Why Can't They Fix This?

[Michael Xalvin]

Try this app Linus, it may help you get the real battery heath https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.digibites.accubattery

[BachChain]

Quote

 Why Can't They Fix This?

Have you tried a fix devised by those people from that place for the thing?

[PotatosaladKR]

Because Samsung is simply sucks at optimizing your phone’s memory.

 

You can check how much apps got killed by kernel with ‘lmkcount’ command, and My S6 was showing that apps were killed almost 700 times in 6 hours

and I still have the image

 

 

Since then Samsung started to hide files required to see these memory status with command behind seLinux so I had to root my device in order to search them..

 

So I made opportunity to use rooted S9 

 

And I was able to check that Samsung swapped LZO to ZSTD for compressing, not LZ4.

ZSTD is way better at compressing, but the speed is slower than LZ4, but similar as LZO.

so several custom kernels love using LZ4 for faster performance, but samsung didn’t.

 

so why..?

 

well, they partitoned 2GB of total 6GB ram for compressing but even with the simple basic usage pattern - like 4 or 5 apps like chrome, messanger, music running - almost all of 2GB memory swap partiton was already full.

 

simple math, i searched google and found that ZSTD’s compression ratio is almost x4..

so total 6GB - 2GB for swap partiton,

and 2GB x 4 for used swap partiton and compression ratio..

 

so total 12GB of ram is being used in this phone.

 

I really really wonder how awful software like this can look so smooth

 

I want to compliment samsung’s software team for hiding this mess

but they really should appologize that they are ruining hardware team’s amazing hard work like this.

[PotatosaladKR]

even well known recognized XDA developer, arter97 ranted on this problem years ago in korean smartphone community but samsung is not fixing it

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[YeAxolotl]

i personally have an issue with this service idk how to disable it but it takes up almost all of my battery life

[Cloud_AT]

Hey Linus, it definitely sounds awkward but I guess when you put the phone in your pocket the screen faces your thighs. If so, turn it around; I had issues with the pocket mode not working correctly on several phones now with the screen getting activated through the trousers and leeching battery.

[Guest]

7 hours ago, yourbiggestfanStan said:

Edward snowden claims apple is one of the worst offenders, and apple designs are tasteless. They are basically overpriced, underperforming, bug ridden crapware.

Well if Edward Snowden said it, it must be true. Better throw all of my Macs away and get more privacy-orientated PCs and Android, which most definitely have no Telemetry or Location accessing. 

[Gregor poland]

@LinusTech for my point of view it's a problem with SIM card connection. If the SIM card is bad or connection between SIM and phone is broken it will lose for split sec and restore connection. I had same issue in poor range in laboratory . Processor will burn and battery will drain faster. Try to clean connection with SIM card and replace SIM card. Br Greg from Poland 

[Om3gA]

I had the same promoem with mu S4, always hot, fast battery drain. Tried all options, change battery with new one, same problem, after that i had one full battery in my pocket for quick swap (that was my favorite, hate non swapable phones). Tried fress install, feom recovery menu, same problem. Root my phone for uninstalling s-health s-memo s.s.s.s.s.s and all apps one by one, little longer battery life but nothing huge. Facebook and messenger has biggest hit on battery performance. I don’t have possibilities for contact Samsung but I get my things in my hand and start experimenting  . Get another S4 and start swapping, swap mainboard, cameras, all parts one by one and nothing changes. Next step was system, flashed new android revision, older ones, beta ones, had some data inprovment, some sistems give few hours less or more. Tryed to write personal android based on samsung bootloader and system and that was main problem, I didn’t changed anything, after that I give away bought Iphone and let it go.

 

Last year I found my S4 in drawer and start test again but this time on basic android, not samsung one. Just plane android withou any app preinstalled or any modification, now I use S4 again as second phone but my battery life is 2-12 days based on usage. With stock samsung android it was 10-16 hours, that is huge difference, I didn’t find out what eating battery but if you dissable wifi, mobile data and gps your phone will be cold and battery life will hit 5+ days, something inside samsung android system use lot data transfer, I will love to find out what it is.

[bassem8246]

I always noticed this problem with samsung phones since the galaxy S1.

I am a note 4 owner (exynos processor )and 2 years ago i bought another note 4 (snapdragon ) for my mother.

Thats when i noticed a huge battery consumption issue with all exynos processors. Maybe that's why you got different results on same device.

[White_Helix]

Exact same problem here with my EU S8 (Exynos), did a hard reset, flashed it with Odin, nothing helps. I get it to Samsung Support next week, maybe that will help.

[EEEEE]

On 9/8/2018 at 3:08 PM, GabenJr said:

We take some of the most common apps of 2018 and load them on to a Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus and a Google Pixel 2 XL to see why my Samsung phone always seems to overheat and run out of battery.

 

 

Buy a Samsung Galaxy S9+:

On Amazon: http://geni.us/KjgSwE

On Newegg: http://geni.us/L0J4

 

Buy a Pixel 2 XL:

On Amazon: http://geni.us/dheebA

On Newegg: http://geni.us/6ZEB

I have the same problem. My old S4 used to die insanely fast, then I upgraded to the S7 edge and the battery life was amazing. One year later (i cracked my s7 and got a replacement halfway in the 2 yr pd) the S7 kills battery like nothing else. When the phone is running it roughly translate to 1% a minute. When it is off it still drains battery pretty quickly, the problem has gotten so bad that I am force stopping default apps and making the wallpaper black. I really hope they fix this by the S10. Sorry for the rant and am willing to take any suggestions including those for alternate phones with flagship or almost flagship specs for the 2018/19 year.

[EEEEE]

2 minutes ago, EEEEE said:

I have the same problem. My old S4 used to die insanely fast, then I upgraded to the S7 edge and the battery life was amazing. One year later (i cracked my s7 and got a replacement halfway in the 2 yr pd) the S7 kills battery like nothing else. When the phone is running it roughly translate to 1% a minute. When it is off it still drains battery pretty quickly, the problem has gotten so bad that I am force stopping default apps and making the wallpaper black. I really hope they fix this by the S10. Sorry for the rant and am willing to take any suggestions including those for alternate phones with flagship or almost flagship specs for the 2018/19 year.

I have the same problem. My old S4 used to die insanely fast, then I upgraded to the S7 edge and the battery life was amazing. One year later (i cracked my s7 and got a replacement halfway in the 2 yr pd) the S7 kills battery like nothing else. When the phone is running it roughly translate to 1% a minute. When it is off it still drains battery pretty quickly, the problem has gotten so bad that I am force stopping default apps and making the wallpaper black. I really hope they fix this by the S10. Sorry for the rant and am willing to take any suggestions including those for alternate phones with flagship or almost flagship specs for the 2018/19 year.

 

Edit: sorry for the double post put notifications on for this one

[FITorion]

I've recently been keeping my phone (s7) in power saver mode to be able to end the day with 30% without having to charge during the day.  most days my phone gets little to no use.  the little use being bluetooth music in the car and light web browsing.

 

I do receive a rather large number of sales calls and have the phone in do not disturb mode perpetually so only people on my contacts list ring or vibrate through.

[lukxsor]

On 09/09/2018 at 5:08 AM, GabenJr said:

We take some of the most common apps of 2018 and load them on to a Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus and a Google Pixel 2 XL to see why my Samsung phone always seems to overheat and run out of battery.

 

 

Buy a Samsung Galaxy S9+:

On Amazon: http://geni.us/KjgSwE

On Newegg: http://geni.us/L0J4

 

Buy a Pixel 2 XL:

On Amazon: http://geni.us/dheebA

On Newegg: http://geni.us/6ZEB

Hi lunustechtips / GabenJr

 

I decided to come over from the Level1Tech forums to help you out with my experience/tests i have conducted. I have been using a samsung note3 n9005 since it was released and ran into the same problem. within the first month of owning it, the phone would heat up and the battery would die extreamly fast. i have been conducting tests to determin what might cause this and how i can improve my battery life since i bought it from just basic software testing/config all the way to buying a second board and de-soldering chips one by one to test idle power draws. Hopefully "some" of my findings may help you with s9( ps i know you have prob done some of these and some you just are not able to do but im including them should they be useful to others)

 

1: Safe Mode IDLE Battery Tests

 

So this is fairly straight forward, boot into safe mode and re-run your tests. In my testing this only helped wean out 3rd party apps that were running in background the pre-installed crapware still runs. Also try to goto developer settings and limit background processors to 1 and put transitions/animations to 0.

 

 

2. Factory reset, Disable All Google Apps ect.

 

The next thing should be to factory reset linus's phone (after back up obviously) but donot install any apps. Run a standard idle test, then dissable google apps and any other bloatware. I chose to go through the painfull process of dissabling each app one by one and running the battery test after dissabling each one but thats upto you.

 

 

3. Buy a used phone of the same age as the one your comparing.

 

This is an important data point, since the s9 does not have a removable battery like the note 3 you need to find a used phone around the same age as linus's to test against (you can check by decoding the imei of used phones to get production dates to compare with linus's).

 

 

 

4. Custom ROM

 

One of the things that saved me the battery life was to replace samsungs rom with a custom one. My tests gave a 25% increase in screen on time compared to samsungs touch wiz.

 

5. Battery degridation

 

Lithium-ion batteries can loose around 5% of their capacity per month depending on how charging and discharging is handled on the battery. I have replaced my battery many times because of this and generally 3rd party batteries seem to last longer than genuine samsung batteries, and when on 0% have more volts in them than my samsung ones. now my theory is that maybe samsung have changed the discharge ratio on their batteries so out of the box they have more screen on time but causing faster degridation down the road.

 

So yes i am going to suggest you try to replace your battery, maybe you can get louis rosman to help you with that.

 

 

 

 

 

[lukxsor]

3 hours ago, YeAxolotl said:

i personally have an issue with this service idk how to disable it but it takes up almost all of my battery life

I dont think you can remove it without root access. Do you have any apps that use vr? Have you tried limiting background processing to 1?

[PythonLimited]

So from a developers perspective this looks like a very poorly optimized kernel for me Linus. I don't think this has to be done something with the userspace of the phone itself (tho the commands top and htop will help u to find out if in wrong) but probably with samsungs custom implementation of the android stuff in the kernel. I'm working on the galaxy s3 neo kernel for about 4 years now, and they did a lot of crappy stuff on that. The memory management is awful with zram zcache and swap. The device has 1.5 GB ram of which 0.7 are available at runtime but without the custom roms I developed for it on bare stock u can really see it struggle in daily life usage as Samsung is always giving the ram to the zcache and swap partitions. In addition they have some sort of cleaning algorithm which tries to drop unused memory but consumes more power then it saves, on Qualcomm variants there's also M(ake)P(oor)Decision which is a hotplug for the CPU but often freezes  or nearly stress-tested the whole phone as it couldn't handle the workloads correctly resulting in an ususuable state. My S8 also is still experiencing those stuff I'm describing too. What u could try to save this problem is either resetting the device to stock with a computer via ODIN or installing a custom kernel (would void warranty as it removes Knox secure boot etc...). I don't know why Samsung wants to do that, butnit seems like those problems are occurring on all the phones I had from them after a specific period of time. Maybe (but that's just theory) they did something like apple did with slowing down the phones but with a different approach - killing the battery. Other option, u enabled a loop like battery killer app combo. Two apps basically being in a race condition to get permissions, do read write operations (especially when ur dealing with mutex - locked files by process, files) or just the simple google audio recognition. Anyways this is still something Samsung needs to fix urgently but they seem to refuse any support and/or statement for this.

[PiGHamM3R]

Well, I kinda skimmed over the thread, seeing some killer great responses. I have a similar issue of poor battery life on my Samsung phones. I'm Team Android and can't stand Apple devices (mostly due to the smug arrogant cult-like personalities of their owners).

 

I kept getting hit on Battery Life - Where my Galaxy S3 would last ~8 hours at best, my friend's iPhone would last double mine. I got the Galaxy S6 Edge (because of it's bigger battery), and started out with 10 hours, got down to 6 hours about a year or two ago, and finally 3-4 hour battery life as of recent, the friend's iPhone 7 still going strong all day.

 

So a few days ago, I got so angry with my phone I threw it so freaking hard (smart right?) and shattered the screen; to be fair it was already flickering in some instances and already chipped and broken and 'spidering' in a corner; screen protector was holding it together from what I could tell so I let it be until this.

I went and bought a Galaxy S9+ YESTERDAY -- Bummer, because I want to hold out and see what the Pixel 3 XL would give us (and I hate the stupid Bixby button or squeeze gestures)

 

From 100% at 5am to ~50% by 5pm; very light usage with only phone calls, text and some Facebook messenger mixed in there - on the brand new Galaxy S9+ (Verizon for those interested).

 

I really want someone at Samsung to read these PAGES and the YEARS of issues and realize they're acting like Apple in 'investigating', not acting on the issue, and it's not how we're holding it.

[Joda]

i've had the LG G4, G5, and G6 and ran into the same sort of issue. random battery drain with no explanation.

[Drak3]

17 hours ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

On my usual usage pattern, I consistently go for around 15-6 hours with 4.5-5.5 hours of SOT, exceeding 6 if I keep it on Airplane Mode when I'm traveling.

Ouch.

 

17 hours ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

If I use it in a frugal manner, a second day is very well possible

Double ouch.

Both my old Note 4 and Note 9 last, easily, double that.

[Leslieann]

11 hours ago, JessicaFEREM said:

I don't think you can uninstall system software on android without rooting.

 

Google Services provides all the Google backend for the things you've come to know and love (or hate) and gets updates through the Play Store.  Google services is not Android framework, nor is it actually system software, though to uninstall it you do need root.

The specific one I'm referring to is simply labeled "Google" in your installed list in the Play store. It's supposed to be Google Search according to the description but it's far more than that, it's an update to all Google's backend installed on the phone.

[nitsuD]

Right now I'm using a Samsung Galaxy S7, the battery in which has been replaced as I bought it used with the original battery.  The new battery was working fine for a while and then started draining fast on me, and my phone started to warm up in my pocket.  At first I thought I had gotten a dud replacement (thankfully the tech shop I use for repairs has a one-year warranty), but before I could take it in, I had music start playing from my pocket.  What had apparently happened was phone was making good enough contact with my leg through my pocket fabric that it triggered the always on screen to begin playing music from an app which I had in the background when I just put the phone to sleep.  My point is this- you mentioned in this video that you have the always-on screen AND wake on notifications options on with the phone in your pocket.  Could that be keeping your screen on and giving it confusing inputs to keep the screen lit, pulling your battery down?  Have you tried turning those features off and just routing all push notifications to your smartwatch?

[D13H4RD]

46 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Both my old Note 4 and Note 9 last, easily, double that.

I'd expect the Note9 to do better 

 

Not sure about the 4 though 

[Drak3]

Just now, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

I'd expect the Note9 to do better 

 

Not sure about the 4 though 

Well, before the power virus that was Lollipop, the Note 4 regularly lasted me a day and a half without turning off data, without using any power management features, and not disabling as many things as I do now.

[Boojay]

Never used a Samsung as a daily driver, but I have the exact same problem as Linus. Doesn't matter what phone or brand I use, inevitably a battery drain manifests and I have no idea what the culprit is.

 

Currently, I'm on a Pixel--stock everything--and I have to charge 2-4 times a day with normal usage. But whether it's Google, LG, Sony, HTC, etc., I eventually end up with the same issue and have given up. I've literally tried every solution I could find online over the past year with the Pixel (Google even sent a replacement), and much longer than that with previous phones. It sucks because the Pixel is a great phone, however it doesn't last me half a day.