Help Note 3 HORRABLE battery life!!

Try a custum recovery and rom.
Or just root.
Then check out an app called cpu master. It will only work with root and with a kernal (most custum kernels and some stock).
And greenify (needs root)

Ok so, cpu master, you can underclock your max processor speed while your phone is screen off, or in call, ect. Without having all the power saving stuff on while your using your phone. Be sure to use the profiles.

Greenify, is a task killer that dosent kill apps and then android reboots them. It triks droid by hibernating apps that "wake" your phone.

I run my phone like a mad scientists and these two apps keep me happily running ohh about 8-10 hours. And my phone may be screen off, but is rairley "hibernating"

Note, im using the note ii, in my experiences.

What is your screen setting? Dynamic? Maybe turn that to standard?

First off welcome to the forums

I would definitely say something is wrong just because the Android OS should not be that high same with the Google Search.

You might want to just start disabling GPS as it looks like Google Search might be using a lot of background data just to randomly pinpoint your location a lot.

Maybe try downloading something that will automatically monitor background services like, Juice Defender

Totally forgot about juice.

Do you have an sd card? If so try removing it. Run phone for a day without it and see if it makes a difference. If it does copy files from sd card on a computer. Put card back in phone and allow the note 3 to reformat the card.

Your screen shot shows you got 12 hours of time on your battery. That's not bad if you're a heavy user. Screen time is certainly the biggest drain if it's on a lot, especially if you run it bright. There are ways to conserve and there are certainly other things that will add to battery drain. I've pasted a detail list of things to do to maximize your battery life below. Try them and see if they help.

I typically get around 18 hours a day out of my battery with judicious use of the screen. If you're screen is on a lot your battery will drain. I think it's possible you have unrealistic expectations on cell phone battery life. If you are playing a lot of games (I noticed a game in your screen shot) that's a big drain as well. I also noted that Google Search was active for 18% of the time.

Here are the three most important tips I have for good battery on the GN3:

Reboot daily, and do it when the phone is fully charged AND STILL ON THE CHARGER! Let it sit on the charger for a good five minutes so it goes through the whole boot process without taking any battery usage. Rebooting cleans out caches, closes down programs, apps and widgets that might be running that you don't know about.

Screen brightness - find the best (lowest) screen brightness you can live with and set that as your fixed screen brightness. Using Auto-brightness is NOT a good battery saver and can be annoying as it changes your screen brightness as it feels like it with often annoying results. I use a free app called Brightness Level Disc that comes with a free widget that I put on my front screen. I run my screen at around 49% and get great battery results with that. If I need brighter or dimmer depending on ambient light, the disc has a neat four button switch to select brighter or dimmer with the press of a button on the front screen (or wherever you want it).

Last, but not least, your GN3 came with a neat little widget called Active Apps Manager. I also put this right on the front screen. It's a little number inside a circle. The number is for how many apps are currently running in your phone's memory. The circle around the number turns colors from green to orange to red. If it's red then at least one of your running apps is using the cpu and therefore battery. If it's green then the apps are idle and not using much battery. You can press the button and it will show you what apps are open and what percentage of cpu is being used.

This little widget is invaluable in telling you which apps are notorious for using the cpu (and battery) even though you are not actively using them. It helps you understand which apps you need to kill off each time you use them. For instance I have found that almost all my news apps that have notifications activated will continued to run and eat battery. Also, my chess app, Chess.com. So now I just know to kill them off after I'm done using them.

I do not turn off any of the other things suggested at the beginning of this thread. I leave on wifi, bluetooth, gps, 4G, syncing - you name it. I do not use live wallpapers as they do eat battery and I find them silly anyway!

Try these three things and you will be surprised how much better your batter life will be. If you do all three and your battery is still eating then you likely have a bad battery. I use my phone ALL day, texting, skype, phone calls, stream music for hours, chess moves, facebook, and I still have usually 20%, give or take 10%, at the end of each full day.

Not sure why but enabling Developer Options and checking 'disable hardware overlays' and then 'enable MSAA' somehow reduced the amount of battery used, as did disabling any Google sync that was unnecessary (such as cloud backup, Internet sync, app data sync, etc)

Still unsure though why Android System is the top consumer. CPU keep awake was only two minutes...

AndroidthebestOS said:

Thanks everyone, I think I might have to give out a bit more information on how I use my phone.

So I wake up in the morning, pull my phone off the charger with 100% battery. Typically I don't touch it at all during the day, and then I normally play a little bit of clash of clans after I come home (10-15 minutes). Then I do a bit of web browsing, checking Facebook and Twitter,(about 45 min) and that's about it. So I don't really consider myself having a unrealistic expectation on the Note 3's battery life.

Screen mode is on adapt display.

GPS and all the air gestures are off.

I will try formatting my SD card to see if it helps. Thank you for the suggestion!

I also figured that the Google now launcher was the reason why Google search was up so high on the list (mainly because of "OK Google" hotword detection). I have now switched back to using touchwiz (ugh)

And I would prefer not to root my phone to get better battery life, but thanks anyway

I've included some new screenshots of the battery life without GNL.

Click to expand...

Did you use that feature a lot?

Pretty sure they have it on Nova Launcher and it doesn't eat through my battery like that.

I too have tried Methos1979 suggestions which have worked for me in the past. Especially the reboot in a morning.
However my android os is again killing my battery.
I've lost a total of 46% to android os and android system today.
Anyone got any ideas what this is doing to my phone as I certainly don't use it that much.

Does this image help at all. GPS seems to be on a lot!

I pretty much have the same usage as the OP apart from maybe up to 5 calls and a bit of SMS, whatsapp etc.
My battery at the end of my working day is never lower than 80%, then at night it's time for more playing, and it's hammered from late afternoon to around 11 ish and still a have over 40% battery.
I'm not saying its like this all the time, but after nearly 10 hours it just turned from 97%......



I have never hammered the phone all day constantly, so I have no idea how long it would last that way, I use no battery apps but one thing I do is make sure there are no active apps being used before I lock the screen.

My battery life does seem to be decreasing. It could be many things and is likely a combination.

One thing I'm wondering is, just how much worse is battery life on phones that have added a ton of apps? Even if they are not used much?

For instance, when we have these discussions it would be helpful to know two additional things:

How old is your phone?

How many apps do you have loaded?

My phone is almost a year old. Batteries do wear out - they will just no hold a charge as long as a factory fresh one. I think I'm going to order one soon and see if I get better life like when I first started.

Second, is just the shear number of apps. I'm a power user. I have probably 200 apps on my phone. I don't use nearly that many, but there they are. I often wonder if I only had absolutely the apps on there that I use regularly if that would make for better battery life.

Interesting questions.

The poster (evohicks) who had 96% battery life left I would like to know how old your phone is, and how many apps do you have installed? I don't think my phone would be at 96% after sitting for 9-plus hours even if it was doing absolutely nothing!

I get 12 hours and am at 50% but much of that is because I live in a sketchy coverage area.

Honestly I disable my GPS a lot just because Google and Facebook both like to check my location constantly, and it gets rather annoying how much they check it.

You can turn off the one on Facebook, I think Google's would be a little more difficult since so many of their apps care about your location.

so how about we look at some other things.

what widgets do you use - which are active update. Some widgets use parts of the OS and GOOGLE services as their function which might be why you see those up so high.

weather, news, stock and music apps all can do this and eat service alot.

I'd keep using google now launcher if you like it - seems to be OK.

do you keep your wifi ON

Do you allow location reporting on all google apps, and or other apps.

do you play music on your phone during the day (I do and typical work day for me runs 100% down to around 73% worst case 65% at the end of the day)

dynamic brightness - use that

gestures controls suck IMO

leave on the smart stay feature - and set screen time out to lowest or near lowest setting - it doesn't take much in power - but saves tones. also let's the phone sleep more when you're not looking at it. Works as good or better than Screebl did on my other devices.

otherwise I would blame FB the most as it doesn't turn off just because you don't have the app up - depending on your setting it will stay active for alerts, check in BS, and just because it wants to. It's a bad app IMO. wifey's phone it was the number 1 culprit of battery death.

also maybe calibrate your battery meter - and finally - like all things it's possible to get a bad someting. it's possible you have a bad battery - or a bad phone. I doubt the phone - but the battery is indeed feasible.

Use the active apps widget. If it turns orange or red something is wrong. Helped immensely in my case. Believe it or not, Google apps are notorious resource hogs if the apps are backgrounded and not closed by swiping them out of recent apps. Google Search in one instance was consuming 280mb RAM and 75% CPU.

For what it's worth, getting a brand new Note 3 from AT&T, and updating it to KitKat before installing anything didn't help.

But having BestBuy completely flash it STRAIGHT to KitKat rather than applying the update to 4.3 DID completely solve my problem.

Stang70Fastback said:

For what it's worth, getting a brand new Note 3 from AT&T, and updating it to KitKat before installing anything didn't help.

But having BestBuy completely flash it STRAIGHT to KitKat rather than applying the update to 4.3 DID completely solve my problem.

Click to expand...

What was your problem? Battery? I didn't see anything from you in this thread.

He flashed the update after a factory reset vs. a 'dirty flash'.

Methos1979 said:

What was your problem? Battery? I didn't see anything from you in this thread.

Click to expand...

I've been active in some of the other battery life threads.

nickdalzell said:

He flashed the update after a factory reset vs. a 'dirty flash'.

Click to expand...

Yeah, basically, I had the Note 3. Then KitKat came out, so I upgraded and it trashed my battery life. So eventually I did a factory reset thinking maybe I should start 4.4 off without a bunch of apps already installed. Didn't help. So I got a new phone from AT&T, and figured since that one was brand spaking new that I'd upgrade it to KitKat before doing ANYTHING else (it also came with 4.3, disappointingly). That STILL didn't help.

Finally, at the suggestion of a nice AT&T rep, I took the phone to Best Buy, and had them completely re-flash the device STRAIGHT to 4.4 (as opposed to UPDATING to 4.4). This seems to have completely resolved my problem. It's been a week now and I'm getting fantastic battery life. And the phone is actually functioning properly. There are certain issues I had in all of the previous iterations that are finally gone. The two most noticeable being that the phone now remembers my default application selections, AND that the phone is actually SMOOTH now. It has NEVER been smooth. Always a bit jerky. Now every animation is ALWAYS smooth and games NEVER stutter.

I dunno WTF is up with the 4.4 UPGRADE, but boy oh boy did it really mess with my phone every time I applied it myself.

Stang70Fastback said:

I've been active in some of the other battery life threads.



Yeah, basically, I had the Note 3. Then KitKat came out, so I upgraded and it trashed my battery life. So eventually I did a factory reset thinking maybe I should start 4.4 off without a bunch of apps already installed. Didn't help. So I got a new phone from AT&T, and figured since that one was brand spaking new that I'd upgrade it to KitKat before doing ANYTHING else (it also came with 4.3, disappointingly). That STILL didn't help.

Finally, at the suggestion of a nice AT&T rep, I took the phone to Best Buy, and had them completely re-flash the device STRAIGHT to 4.4 (as opposed to UPDATING to 4.4). This seems to have completely resolved my problem. It's been a week now and I'm getting fantastic battery life. And the phone is actually functioning properly. There are certain issues I had in all of the previous iterations that are finally gone. The two most noticeable being that the phone now remembers my default application selections, AND that the phone is actually SMOOTH now. It has NEVER been smooth. Always a bit jerky. Now every animation is ALWAYS smooth and games NEVER stutter.

I dunno WTF is up with the 4.4 UPGRADE, but boy oh boy did it really mess with my phone every time I applied it myself.

Click to expand...

This is VERY interesting information and excellent - thank you for sharing! I didn't even know this was something that you could have done. If I ever half to 'start over' with this or any future phone and plan to do a factory data reset I will instead seek out this solution.

You should post this information as a standalone thread with something in the title about battery life, Kit Kat, etc. so people searching for a resolution can find it. I would be very interested to see if other suffering bad battery life post Kit Kat upgrade solved their issues with this solution.

Great post!

It is often a good practice to do a factory reset when updating Android to a major version, otherwise you get app compatibility issues which cause the device to reboot on its own, crash, or eat the battery.