installed apps pushed out by device manufacturers, with 3 of the 10 biggest battery draining apps that run on start-up coming from Samsung. News apps also warrant a mention, particularly those that update in real-time, with the New York Times' Breaking News app topping the list of the most storage-hungry apps we use.

But with 62 percent of the time we spend on Android tablets or smartphones dedicated to playing games, gaming apps warranted their own top ten. In these stakes, King, the developer behind Candy Crush Saga and other titles in the Saga series, took out the dubious honour of holding 4 of the top 10 spots for performance-draining game apps.

So what should you do if your battery life is dropping faster than all those sugar balls in Candy Crush? AVG recommends turning off app notifications, limiting refresh intervals, deleting your cache of temporary files and limiting the amount of data an app is allowed to download while you're not watching.