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Help WiFi is off and using a lot of battery.

EKhatch

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2010
106
9
I have WiFi turned off and it shows as the primary source of battery usage. Much higher than even the screen on time. This has happened a couple of times and the first time I noticed because my phone started dying rapidly. Like 1-2% every ~10 minutes. Any idea why this could be happening. Any suggestions on what to check?

Thanks
 
The percentage you see in the battery stat isn't the amount of battery being used by the app, it's the percentage of the amount used that's used by that app.

IOW, if the total drain on the phone is 5mA, and wifi is using 20%, it's using 1mA. If you could see the stats on every app that has run since you took the phone off the charger, they'd lways add up to 100% - even 5 minutes after you unplugged the charger. The amount of power being used is always 100% of the amount of power being used.

The question is whether the battery is dying after a few hours, or is it lasting the normal amount of time between charges?

If you go to Wifi in Setting, press the menu and go to Advanced, you'll see "Always allow scanning". Turn that off if you always know where you'll be using wifi (and turn it on by hand). (And don't be upset that it's scanning when you look at your wifi settings - it thinks you want to connect to a wifi signal, so it's scanning for one. It'll stop when you close that screen.)
 
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Thanks for the replies. It just seemed odd that WiFi would be using any battery when it was turned off but I didn't know about the advanced setting that has been mentioned. I'll do some playing around and see what I come up with. I guess there is a chance something else was running when I had the high battery drain issue and it was just a coincidence that WiFi percentage was also so much higher than normal.

Thanks again for the quick replies, this forum is great.
 
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Is WiFi radio actually turned off or is it just not connected? It's strange that WiFi would use any power if the radio is off.

It is not strange to use power for two things - scanning, as mentioned before, and for location services. Android (and iOS, for that matter) use WiFi and cell tower triangulation for location services in addition to the GPS radio.
 
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That's interesting. I'd never gone looking for it. I just checked out the Droid X (GB) and Droid Bionic (ICS). They both have something called Safe Mode. It is different from what all Jelly Bean phones have.

Prior to Jelly Bean if you dragged the icon for an app you added from app drawer to the home screen and then entered Safe Mode the app on the home screen would not be disabled.

Starting with Jelly Bean if you dragged the icon for an app you added from app drawer to the home screen and then entered Safe Mode the app on the home screen would be disabled.

So ... prior to Jelly Bean not all apps that you added would be disabled and with Jelly Bean all apps you added are disabled.

Thanks for bring this to my attention.

... Thom
...
 
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