Database Info

Battery draining bugs very common

This study confirmed what I believed all along for a lot of Android apps, they have bugs or just inefficient code in them that drains the battery when it shouldn't. I hope Google, the developers of AOKP, CyanogenMod, & others focus more on this issue. A lot of custom ROMs & kernels introduce problems too. Sure we can all just slap on after-market batteries, but I prefer to not carry a brick in my pocket.
http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2012/120613HuSmartphoneBugs.html
ABSTRACT:
Despite their immense popularity in recent years, smartphones are, and will remain, severely limited by their battery life. Preserving this critical resource has driven smartphone OSes to undergo a paradigm shift in power management: by default every component, including the CPU, stays off or in an idle state, unless the app explicitly instructs the OS to keep it on. Such a policy encumbers app developers to explicitly juggle power control APIs exported by the OS to keep the components on during their active use by the app and off otherwise. The resulting power-encumbered programming unavoidably gives rise to a new class of software energy bugs on smartphones called no-sleep bugs, which arise from mishandling power control APIs by apps or the framework and result in signi?cant and unexpected battery drainage. This paper makes the ?rst advances towards understanding and automatically detecting software energy bugs on smartphones. It makes the following three contributions: (1) We present the ?rst comprehensive study of real-world no-sleep energy bug characteristics; (2) We propose the ?rst automatic solution to detect these bugs based on the classic reaching de?nitions data?ow analysis algorithm; (3) We provide experimental data showing that our tool accurately detected all 12 known instances of no-sleep bugs and found 30 new bugs in the 86 apps examined.

Hey Whyzor! Why so serious??
Have you lost your Optimus V and moved on to bigger and better phones?
Nice to see you're still geekin' it up.
BTW, what's this tool this article is alluding to?

jawz101 said:
Hey Whyzor! Why so serious??
Have you lost your Optimus V and moved on to bigger and better phones?
Nice to see you're still geekin' it up.
BTW, what's this tool this article is alluding to?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hey, I was just posting something I came upon in my RSS feeds today, thought I'd share. When I was more active in the dev community, if you remember, phantom battery drains was one of my pet peeves. These days I'm just using a debloated stock-ish ROM on HTC Sensation w/ TMobile prepaid. VM was good while it lasted, but I needed better phone selections & data speeds.
As for the tool, I'm guessing it's in the full research paper or some further digging is needed. They probably will release it to the public domain eventually.

Lol I thought you'd written the paper at first
Sent from my LG-VM670 using Tapatalk 2

Snapdragon™ BatteryGuru

Anyone Tried this yet?
Snapdragon™ BatteryGuru
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xiam.snapdragon.app
App is from Qualcomm.
I've never used apps the limit functionality to save battery before, but if anyone would know how to do this right, it should be Qualcomm.
Snapdragon™ BatteryGuru extends battery performance and improves overall user experience by intelligently making changes that optimize Snapdragon device functionality. This app:
• Delivers longer battery life with fewer charges
• Intelligently learns how you use your Snapdragon smartphone and optimizes your device without disabling smartphone functionality
• Requires no user configuration - Snapdragon BatteryGuru automatically learns and adjusts the smartphone settings so you don’t have to.
After a brief 2-4 day introduction period, Snapdragon BatteryGuru learns the user’s behaviors and then notifies the user that it is ready to extend the battery life and improve the experience. Snapdragon BatteryGuru continues to operate in the background, deepening its understanding of the user and further optimizing the experience over time.

Thanks man!
Will give it a go.

I'm not really sure on what the value of these apps are.
Letting my phone do whatever it wants when I'm on wifi and my phone is sitting idle, my phone uses around 1%/hour of battery life.
Some portion of that is all this app could really save then, right?
Why bother if, in exchange, I'm possibly having delayed notifications, apps not updating in the background, etc.?

Sounds like a bunch of BS to me.
I'll be shocked if this makes any discernable difference.
Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

I installed this and 3 days later it was still in learning mode. I got tired of waiting for it to do something else, so I deleted it and installed Greenify.

I'll give it a whirl.

I may try this out, but I already have the no–brainer solution to battery life woes...a big fat extended battery. If only lots of others would do the same lol.

I use the cPU sleeper, i;; give this a try, i get great batt life on stock, stock kernel..

Some of the reviews said it actually drained the battery. Might be wort trying but I have my doubts.
Sent from my SCH-I535 using xda app-developers app

I've had it on my sick Verizon s3 for about 3 days, so far not impressed. It took 2 days in learning mode, then once that period ended it seems to actually be a significant battery drainer! I will try for another couple of days and report back, but I'm not optimistic so far.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using XDA Premium HD app

It seems to keep me from adjusting my CPU with rom toolbox pro or system tuner pro. Can someone else that is running a custom kernal (IMO 2.0) and let me know if they can adjust theirs.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

This is an app written and distributed by a component manufacturer. They will cut speed/processing power as much as they can to make the device use less battery. This inherently means the app will take control of the CPU/governor adjustments. A kernel such as KT with an app that LOCKS frequencies may prevent this, but also will render the app useless.
They aren't concerned with the same things as we in the rooting world are. We want to push as much processing power as possible while using the least amount of electrical power needed, not slow the device down while hoping ppl don't notice. Lol..

I too experienced battery drain from this app.
+1 on CPU Sleeper
Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

tryed for about 1weeks.
After the learning mode...it started to appear as one of the most stealer of battery life...with 12/13% of daily battery usage. Disinstalled lol ...and my phone seems to be turned at a good battery life

Samsung DVFS cripples phone performance, is it an issue for you?

Did you know that Samsung has a system called DVFS that basically does nothing other than cripping your phone's performance with aggressive underclocking? There's a big thread about it here, but other than that, it seems that this issue is not very well known, which is surprising considering the SGS4 is a very mainstream phone. When I discovered about it I was shocked because this system does literally nothing useful, but it makes gaming or other high end smartphone activities (heavy browsing, 3D games, heavy multitasking, etc) lag like crazy.
It shocks me that Samsung has implemented such a thing and that you cannot disable without rooting (and obviously voiding the warranty and your Knox flag), and nobody except a few XDA users noticed.

MarkMRL said:
Did you know that Samsung has a system called DVFS that basically does nothing other than cripping your phone's performance with aggressive underclocking? There's a big thread about it here, but other than that, it seems that this issue is not very well known, which is surprising considering the SGS4 is a very mainstream phone. When I discovered about it I was shocked because this system does literally nothing useful, but it makes gaming or other high end smartphone activities (heavy browsing, 3D games, heavy multitasking, etc) lag like crazy.
It shocks me that Samsung has implemented such a thing and that you cannot disable without rooting (and obviously voiding the warranty and your Knox flag), and nobody except a few XDA users noticed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You say it does nothing useful, but what does it do for battery life?

s14sh3r said:
You say it does nothing useful, but what does it do for battery life?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nothing? The phone already has extensive battery saving options, and it already has an underclocking option right there. Not to mention, swappable battery. Why is this thing enforced on everyone? If you use your flagship tier phone like it was an old Nokia from the nineties then it might not affect you. Since I use my phone for browsing internet, multimedia, and games, it does affect me a lot. I don't give a flying **** about one hour of additional battery when my phone slows down to a crawl. If I wanted to enable crawl mode I should have the option, the phone shouldn't decide arbitrarily when to slow down.
Also, if you really want to get into conspiracy theories, what makes you think this isn't a marketing ploy by samsung? To force users to get the S5 because the old one has such poor performance in games and stuff like that? The average smartphone user is so dumb he wouldn't realize it's all planned right in the system itself, they'd go " hurr, my phone can't run games well anymore, better go out and buy the S5, that will surely play games better, with it's multiple megapixels and cores and newer stuff I have no clue about".

MarkMRL said:
Nothing? The phone already has extensive battery saving options, and it already has an underclocking option right there. Not to mention, swappable battery. Why is this thing enforced on everyone? If you use your flagship tier phone like it was an old Nokia from the nineties then it might not affect you. Since I use my phone for browsing internet, multimedia, and games, it does affect me a lot. I don't give a flying **** about one hour of additional battery when my phone slows down to a crawl. If I wanted to enable crawl mode I should have the option, the phone shouldn't decide arbitrarily when to slow down.
Also, if you really want to get into conspiracy theories, what makes you think this isn't a marketing ploy by samsung? To force users to get the S5 because the old one has such poor performance in games and stuff like that? The average smartphone user is so dumb he wouldn't realize it's all planned right in the system itself, they'd go " hurr, my phone can't run games well anymore, better go out and buy the S5, that will surely play games better, with it's multiple megapixels and cores and newer stuff I have no clue about".
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Good points. I'm not arguing against you, btw, I'm not even sure how to tell if my phone is using it since I'm using Omega ROM.

s14sh3r said:
Good points. I'm not arguing against you, btw, I'm not even sure how to tell if my phone is using it since I'm using Omega ROM.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, if you play any game or if you browse a lot you'd probably notice because performance drops a lot and lag increases. I don't know what Omega Rom is, this is an issue in stock rom. Of course it doesn't affect me anymore because I have the knowledge to research this stuff and eventually find a solution (even though I obviously have no idea how the solution is made), but for the average user this should be an issue, I mean everyone should know about it, it's too shady to be ignored, this is planned obsolescence at its finest.

Also, if this was introduced to save battery, how come so many people are complaining about battery drain on Kitkat?
It's obviously a marketing strategy, and I will spread the word about it.

There's a technical paper on dvfs around which goes through some of the techniques samsung uses to optimise performance and battery use. https://events.linuxfoundation.org/images/stories/pdf/lcjp2012_ham.pdf
Sent from my unknown using Tapatalk

planetf1 said:
There's a technical paper on dvfs around which goes through some of the techniques samsung uses to optimise performance and battery use. https://events.linuxfoundation.org/images/stories/pdf/lcjp2012_ham.pdf
Sent from my unknown using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't care and I don't have the knowledge to understand anything in that document.
What I care about is:
Galaxy S4 on 4.3 and under: great performance, no issues.
Galaxy S4 on 4.4: awful performance, issues.
Other phones on 4.4: great performance, no issues.
It's no coincidence this happened only a few months before the S5 is released.
Either Samsung did something wrong with this implementation, or they did indeed do it to force users to upgrade because the older model is no longer viable for high end smartphone use.

planetf1 said:
There's a technical paper on dvfs around which goes through some of the techniques samsung uses to optimise performance and battery use. https://events.linuxfoundation.org/images/stories/pdf/lcjp2012_ham.pdf
Sent from my unknown using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This has nothing to do with the user-space policies which you're complaining about.

Will deleting the twDVFS.apk be sufficient to disable this frequency scaling on my S4? Or is using the Xposed module necessary?

delete

Is Greenify useful in Android 7+? How to Guard Against Buggy Battery Hog Apps?

Android has come a long way as far as battery usage management. For Android 7 or later, doesn't the "Doze" feature make the Greenify app have little to no usefulness? It seems with these types of subjects (battery apps, cleaners) it breaks into two camps: The "Tin foil hat" camp that uses words like "feels" or "seems" when describing benefits, and the camp that is skeptical. Either way, it is frustrating when you can't find anywhere or anyone on the Internet that has actually do a well thought out test to determine the answer as many things can affect a phones performance and battery usage so no one knows for sure in many cases if what they experienced was just coincidental timing with something else going on with their phone or if the app is truly the one making the difference.
I had a case one day where my battery took an abnormal dip and when I went into settings to see the app usage, the Pocket app was the culprit when I very rarely even use that app. Is there an app that looks for abnormal app battery usage and warns you about it? I prefer to either address the issue with the app developer and/or uninstall it as opposed to a band aid approach using Greenify and/or Island.

General Game Optimizing Service / "App-Performance-Limitter" on S22 Ultra?

According to some news, the so called "Game Optimizing Service" is availeable on S22 Ultra devices - which potenially controlls about 10.000 Apps of the App-Store.
Can someone confirm if it is installed / active on S22 Ultra on SD & Exynos ?
[Update: Samsung reponds] Galaxy phones appear to be throttling 10,000 Android apps, like OnePlus did
According to recent findings, Samsung is throttling thousands of common Android apps on its Galaxy devices, and without a clear reason.
9to5google.com
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1499009797035008002

Package Disabler Pro

krogoth said:
Package Disabler Pro
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Pay for the money greedy developer.

Here's a link to my thread, i debloat Samsung firmware including GOS (Game Optimizing Service) for the best performance and battery.
[DISCONTINUED] Samsung Galaxy One UI - Optimization Guide
THIS IS A SUGGESTED CONFIGURATION FOR SAMSUNG DEVICES OUT OF SUPPORT/CLOSED I - RECOMMENDED SETTINGS To Start With - Factory Reset before starting optimisations - Factory Reset after every Major update (One UI/Android) - Remove SIM before first...
forum.xda-developers.com

I remember that Samsung used something like this in my Note 5 and S7 Edge from Android 6 to limit game performance on purpose.
I advise you all to disable this "optimization".

Reports say that the GOS cannot be disabled the old way b'cos it's now system app since One UI 4.0?

Will it help to uninstall insted of disabling?

You can't disable it in OneUI 4.x
It's part of the Kernel now.

Maybe instead of panicking and basing decisions on headlines and mob mentality you think about the reasons why this might have been done to start with?
Most of if not all of these apps will be very poorly optimised in general but especially for the hardware in the S22 series of devices - this means that left unchecked they will use more resources than they really need to, warming up the devices causing thermal throttling to kick in and draining the battery fast (as well as possibly reducing the lifespan of certain components).
This APK keeps these things in check, but for games where you really need more performance you can use gamebooster to switch to performance mode and recovery virtually all the lost power (if not all of it) - making it your choice to sacrifice heat and battery life for performance when you need it, not all the time.

Yeah, I uninstalled it via ADB but it returns after reboot.

Yeah only thing working from the sounds of it is being rooted and using a package disabler but yeah then you lose widevine currently.

I've disabled all it's permissions including "Change system setting", maybe that helps.
Also here it's mentioned that it's possible to disable the GOS for non-game apps, still waiting for answer to how though:
https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/t56kta

Lennyuk said:
Maybe instead of panicking and basing decisions on headlines and mob mentality you think about the reasons why this might have been done to start with?
Most of if not all of these apps will be very poorly optimised in general but especially for the hardware in the S22 series of devices - this means that left unchecked they will use more resources than they really need to, warming up the devices causing thermal throttling to kick in and draining the battery fast (as well as possibly reducing the lifespan of certain components).
This APK keeps these things in check, but for games where you really need more performance you can use gamebooster to switch to performance mode and recovery virtually all the lost power (if not all of it) - making it your choice to sacrifice heat and battery life for performance when you need it, not all the time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It is more or less the same discussion as we had with the oneplus 9 pro.
I am not seeing bad intend - but i dont't support the overall approach.
Most of theses apps are poorly optimized .... Even if so: That's none of the OS to take care of - especially not if you can't change / edit the overall parameters as a user on a "per App" Solution. I would love to see MS introduce something like this into windows....
Also the oem now actively could impact the performance of an App and the developer ist reliable anymore: "Well Samsung decided our app has to run like this, thanks for buying the pro version, but we can't help you". Wonderfull. And if Samsung has a bad day - maybe we are dropping the performance of some famous apps even more.... cause samsung would love to push the own alternative. Which includes some new advertising service... One could get creative with this stuff.
The reduction of lifespan is also a argument which is... at least questionable. I would argue that this is then poor product design or use of wrong or not fitting-quality components for the job. Makeing up "flaws" in Hardware by Software isn't really a solution to the overall problem

OK, so apparently this GOS thing is what the "Processing speed" option controls. It enables all apps to run at native speeds. I thought it just raised the clock speeds or something. Hmm..

@omnimax
not really. The thing is that the term - "Game Optimizing Service" is a bit missleading.
It is not about allowing named applications to run "native" or "unristricted". Named applications run with predefined ressourcess which aren't by any means "native". It's not about "raising" clockspeeds. It is about restriction of availeable ressourcces.

Lennyuk said:
Maybe instead of panicking and basing decisions on headlines and mob mentality you think about the reasons why this might have been done to start with?
Most of if not all of these apps will be very poorly optimised in general but especially for the hardware in the S22 series of devices - this means that left unchecked they will use more resources than they really need to, warming up the devices causing thermal throttling to kick in and draining the battery fast (as well as possibly reducing the lifespan of certain components).
This APK keeps these things in check, but for games where you really need more performance you can use gamebooster to switch to performance mode and recovery virtually all the lost power (if not all of it) - making it your choice to sacrifice heat and battery life for performance when you need it, not all the time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nah, this is the same situation as OP did with OP9 series, except US SD user's cant even root and remove it completely so you're stuck at their mercy. If it was configurable, not enabled by default, only affected games and didn't phone home all the time, they might get a pass.... but the way it's implemented is pretty much the definition of malware.
Can't even opt-out
Always runs, with permissions or not.
Phones home with potentially identifying information. (EU people, check out how GDPR is handled here, it's probably not)
Makes your device slow.
The road to hell is paved on good intentions and what not...

I am really amused to see so much discussion on this here on XDA and social media as well. For 98% of the folks, as long as your phone runs smooth and gives you an all day battery life, enjoy it. Many app developers are also not saints. They may leak data and bloat code etc so OEMs need to take the matter in their hands. For avid gamers, they should probably get a gaming machine and use phones only for casual gaming. With current tech limits, gaming on phones will necessitate some tweaks to optimize performance. Apple is polished because it simply stops everything else in the background and focuses ONLY on 1 task on the foreground. And iPhones also do heat up after sometime while gaming.

linom said:
I am really amused to see so much discussion on this here on XDA and social media as well. For 98% of the folks, as long as your phone runs smooth and gives you an all day battery life, enjoy it. Many app developers are also not saints. They may leak data and bloat code etc so OEMs need to take the matter in their hands. For avid gamers, they should probably get a gaming machine and use phones only for casual gaming. With current tech limits, gaming on phones will necessitate some tweaks to optimize performance. Apple is polished because it simply stops everything else in the background and focuses ONLY on 1 task on the foreground. And iPhones also do heat up after sometime while gaming.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's really not the OEM's place to "take matter into their own hands". Don't push your use case on everyone else. Samsung does not know my user case, just like Apple does not know my use case, just like YOU don't know my use case. People bought this (and other, like the OP9) phone partially due to benchmark scores that should translate into performance metrics for their use case. When that's not the case, then they should be mad they got a paperweight. Check out the GOS enabled geekscore, it's basically a GS10. Why should users be happy they got a smooth UI experience when the things they actually want to do on a phone is gimped?
Your sentiment on a gaming machine... are you serious? This phone costs more than an actual mid-upper tier gaming PC. Some people like to play games on their phones, and some games are mobile only.
Again, optimizing by itself is not necessarily a bad thing. They just need to make it an opt-in experience, explain what it does clearly, let the users choose which apps to "optimize", and start letting people use their hardware like their own.

craznazn said:
It's really not the OEM's place to "take matter into their own hands". Don't push your use case on everyone else. Samsung does not know my user case, just like Apple does not know my use case, just like YOU don't know my use case. People bought this (and other, like the OP9) phone partially due to benchmark scores that should translate into performance metrics for their use case. When that's not the case, then they should be mad they got a paperweight. Check out the GOS enabled geekscore, it's basically a GS10. Why should users be happy they got a smooth UI experience when the things they actually want to do on a phone is gimped?
Your sentiment on a gaming machine... are you serious? This phone costs more than an actual mid-upper tier gaming PC. Some people like to play games on their phones, and some games are mobile only.
Again, optimizing by itself is not necessarily a bad thing. They just need to make it an opt-in experience, explain what it does clearly, let the users choose which apps to "optimize", and start letting people use their hardware like their own.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, maybe you're right. They need to be transparent on the optimization choices.

lokto7 said:
Reports say that the GOS cannot be disabled the old way b'cos it's now system app since One UI 4.0?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Cannot disable, adb fails...