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Why the Android battery drains quickly: reasons. Why does a smartphone discharge quickly - the reasons for a new device, in standby mode and battery problems

27.03.2018 13:00:00

The autonomy of a mobile device is one of the key factors that a person pays attention to when purchasing a new Android phone. Therefore, manufacturers pay special attention to the characteristics of the battery: built-in capacity, operating time in various modes, and so on.

However, for all the years that smartphones have existed, the most common question that comes up on specialized forums dedicated to mobile technologies is why an Android phone runs out of charge quickly.

As a rule, users blame the Android OS, considering its “gluttony” to be the main reason for a depleted battery.


In fact, the user’s phone quickly runs out of charge if he makes basic mistakes in operating his gadget. Therefore, the purpose of our article is to understand why the phone discharges quickly, and what can be done about it.

If your Android phone's battery runs out quickly, the first common reason is the screen brightness turned up to 100%. In this case, the display “eats” the main reserve of the energy cell’s capacity. In fact, for comfortable work with screen interfaces, 50% brightness is quite enough.

Solution

To adjust brightness, go to the “Display” menu in your smartphone settings. Use the slider bar to select the most comfortable setting for yourself. Another easy way to adjust screen brightness is to turn on adaptive brightness settings. After this, the screen brightness will automatically change depending on how much light hits a special sensor.


Pay attention to screen features such as auto-rotate and smart sleep (the screen does not go dark while a special sensor detects that you are looking at the display). If you are sure that you can do without these functions, feel free to disable them. Thus, you will reduce the load on the battery by 5-10%.

3G/4G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPRS - turning on but not using these modules for their intended purpose can be the key reason why the battery on an Android phone drains quickly. These components, to one degree or another, place a constant load on the battery, including at times when they are not directly involved.

One of the most power-hungry modules is the GPS sensor. Of course, if you find yourself in an unfamiliar city or area, its launch is necessary to determine the user’s location on the map as accurately as possible. Geolocation is also enabled when launching a taxi application, when the driver can find a passenger even without specifying an address.

However, if you are at home and your GPS is turned on, you will more than once ask in bewilderment the question of why your Android phone began to discharge quickly.

You will find more information about the geolocation module in our article How to set up GPS.


Solution

Everything here is extremely simple: if you do not need to surf the Internet, send mail, or upload important data to a file hosting service, turn off the network modules. Also make it a rule: at least once a day, check if your GPS navigation is running after using services related to it.

Reason 3. Mobile games at maximum settings

One of the common reasons why a new Android phone quickly runs out of power is constantly dealt with by fans of mobile toys who download gigabytes of new gaming applications from Google Play. But a mobile shooter with 3D graphics, and even at high settings, drains the battery charge to zero within an hour.

Of course, it all depends on the level of detail in the game. However, by adjusting settings such as shadow display, water quality, light refraction, and the number of shaders, you will load the battery more than the highest screen brightness settings.


Solution

If you want to save battery power, do not run the game for a long time, especially if you plan to surf the Internet for a long time afterwards. Also try lowering your graphics settings from ultra and high to medium. Of course, the realism of the display may be reduced, but you will significantly drain the battery.

There is a very interesting genre of games in which the emphasis is not on graphical bells and whistles, but on plot and riddles. You can evaluate and, perhaps, fall in love with such applications using our article Text quests for Android.

Reason 4: Applications are running in the background

What if everything is fine with the screen and modules, but the phone quickly discharges in standby mode. In this case, the source of the problem is applications that are running in the background without the user's knowledge. For example, Google services and social networks constantly send data about the user’s location, call and SMS activity, and so on to the developer’s servers.


Solution

Check which applications are eating up your battery power. For this:

  • Go to the settings menu
  • Click on "Battery"
  • In the list of processes that appears, find applications that use the battery
  • Click the Force Stop command

Carefully study the entire list of utilities, due to which the phone discharges very quickly - in this case, the indicator shows a load of more than 1% of the battery charge. If you find an application that you haven’t used for a long time, it’s easier to delete it, thereby relieving some of the load on your smartphone’s battery.

Reason 5: Viruses on your smartphone

The phone quickly runs out of power due to malware that gets into the gadget if the user installs applications from untrusted sources, or ignores browser security warnings when visiting suspicious sites.

By the way, many dangerous applications are cleverly disguised as Google system applications. It's very easy to calculate them. System utilities cannot be deleted - only forced to stop. If you find an “Uninstall” button under a supposedly built-in application, it is a definite pest.


Solution

To reduce the risk of dangerous viruses getting onto your smartphone, install applications only from trusted sources: from the Google Play page or the official website of the developer.

If you spend a lot of time on the Internet on your mobile phone, install reliable protection on your gadget. You can choose the most convenient antivirus program for yourself using our article The best antivirus program for Android.

After installing the security application, scan the entire smartphone, right down to the memory card. It is possible that the reason why the phone is discharged may be hidden on the external SD.

Basic rules for properly charging a smartphone

To extend battery life, it is important to follow simple but effective charging rules:

  1. Do not allow the battery to be completely discharged too often.
  2. Make sure the battery charge level remains above 20%.
  3. Do not leave a charged smartphone connected to the network for a long time - this can also cause the battery to drain quickly.
  4. Perform maintenance on the battery once every two weeks. Bring the charge to zero and charge to the maximum value.

Conclusion

Now you know why your Android phone discharges quickly. It is easy to see that any reason can be easily resolved without contacting customer service. By the way, starting from the 7th version of Android, operating network developers pay special attention to the issue of energy saving. Technical experts note that the batteries in new smartphones hold a charge much longer, largely due to the optimized operating system.

Among the owners of smartphones and tablets running Android OS, there are often cases when the battery charge drops sharply on its own. Often this malfunction leads to complete discharge in just one hour. A similar problem also occurs on devices with other systems, such as iOS, although much less frequently.

There can be many reasons why your Android battery drains quickly. These include both a large load on the device and the presence of viruses embedded in Android. Next, we will take a closer look at each of these problems and try to solve them.

Due to its openness and complexity, the Android OS is prone to crashes, and its optimization is at a rather low level. Often, it can keep several dozen programs running in the background at the same time. Therefore, even the Android standby mode eats up the battery. This explains why Samsung and any other brand phones discharge quickly.

In addition, most of these applications are not used by the user in any way and waste resources, which means it is worth disabling them.

Viruses

In recent years, the Android operating system has become highly vulnerable to viruses. Moreover, most of them cannot be detected even by the best antivirus applications.

Under the influence of malware, the device’s performance drops significantly and the load on the processor increases. Characteristic features of a phone being infected with a virus include:

  • increased temperature of the device body;
  • braking;
  • the appearance of advertising where it should not be.

Defective battery

One of the reasons why the battery's charge quickly drains may be its malfunction. With prolonged use, like any other equipment, it breaks down.

It is quite difficult to avoid such trouble. If you plan to use the same smartphone for, say, three years, then at some point you will have to replace the battery. This is necessary in order to continue to use the device comfortably.

Battery usage rules

Just a few years ago, when buying a new smartphone, sales consultants advised “rocking” the battery - completely discharging and charging it several times in a row.

Now this advice is absolutely useless, since new batteries such as Li-Pol and Li-Ion use other technologies that such “stress” only harms.

  1. It is extremely undesirable to completely discharge the phone, as this leads to a reduction in its lifespan. This occurs due to chemical degradation.
  2. You should charge the device as often as possible.
  3. The best charger you can use is the original one. Even though most phones now have the same connectors, each charger has a slight difference in voltage.
  4. Do not keep your phone charging in direct sunlight. Even such a minor factor will greatly affect the duration of the battery charge.

Ways to extend the operating time of a smartphone on a faulty battery

It is not always possible to charge the device, so if your Android is not eating up the battery as slowly as before, you should slightly adjust the operation of the system. What exactly needs to be done and how, we will consider further.

Screen

The screen consumes the most power, so it's worth setting it up first. The following recommendations should help you:

  • The higher the brightness, the faster the display drains. Each device has the ability to adjust its settings, so change them to the lowest possible level as soon as possible.
  • Set the shortest time possible for the display to turn off automatically. This will prevent you from wasting energy.
  • When using a device with a screen built on AMOLED technology, you should set dark wallpapers on your desktop, since almost no energy is wasted when displaying black color.

Communication modules

Communication module components consume power in the background, including when the display is turned off. The constant downloading of new data they produce wastes battery power.

Almost all settings related to them are located in the “Wireless Technologies” section. The name varies depending on the version of the operating system, but in general it is not very different in each version, so finding them will not be difficult.

There are several ways to optimize this part of the system. Next, we will look at the main ones.

  • Turn off LTE if you are out of 4G coverage.
  • Turn off the mobile Internet itself if it is not currently in use.
  • Disable the Wi-Fi search feature if you don't need it at the moment.
  • Turn off Bluetooth. This technology consumes quite a lot of energy.

Sensors

Modern devices are equipped with a huge number of sensors, due to which the device is discharged in less than an hour. If you deactivate them, the operating time will increase several times.

It's worth disabling:

  • First of all, stop the GPS. This function is usually placed in the top menu.
  • The accelerometer and gyroscope are among the most energy-consuming sensors, so automatic screen rotation should be one of the first to be turned off.
  • Electric motor. This small part is responsible for the vibration response, which drains the battery.
  • Additionally, you can disable synchronization with cloud services and delete unnecessary accounts.

All this will help to significantly extend the life of the device and make your use of it several times more comfortable.

Battery saving program

To simplify the implementation of all the above actions, a large number of third-party programs have been created. They allow you, through a convenient interface, to choose which functions you currently need and how the device will save money.

The best among such applications is Battery Doctor. This program is free and available to everyone. It has quite a wide range of functionality, allowing you to optimize settings and exercise control over them with maximum flexibility.

In addition, the program shows the remaining operating time of the device.

Conclusion

I hope this article helped you understand what to do when your battery drains quickly and why it happens. We tried to cover in as much detail as possible all the ways to extend the life of the battery, and talked about ways to keep it in working condition. If it’s easier for you to perceive information through video, then below you can find instructions in this format.

Write comments with your advice, we will be very grateful. If you still have questions, feel free to ask them there, we will answer everything. See you on the pages of the site!

Video instruction

In this video you will learn what to do if your Android battery runs out quickly.

In fact, he is the editor-in-chief of the entire site, always in touch with the best authors. Proofreading and proofreading is his job. An excellent expert in his field. Excellent understanding of the technical nuances of electronics. Occasionally writes and publishes original articles.

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Each of us has probably encountered a situation where a new smartphone, after a couple of months, begins to discharge faster than immediately after purchase. For some, a noticeable drop in autonomy occurs later, after a year or two, and for others, even after a week. And the reason is not always battery wear. Our article will help you figure out why your smartphone battery began to drain quickly. Let's try to look at the most common reasons.

It happens that manufacturers release a firmware update that turns out to be unoptimized in terms of energy saving. Even Apple or Samsung are not immune from this, but they quickly release fixes for random bugs. But the Chinese are worse with this; you won’t be able to wait for the next update that will correct the rapid loss of charge percentage.

An indirect sign that the firmware update is to blame is a sharp increase in complaints on thematic forums dedicated to smartphones related specifically to the update. If a problem appeared for a number of users at approximately the same time, this is precisely a software defect. There are two solutions to the problem: wait for a fix to be released (if the manufacturer cares about operational updates) or flash the device with an earlier, stable version of the software (if it is “Chinese”, there is no point in waiting for an early update).

When we buy a new smartphone, its memory is clean, there are a minimum of built-in applications, so the load on the hardware is minimal. But as you use it, new games and programs are installed there, which can increase the load on the hardware. Advertising windows built into software, background processes, constant use of network functions - lead to the fact that the processor cores are loaded more than initially, operating at higher frequencies. Writing and reading data to/from the built-in memory and MicroSD cards becomes more frequent, which also increases the load on the battery.

If the problem is precisely the abundance of software, then in addition to the accelerated loss of battery charge, other symptoms are observed. One of them is turning on the smartphone for a long time. Overall performance also decreases slightly, programs take longer to launch, and heavy sites don’t load as quickly. To return charge consumption to its previous level, it is advisable to reset the device to factory settings. If such measures are undesirable, you can limit yourself to only deleting programs that you don’t mind.

Smartphone batteries are equipped with their own charge controller, which prevents overcharging (which causes the battery to degrade) and prevents overdischarge (a critical drop in voltage kills the battery). Often it also has its own memory, into which service information is recorded (state of the “jar”, ​​current capacity, etc.). When failures occur, the microcircuit may report incorrect data to the system, causing charging and discharging to occur incorrectly.

A common sign of controller malfunction is an abrupt decrease in the charge level under a uniform load. For example, an hour of watching a video consumed 10% of the charge, and the next 15 minutes of watching the same movie – another 15%. Another symptom is the sudden shutdown of the smartphone, when a significant (10-90%) portion of the stored energy remains. The third sign of controller malfunction is the inability to charge the battery to 100% (at 50-99% the charge stops).

You can try to cure a faulty controller yourself; to do this, you need to carry out a procedure popularly called “calibration”. Its essence is to repeat several (3-5) cycles of complete discharge and charge of the battery with weak currents. First, you need to discharge the battery before turning off the smartphone, for example, by watching a video. Then you need to take it out, insert it and charge it to 100%. It’s even better to use a “frog” for this purpose, the charge current of which is 3-10 times lower than that of a standard power supply.

Once the battery is charged, you need to insert it into the phone and discharge it again until it turns off. If everything goes well, after 3-5 charge-discharge cycles the service data will be overwritten and the battery will “remember” its real capacity. Unfortunately, this method does not always work and not with all batteries.

There is a myth that deleting the batterystats.bin file from the firmware does a “software” calibration, removing usage statistics from the system. However, in fact, this is just a log of Android OS charge consumption, and it has nothing to do with the hardware battery controller.

Battery degradation

Lithium batteries, which have a high energy density, have a relatively low operating life. These phenomena are directly related to maintenance-free batteries: the more energy you can “pump” inside, the faster the actual capacity will decrease. The battery life of a smartphone ranges from 500 to 1-2 thousand charge-discharge cycles. And this is ideal, with strict adherence to operating rules.

If a smartphone is often discharged to zero, is used a lot in the cold, is exposed to temperature changes and other stressful influences, the battery life is reduced significantly. Capacity also decreases from long-term storage in a discharged state. A cheap Chinese battery can lose half its capacity after just 100-200 cycles, while a better one can lose half its capacity after 300-400 cycles. Or you can simply discharge the battery on the road, put a spare one in, and forget about it. If you remember about a dead battery in your bag only after a month or two, it can already lose most of its capacity irrevocably.

The main symptom of degrading batteries is rapid discharge and equally rapid charging. If the smartphone holds a charge worse, but also charges faster than before (using the same power supply), then the battery is worn out. The only solution to the problem is to go to the store/service for a new battery.

Articles and Lifehacks

The problem of energy consumption by a mobile device worries most modern people. So we noticed that My phone battery drains quickly, why? it happens? Agree, the situation is not the most pleasant, even compared to the necessity of being deleted due to an oversight, especially if we need to stay in touch 24 hours a day. First, let's figure out why this happens.

Why does my phone battery drain quickly?

The energy consumption of a modern “smart” phone, that is, a smartphone, differs significantly from the same consumption of a push-button telephone. This is partly due to the large display and heavy use of the device. Another important factor: high processor clock speed.

A smartphone is not only a means of communication, but also a real portable computer, and therefore its owner usually actively uses GPS navigation, mobile Internet or Wi-Fi, listens to music, takes photographs, watches videos, etc. All this greatly affects battery consumption.

The presence of the Internet makes synchronization possible – in particular, with various services and social networks. In addition, numerous applications load the device's RAM and consume a lot of energy.

So, the answer to the question “the phone battery drains quickly: why” is given. Of course, it happens that the reason lies in some technical malfunction. In this situation, it is recommended to contact a service center.

Is your phone battery draining quickly? Now we know why. What to do?

If we own a device running Android, we should know that there are special programs that help us find out what exactly consumes the most energy (like Power Tutor). In addition, there are applications that monitor battery temperature and control voltage (for example, Android Assistant). Installing a suitable program will help you find out the cause of the problem as quickly as possible.

Now let's talk about recommendations common to all users, which must be constantly adhered to if we want to significantly increase energy saving.

One of the most important features of modern mobile devices is multitasking. However, the problem is that every open (and even minimized) application loads RAM. Accordingly, the more applications are open, the greater the load and battery consumption. It is recommended to close applications whenever you are finished using them.

It is also important to know that our display consumes the most energy. It is best to set the brightness level to no more than 30-40%, except perhaps in cases of exposure to the sun. This is quite enough for comfortable work. You should also disable auto-rotate and get rid of widgets and animated wallpapers (it’s best to replace them with a static image).

Do not use vibration or speakerphone. In addition, when outside the network coverage area, it is advisable to switch to “Airplane mode”. We still won’t be able to receive and make calls (as well as SMS messages), but the battery power will not be consumed by the device constantly searching for the network. The same is best done if the signal is weak.

And finally, we should train ourselves to turn off those modules that we don’t need right now: GPS, Bluetooth, mobile Internet and Wi-Fi. If you are not using it, for example, there is no need to waste battery power by constantly connecting to the network. And then the device’s battery will last for a long time.

A smartphone is a universal device that allows you to solve a large number of different tasks with minimal time.

At the same time, due to the specifics of its operation, this device requires quite a lot of energy, so battery capacity is a very important factor. But it often happens that the charge is spent very quickly for no apparent reason.

Today, almost everyone has devices such as smartphones. All well-known brands offer fairly high-quality products. But even she tends to break.

To understand why a smartphone discharges quickly, it is necessary to observe exactly what factors influence the duration of its operation. The fault can be determined experimentally.

If for some reason it is not possible to find the fault, then it is worth trying standard methods to resolve the problem of the type in question.

Causes and solutions

Most often, gadgets on the Android operating system lose battery power very quickly due to:


The reasons for rapid discharge indicated above are quite typical; eliminating them does not even require performing any complex manipulations.

Live wallpaper

A working screen, as well as various kinds of processes occurring on it, seriously affect the processor load. The larger it is, the faster the battery energy is consumed. Moreover, sometimes the discharge rate due to the operation of these wallpapers increases by a full third.

Live wallpapers can be of two types:


In both cases, the situation can be resolved quite simply without outside help.

If the live wallpaper is set to standard, you can do the following:

  • open “Settings”;
  • click on the “Screen” item;
  • select the “Wallpaper” section;
  • activate standard wallpaper without animation.

If you have installed a special application that creates animation on your desktop, you just need to remove it.

To do this you will need:


Accelerometer sensor

The gadgets under consideration today are real telecommunications combines, stuffed to the brim with a variety of functions that can solve various problems.

Almost every device has an accelerometer; it allows you to measure acceleration, as well as the position of the device relative to the ground. But its use increases the load on the processor.

It is because of this device that the battery can drain very quickly.

To turn off this sensor and reduce the discharge rate, you must:


Close background applications

Right after the screen, the central processor (especially if it is multi-core) is the most power-hungry device. Since data processing requires maintaining high voltage on the bus and inside the CPU itself. Consequently, if there are a large number of simultaneously running applications, the battery energy will decrease quite quickly.

To close various types of running programs, you must:

  • open the “Settings” menu;
  • select “Applications”;
  • activate the “Working” section.

In the list that opens, you should select which utilities are not required at this particular moment. Then click on the desired icon and stop. For this purpose there is a special button on which the inscription “Stop” is located. Sometimes some products from third-party developers consume up to 50% of the battery reserve.

Brightness setting

The display has the highest consumption. This component, regardless of its type, always emits light during operation, since the backlight is on. It is thanks to it that the user can easily distinguish in the dark everything that is on the screen. But the brighter it is, the faster the battery is consumed.

In many cases, a problem such as a quickly draining smartphone battery can be resolved by simply lowering the brightness of the display.

On all devices running the Android operating system, this can be done as follows:

  • use your finger to lower the working screen down;
  • We find at the top of the menu an icon called “Brightness”;
  • A long slider will open, by moving which you can adjust the strength of the glow.

By turning the brightness a little lower or reducing it to zero, you can sometimes save up to 100% of the battery charge. You should also always turn off the display when you do not need to use it.

Video: What to do if the battery drains quickly?

Communication setup

In some cases, to save power on a device, you simply need to disable some communication protocols. For example, GPRS/3G/LTE. Since it is precisely because of the working modules that support connections of these types that the battery can literally melt before our eyes. Often it is enough to simply turn them off - this will allow you to connect the gadget to the network much less often.

The operation of various communication modules is turned off quite simply. You just need to open the taskbar, which is located at the top of the screen, and click on the corresponding icons - the backlight under them should disappear.

Turn off wireless technologies

Often, immediately after purchase, happy owners of a phone cannot understand what’s wrong: the new battery loses its charge right before our eyes. However, there are no visible reasons for this: the screen brightness is at its minimum, only the most necessary background applications are running.

The secret of this behavior may lie in the fact that all or some individual wireless communication technologies are simply activated on the device at the same time.

These include the following:

  • Bluetooth;
  • Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi eats up the battery especially hard. To disable these technologies, you should open the settings and check the switches with the appropriate labels. They should be in the "Off" position. Otherwise, you should disable them.

Turn on Airplane Mode

All gadgets running the Android operating system have a special profile called “Airplane Mode”.

When activated, the following modules are disabled:

  • UMTS.

At the same time, Wi-Fi and GPS continue to function. An important feature of this type of mode is that its operation significantly reduces charge consumption. It’s easy to turn it off - just press the “Power” key and select the appropriate menu item

2G network

The easiest way to get rid of rapid battery consumption is to use a mode in which communication is carried out via the 2G protocol.

It's very easy to do this:


Other

Also, the phone can lose battery charge very quickly due to problems with the hardware. This could be a common factory defect in the battery, motherboard, or other parts of the smartphone. Sometimes problems arise with the connector of a special charging device, or the mains voltage is not high enough or too low.

The smartphone discharges quickly in standby mode

Sometimes the device can discharge very quickly in standby mode. A damaged motherboard containing leakage currents may be to blame for this. Determining the presence of this kind of defect is only possible with special equipment.

If you suspect such problems are occurring, it is best to contact an authorized service center.

Video: Why does it discharge so quickly

Save battery

If all of the above methods of dealing with a falling battery charge do not help, then you can try using special utilities:

EasyBatterySaver is a utility that makes it possible to increase the operating time of your smartphone by 5–20%.

It also has the following additional functions:

  • allows you to fully charge the device;
  • makes it possible to reboot the gadget as quickly as possible and kill its tasks;
  • can automatically deactivate Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other processes.

BatteryDr.Saver

Battery Dr.Saver is a utility in which you can select the optimal mode for the battery you are using. It makes it possible to reduce battery consumption to a minimum. But the most important advantage of this application is the ability to save up to 50% charge in standby mode, as well as increase the operating time without recharging.

Update the firmware

Sometimes, to resolve a problem of the type in question, it is enough to simply update the firmware. This is especially true for devices running very early versions of Android.

This process does not take much time; all you need is a good internet connection and a fully charged battery.

Battery problems on Android smartphones are quite common. However, in most cases they are relatively easy to deal with. It is only necessary to observe the specific device as closely as possible and check what exactly affects the duration of operation.