I know this is a common question with the D4, but I've been experiencing worse than normal battery life due to either an application or something related to signal strength (just moved to a new building at work).

I have always been able to get from morning to evening without charging mid-day if I didn't touch the phone with plenty of charge left over (+/-17 hours). Recently, due to an application flipping out or the phone/data signal being below what I used to have or something else entirely, I'm having the phone charge drop considerably faster. Today I set the phone on my desk at work and only turned the screen on 2-3 times to check battery level. By noon the battery was down to 54%. By 5pm it was down to 45%. I made 2 short phone calls, 1 text, performed 1 google search for a price of an item and the phone was under 15% at 7pm.

I would consider a new battery, but yesterday I charged the phone at my desk so it was 100% at 5pm. At 11pm I was about to charge it, but realized I had a task to complete that took 20-30 minutes (Web page email + application wifi sync to PC + pocket cloud to that PC + screen on the whole time). I started at 39% and finished at 38%.

So, I'm back to assuming that something is up with applications/phone connectivity/radio. I have GSam Battery Monitor installed and have data from today. I'll try to attach screen grabs to show the notable data.

I'm at a loss here, so any suggestions would be very much appreciated!

 

I turned off the WiFi this morning when I got in to work and did nothing different (the phone sat on my desk all day mostly untouched). Today I'm seeing 62% remaining at 430pm whereas I was at 45% yesterday. I did reboot last night, but since I did that a few times in the last couple days anyway, I wouldn't expect that to help/hurt.

I ran WiFi Analyzer and found that my new building has 20+ wifi AP's on 1, 6, and 11. Interestingly, in the 2 minutes I had the analyzer running, my battery dropped from 62% to 50%. Either the WiFi is killing things or the battery is toast, right?

 

I've only had ESPN Radio installed since June and haven't used it since July. I froze it now, but may just uninstall it.

I can try freezing Google services as well, but I'm not sure what processes that would inclphon

I don't use the mail apps that came with the phone. I've always used Maildroid on this phone.

I have installed quite a few apps, but most have been removed after trying them. If removed apps leave residual clutter over time, what would you recommend to clean it?

 

I have installed a few apps, but certainly wouldn't put it close to 1-200 installed. I probably have 25 installed currently. I tried to adjust the settings on the Play Store app, but there were no options when I navigated to settings--apps--all--Google Play Store--uncheck 'show notifications'. In the mean time, I've frozen Google Store and Google Services as well as the only other app like ESPN I could think of (MLS Matchday). I don't have a Facebook account so that was the first thing I uninstalled.

 

I realized that you meant notifications within the play store app. Those were already off. I also turned off all automatic updates (was set to wifi only). I will also go through and remove apps I never use (or at least freeze them for testing).

 

From my experience, GPS doesn't hurt my phone too much. If I'm using a navigation app, the GPS+app combination is terrible for the battery. Yes, I generally keep the GPS on all the time though. It doesn't appear that the GPS is listed high up on the list.

 

I used "App Quarantine" to freeze effectively every app I installed or isn't required based on the list for Droid4 provided on XDA. I am now charging the phone at work to 100% and will let it sit on my desk untouched (as much as possible). I also turned off WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS (including all location services). If the battery still drains in a similar fashion, can I then assume that it isn't app/system related and that the battery has degraded? What else can I try to narrow down the cause of the battery drain?

 

I sometimes see the GPS icon, but that's only when I have an app looking for a signal. I've only seen the "searching for signal" in the notification screen during these times.

I went hunting in the hills yesterday with the phone in the non-smart phone config (plus a couple needed apps which included maps and GPS). By the end of the day when I put it back on the charger to get navigation home I was still at 81%. I didn't use the phone at all during the day but it was turned on. I would consider this acceptable since it was basically 20% usage in 8-9 hours or so.

I think the only thing I can do is to turn a couple apps at a time on until I get back my core usability and can verify that battery life doesn't suffer significantly.

 

I'm certainly jealous. Obviously you either have a better 4G signal than I do, a better battery, or both. I've never been able to keep my 4G on even before this battery drain issue because it would kill the battery by noon. I figure it has to do with lower signal strength forcing the antenna amplifier to go nuts searching for signal. Even with 4G turned off the phone sometimes will be in 1x mode. At least it does better with battery in 3G than 4G.

 

I had around 80% last night and decided to try syncing my MediaMonkey library to the phone (no downloaded files, just updating metadata. The sync took 2-3 minutes but the battery claimed to drop by 40% instantly. It might have been caused by rebooting the phone though. Any thoughts on this?

 

Another interesting incident yesterday. I decided to turn on the email app (MailDroid) yesterday since things seemed relatively ok (other than the one strange battery drop off). I found that the battery level tanked much like I've seen in the past. Is it possible that my mail app has a power consumption bug that could cause such poor life? I've been using MailDroid for several years without any issues. However, yesterday the battery was down to 40-50% when I got home from work and quickly dropped to <20%, which is what I originally created the thread to discuss.

So, either the battery is bad or MailDroid is the culprit?

 

I changed some settings in maildroid so that it's not always connected. It remains to be seen how much of a difference this will make in the long run. I did have 50% when I got home today. But, all of this savings so far is at the cost of actually using the phone. I think based on the rapid drop in charge, the battery is dead. In fact, in the . Minutes I've been composing now, the charge went from 44% to 20%. New battery it is!

 

We lost power at our house last Saturday night for just over a day. Since I didn't know when it would return and I was traveling out of town first thing Monday morning, I didn't touch the phone much if at all from Saturday through when the power came back. I don't really understand what was different other than no WiFi signal since the mobile networks stayed up but I was able to get very good battery life as can be seen. NOTE: I saved the picture today so the activity bars are clipped a bit.



Just today, though, I had quite the opposite experience. I didn't do a whole lot with the phone other than take a few short phone calls and send a few texts. However, you can see that I did pretty terrible today and only made it to just after noon before I was down to 4%. In fact, I had 45% when I answered a 2 minute phone call and had 19% when I hung up. I then checked one thing and was down to 5%.








Again, I guess I'm simply trying to verify that this sounds like a bad battery and not something that could be corrected by an application. If I had my choice, I'd simply upgrade to the Droid5, but since Motorola doesn't like that idea, I'm kinda stuck.

 

Well, I came up with a test that seems pretty conclusive. After charging the phone to full battery, I turned the screen brightness up to 100%, disabled the screen timeout, and launched candy crush (just a typically draining app). I then set the phone to the side and waited for it to die. The following pictures seem to indicate pretty clearly that the battery must be the issue. Since the load on the phone was unchanged from 100% until it turned off, the battery level should have drained linearly (right?). Since it drained linearly to 50% and then dropped dramatically fast, I assume that the battery must be toast.

 

I calculate that I have somewhere around 1000 charge cycles on this battery (5/2012 to 11/2014), so a new battery won't hurt anything. I even found one that looks good and is available locally via ship to the store. Lenmar 1925mAh for $20 from HomeDepot (yeah, weird I know).