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Help major sudden battery drain issue???

glasshalffull

Member
Mar 18, 2010
64
8
in the last couple of days, something is causing my bionic battery to drain super fast...so fast i can hardly charge it as fast as it discharges.

Phone is very warm.

this happened suddenly

I have had the phone since the day the bionic was made available to the public.

running the default system, not rooted or running any custom/different user interface

i checked, settings/battery & data manager/usage statistics and have attached screenshots of the results

I had just installed these 2 apps recently:

Car Locator - https://play.google.com/store/apps/...lZHdhcmRraW0uYW5kcm9pZC5jYXJsb2NhdG9yZnJlZSJd

Field Trip https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nianticproject.scout

I have uninstalled them both.

352 MB RAM being used by applications with 360 MB free, 2.8GB app storage free

I have tried these things to solve the problem and they have not worked:

1. Pulled the battery and restarted after 1 minute
2. turned on and off wifi ( phone is running fine, like normal, on my home network)
3. uninstalled 2 apps that i recently added within the last week.
4. made sure all of the video players and apps were closed and signed out of

what could be the problem? any ideas how to fix
 

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Obviously your biggest clue there is the "media" using 47%. Figure out which app is causing that. Also looking at your screen shots, I have never had my entire notification bar at the top of the screen filled up with icons for a dozen different things that are running. You obviously have a ton of stuff running so naturally your battery is going to take a beating. Speaking of that, just because your battery suddenly starts dying doesn't mean it's something software related, it could be the battery itself going bad.

I keep such a bare minimum on my phone that it's never an issue to just factory reset it and start over. If you don't feel like doing that, you have to find a way to shut down the apps and then reintroduce them one by one and see which one starts causing issues.
 
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I had an issue with battery draining faster than usual for a few weeks. Turned out my ISP changed outgoing email server and a few that I thought I sent were stuck constantly trying to send. Had to uninstall email app and reinstall to get settings correct again.

What ISP are you referring? I have had MAJOR battery drains the last couple weeks. I use K9 Mail and have AOL & GMAIL accounts.

Thx
 
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Download the circle battery widget here and install the widget on your home screen. Press the widget and hit battery, it will tell you what kind of shape your battery is in. Also the battery usage will tell you what is using the juice.

Will give that a try dfib......

I took it into Verizon wireless store and a rep there looked at it for 4 minutes and told me to buy another battery.

If it was just the battery going bad, the temperature of the phone wouldn't be as warm as it has been since the problem started.
 
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i just tried the circle battery widget and the battery usage feature gives the same results that you get in going to the settings, like the screenshots i took in the initial post

the display is using most of the battery (90%) but not sure how to fix, the brightness is only set to about 70%

i set brightness to "auto" which has dropped display usage to 70%
 
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something had changed the brightness of the display to high, so i have turned that down and the battery isn't draining as fast and is not as hot as it was previously but is still warmer than normal.

I have just checked the battery usage and the "media" is using 64% of the battery....far more than anything else.

see the screenshot,

not sure what I'm looking at in that screenshot and how to fix it

any suggestions?
 

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Media. As in something Media related. As in:

Play Music or MOG music or DLNA or MotoCast.....

Something is constantly connecting to a media server you're (assuming) recently set up, or recently changed, or recently uninstalled (but forgot to remove from your phone). I suspect it is the last one, b/c then it is very similar to the other user who posted about their ISP changing mail servers and their battery going stupid b/c mail was never sending but constantly trying to....

What I'm saying is forget about all these other things and concentrate first on trying to figure out what the heck that Media thing is on your phone.
 
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Media. As in something Media related. As in:

Play Music or MOG music or DLNA or MotoCast.....

Something is constantly connecting to a media server you're (assuming) recently set up, or recently changed, or recently uninstalled (but forgot to remove from your phone). I suspect it is the last one, b/c then it is very similar to the other user who posted about their ISP changing mail servers and their battery going stupid b/c mail was never sending but constantly trying to....

What I'm saying is forget about all these other things and concentrate first on trying to figure out what the heck that Media thing is on your phone.

Quoted to say that I agree. It's likely not a bad battery - the MediaServer is a huge clue that the phone is playing/trying to play some sort of media. Not that I am suggesting this, but I suspect that if you factory reset and reinstalled everything from scratch, you'd find the problem solved.

I think that Badass Battery Monitor is a good step. Thankfully, I have never had an unexplained battery drain myself, so I wish I could give a more concrete suggestion, but if you can figure out which app or process is trying to play some sort of media, that's likely the solution.
 
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Something is constantly connecting to a media server you're (assuming) recently set up, or recently changed, or recently uninstalled (but forgot to remove from your phone). I suspect it is the last one

HI John,

When you say I need to remove the app after uninstalling it, is that as simple as removing the folder contents for that app.

if it's more involved, can you point me to a link describing what to do?

thanks
 
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HI John,

When you say I need to remove the app after uninstalling it, is that as simple as removing the folder contents for that app.

if it's more involved, can you point me to a link describing what to do?

thanks
Removing an app's "folder" does not remove the app. There are two ways on non-rooted devices to remove an app:

1) Go to you "My Apps" list in the Play Store and find the app and click the Uninstall button there and follow the prompts.
2) Go to Settings-Apps and find the app in the list, tap into it, then click Uninstall button and follow the prompts.

Personally, I prefer method 2, and prior to uninstalling I always Force Close the app, then Clear Data, then uninstall... Probably not required, but just cleared up something for me once so now I do it all the time.
 
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excellent, acejavelin

thanks for the help

I'll try method 2 as well and see if that helps

I've searched google and found another possible answer where the problem was something on the sd card that was keeping process.android.media running. They reformatted the card after backing it up and it solved the problem.


I do add/change/delete alot of audio and video form my sd card to watch /listen to on my players

I'll check into this as well
 
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I think (knock on wood) that i have found the answer and solved the problem.

In my post yesterday, I said i had located another thread with a similar problem and that seems to be what was wrong with my phone.

I had a large video on my laptop that i reformatted/rendered in handbrake for my phone using the "Android Mid" settings in HB.

The video was too large and i wanted to make the file size smaller, i also cut the frame rate down to something like 12fps.

i stored that video on my sd card where i have stored other videos lots of times....videos that i also rendered in HB using the same method as this video.

I removed this video from my phone and the problem has stopped for several hours now (crossing fingers)

temperature is down to normal

"Media" is no longer shwoing as the biggest user of juice in GSam Battery Monitor

battery is holding charge and back to normal, not draining


Hopefully it will stay this way.

For future reference,this might be something to consider when others troubleshoot similar problems in the future

I'd like to thank everyone that has offered their help in this thread!

You guided me and I wouldn't have figured it out without your help.
 
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