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battery jumping to 4% virtuous inquisition

I thought maybe it was my battery (anker 1900) so they replaced it, and although my battery life increased, once I get to around 12%, it'll jump to 4 and then die in 5 minutes, many times before the phone can even shut itself off, it just loses power. Almost as if its.misreading the voltage until it gets very very low. I know this was a problem on gingerbread, didn't think it was on ice cream sandwich. Any thoughts? Its really annoying
This anker battery does last longer than my last anker, I got over 4 hours of screen use with wifi over 9 or 10 hours. But the jumping to 4% must be software since it happened on both batteries. Haven't tried using my stock battery yet. Anyone else experience this?

Have you tried one of the recalibration methods on xda? Or you can use battery monitor widget pro to enter upper and lower limits for your current setup.
from HTC Pyramid / Tapatalk 2

Well, in the lower levels of the battery, ie below 20% the % reading is quite unreliable. This is normal, because voltage fluctuations will cause wrong battery readings.
To show you an example, after your battery dies out, leave it for a few minutes & then try to switch on your phone. You will still be able to, because the battery hasn't completely drained.
You should calibrate your battery & see if that helps too

Purposely drained battery, charged for 2 minutes, restarted, now at 50%

I'm on CM10 8/31 and I've been noticing that my battery life has been really poor lately, so I wanted to find out what the problem was. I thought about draining my battery fully and then charging it again. Once I drained the battery, I charged it, and restarted the phone after the charging began. Once the phone booted, it reported a 50% or so charge. I'm wondering if my phone is stuck at reporting battery at half capacity, and that when it charges to 100%, it's actually 50%. Anything I can do?
EDIT: Also, I should note that the battery has sometimes spiked up/down by about 20% after a reboot (including today before the drain).

This phone has a fuel gauge chip, fully discharging and recharging will not calibrate it. False readings after reboot are common, you may even notice it will climb back up as it begins to accurately reflect level.
There are apps to let you know what is causing drain. BetterBatteryStats and CPUSpy are recommended a lot.

ALBGunner04 said:
I'm on CM10 8/31 and I've been noticing that my battery life has been really poor lately, so I wanted to find out what the problem was. I thought about draining my battery fully and then charging it again. Once I drained the battery, I charged it, and restarted the phone after the charging began. Once the phone booted, it reported a 50% or so charge. I'm wondering if my phone is stuck at reporting battery at half capacity, and that when it charges to 100%, it's actually 50%. Anything I can do?
EDIT: Also, I should note that the battery has sometimes spiked up/down by about 20% after a reboot (including today before the drain).
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Entropy doesn't frequent our forum much anymore, but he left some nuggets of wisdom behind.
As you have probably seen, he mentioned several times that generally our fuel gage doesn't need much attention. It may get a little out of whack if you have heavy usage followed by reboot, but generally the error is short-lived and goes away quickly (within an hour or so).
But apparently sometimes the fuel gage gets really confused, and in that case you can reset it (to un-confuse it) by powering down and pulling battery for 20-30 seconds. It certainly can't hurt to try.. that's what you try for any computer that was acting weird. That was discussed by Entropy here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1209087&highlight=+gingerbread+fuel+gauge+
By the way, here is a link to the fuel gage chip (MAX17040) used in Infuse
http://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/MAX17040-MAX17041.pdf
It has a heuristic model of the battery. The only input is the battery voltage. So it looks at time history of voltage and provides an output signal. Exactly what the output is I’m not sure. You’d think it would be an estimate of %. But according to the circuit diagram there is no inputs to the MAX17040 other than battery voltage.
And yet our phone also knows when it’s charging. And our Infuse phone also has a sensor that enables it to measure current while charging (but not to measure current while discharging). This according to the developer of Battery Monitor Widget:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=31295223&highlight=infuse#post31295223
Why the heck would we not use sensed charging current and charging status as an input to calculating our % battery (since the signal does not go to the Max17040)? Beats me, doesn't make sense. Maybe the output of he fuel gage chip goes to the integrated power chip MAX8998 which looks at these other inputs (charging status and charging current) and develops the % estimate... I’m not sure.

Don't you have shutdown issues?

As probably many of you already know, there is a shutdown bug mostly affecting Nexus 6p but also other devices as well.
I've been using my Nexus 5 for 3 years until a week ago I got the Nexus 6p, and I had not noticed this issue. However, after having the shutdown a couple of times with the Nexus 6p, I decided to test with the Nexus 5, and I'm finding quite easy to reproduce the problem, what make me wonder why I hadn't read such complains about Nexus 5 before.
Just getting to 15% and spam the camera a little (around 7 photos), and it dies (battery drop 15 to 0). Tested with two Nexus 5.

How old are the batteries in the Nexus 5 phones you used for the test?

You aren't replicating the bug. The camera really does suck down battery life like you wouldn't believe. You are most likely genuinely draining the battery 15%. I've been on a Nougat ROM for a couple of months now and haven't had any sudden battery power off or anything of that nature. I can bring it down to 1% everytime before it dies.
Are you doing this on stock ROM or custom ROMs? What Android version?

everything stock, 6.0.1.
your theory would be ok if the battery remained on 0%. But after turn it on again, some times is indeed at 0%, but other times it's at 15%.
Also, according to that logic, if the device is at 100% and I take 10 photos, my battery should drain to 85%, right?...

It's not a theory. Batteries don't always drain at a linear rate. For example, going from 100% to 85% could take 1 hrs. While going from 15% to 0% could take only 20 mins. This will be made worse by an old or dying battery. When a battery is under load, you have what is called "battery sag." Let's say the battery is at 3.7v. When under heavy load, the voltage could drop to 3.5v or lower, aka: battery sag. When the load is removed, the voltage will jump back up, though not as high as it started because while under that load, it also drained some juice from the battery.
You are probably experiencing heavy battery sag while at 15%, enough to drop the battery voltage low enough for the phone to power off. The heavy load is removed (camera is no longer on), and voila, now the battery is no longer "dead." My first Android phone (Tmobile G1) wouldn't even allow the camera to open if the battery was at 15% or lower. Most likely because the heavy load and subsequent battery sag would cause the phone to power off almost immediately.

Phone charging at 100% for around 15-30 minutes

Hello. I just noticed something weird on my TCL 10L phone. When the phone reaches 100%, it displays fully charged on my lockscreen. Though, unlocking the phone I see the phone is still charging. I see the battery bar being green with a charging bolt. It takes around 15-30 minutes until it says charged (and the bolt removed). Is this normal? I do not remember the phone doing this when I bought it around 5 months ago.

Changes in charging and especially sudden loss of capacity can indicate a battery failure.
Check for cover swelling/bulging, battery swelling is a failure, replace asap if so.
A failure this early is rare but Li's can fail at any time in their life.
Inspect jack and port for contamination. Use a known good charger and cable. Try cycling the battery until the phone shutdown then charge to 100%, repeat... to calibrate battery indicator.
Minimum start charging temp is 72F
Best start temperature is 82-90F
Never attempt to charge a Li below 40F
Keep battery temperature below about 101F when charging.
Do not use phone while charging as it will skew the charging curve.

Thanks for the reply. There is no battery loss. I can play games on this device, browse, and check apps and drain the battery in the same period I did since I got it. I actually charged it to 100% since went to sleep. 9 hours later the device was still at 100%. 1.5 hour of playing a game after that and the battery was down to 84%. The issue is really weird. I am thinking a battery calibration may help. I do not know.
P.S. I am currently using Android 10 and I do not want to switch to Android 11.

I wouldn't worry about it.
It's best not to charge to 100%.or below 30%.
Lu's like frequent midrange power cycling (40-65%).
As for 11, no way that crapware is getting on my phones....

blackhawk said:
I wouldn't worry about it.
It's best not to charge to 100%.or below 30%.
Lu's like frequent midrange power cycling (40-65%).
As for 11, no way that crapware is getting on my phones....
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Did you personally experience this on any device? This is the first time I saw something like this. According to some articles the phone may display wrong battery stats. So I was thinking calibration would be a solution to this issue.

Fast battery drain from an year old device. Is there any way to slow charging speed?

So my 4a has been having fast battery drain since few months now. I remember it having very good battery life initially. However now it drains battery very fast.
This is also surprising since I keep brightness low due to me being sensitive to it.. and also keep the phone charged upto 80% capacity only as I read that it prolongs battery life.
One thing I could note is that the phone drains slower in the 80 - 100 % range if the phone gets fully charged occasionally.
Hence I have been suspecting the 'rapid' charging which is enabled by default on stock charger to be one cause.
Is there some way to enable slower charging like what happens in case of 'Adaptive charging' post 80% capacity? I hope that will lead to lesser wearing down of battery.

Don't use a compatible cable/charger and it'll change slowly. I don't think any PC I've connected to can do rapid charging, for example, and the cheap USB chargers I have definitely can't do it, only the one that came with the phone can do it.

purezen said:
So my 4a has been having fast battery drain since few months now. I remember it having very good battery life initially. However now it drains battery very fast.
This is also surprising since I keep brightness low due to me being sensitive to it.. and also keep the phone charged upto 80% capacity only as I read that it prolongs battery life.
One thing I could note is that the phone drains slower in the 80 - 100 % range if the phone gets fully charged occasionally.
Hence I have been suspecting the 'rapid' charging which is enabled by default on stock charger to be one cause.
Is there some way to enable slower charging like what happens in case of 'Adaptive charging' post 80% capacity? I hope that will lead to lesser wearing down of battery.
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It's more likely an app that drain your battery in background than your battery dying already. Quick charge and adaptive charge are made to not harm the battery.
Are you rooted? If yes, install Franco kernel manager app from playstore.
In first page you'll see your battery life estimation (from system) and clicking on live monitor go-to the processes tab.
Just like top cmd on Linux you'll see which process is active and how much cpu it use
For me as an exemple i realized that when I'm using YouTube music. The AdAway app goes crazy and drain my battery. And its something that's not shown on settings/battety tab.

Fast charging stresses the battery more than slow charging. That said I almost always fast charge. I expect 1-2 years of battery life on my N10+'s though.
Charging past 80% or discharging below 30% stresses the battery; Li's like frequent midrange power cycling.
Don't start charging below 72F, 82F or higher is best. High temp cut off is about 102F.
Never attempt to charge a battery colder than 40F!!!
Erratic fast charging is a sign of battery failure.
A rapid decline in capacity is another sign of a battery failure.
Any rear cover bulging ie battery swelling is a failure, replace asap.
Once a battery is below 80% of it's original capacity it's degraded and has reached the end of its service life, replace it.
Degraded Li's are more likely to fail which can easily destroy the phone.
If the phone is used heavily or is 2-3 years old, probably time to replace the battery. Just do it.
On most phones the cost is low.

a1291762 said:
Don't use a compatible cable/charger and it'll change slowly. I don't think any PC I've connected to can do rapid charging, for example, and the cheap USB chargers I have definitely can't do it, only the one that came with the phone can do it.
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Mine does rapid one only Thankfully connecting a usb to a socket board does non-rapid

Dead-neM said:
It's more likely an app that drain your battery in background than your battery dying already. Quick charge and adaptive charge are made to not harm the battery.
Are you rooted? If yes, install Franco kernel manager app from playstore.
In first page you'll see your battery life estimation (from system) and clicking on live monitor go-to the processes tab.
Just like top cmd on Linux you'll see which process is active and how much cpu it use
For me as an exemple i realized that when I'm using YouTube music. The AdAway app goes crazy and drain my battery. And its something that's not shown on settings/battety tab.
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Click to collapse
Thanks for the response
Frankly don't have that much usage of my phone. Will give sometime to observing with non rapid charging. Will give this a try if that still persists.

blackhawk said:
Fast charging stresses the battery more than slow charging. That said I almost always fast charge. I expect 1-2 years of battery life on my N10+'s though.
Charging past 80% or discharging below 30% stresses the battery; Li's like frequent midrange power cycling.
Don't start charging below 72F, 82F or higher is best. High temp cut off is about 102F.
Never attempt to charge a battery colder than 40F!!!
Erratic fast charging is a sign of battery failure.
A rapid decline in capacity is another sign of a battery failure.
Any rear cover bulging ie battery swelling is a failure, replace asap.
Once a battery is below 80% of it's original capacity it's degraded and has reached the end of its service life, replace it.
Degraded Li's are more likely to fail which can easily destroy the phone.
If the phone is used heavily or is 2-3 years old, probably time to replace the battery. Just do it.
On most phones the cost is low.
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Click to collapse
Thanks for the response. That was insightful

UPDATE:
Started slow-er charging since few days now.. and I really feel that the battery performance has considerably improved
Also update to Android 12 since few days as well so not sure if that has a role to play though I don't think so

purezen said:
UPDATE:
Started slow-er charging since few days now.. and I really feel that the battery performance has considerably improved
Also update to Android 12 since few days as well so not sure if that has a role to play though I don't think so
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If it seems to work better... I don't see any difference on my N10+'s though. Run times are the same slow/fast charging.
Keep a close eye on it as erratic fast charging is a sign of battery failure... I have seen that