I've noticed the battery drain is just awful on KitKat, when my Galaxy S4 is idle, the battery gets drained even when nothing is being done with the phone. Back on JB, my phone never did this, I would be on idle after full charge, hop on the tube, get off 45 minutes later and still see 100%. Today, I was already on 88% by the time I arrived at uni. Really unimpressed with this whether it's due to bugs or not but KitKat is supposed to be lightweight and SAVE on battery rather than drain it.
The main issue that I've been having is that Android OS and Android System are the 2 things that are draining most of my battery. I've been a keen watcher of my battery and what exactly is using most of my battery ever since I joined the Samsung crew and usually it's the screen that takes up majority of my battery life but that's normal for me - it makes sense that whenever I use the phone, battery gets used up right? At the same time, things like Android OS and Android System used to use about 3-4% of my battery life. Ever since KitKat, I've notice Android OS and Android System usage shoot to about 18-20% and my screen is still around 20-30%. Therefore if you do a bit of maths, my battery is around 60% by this point and I've only had it off charge for about 4-5 hours. This is really abnormal as when I used to be on JB, I could use my phone for 48 hours before I needed a charge.
I've been looking for a fix all day (even in my finance class since I sped through all the questions, my lecturer had nothing to say since I got them all right), but managed to find nothing concrete in terms of a solution. A lot of the problems were geared towards the Nexus 5 (since they got KitKat before everyone else), but no real solution for the Samsung users.
I saw solutions such as do factory reset - I absolutely hate doing factory resets on Samsung, mainly because Kies DOES NOT back up your settings and layouts with folders etc so any customisations you've had, you will lose. Only thing you keep are well, the things you backed up - which is pretty lousy and minimal considering iTunes backs up EVERYTHING so even if you do a factory reset, when you restore your backup, everything just looks the same before the reset. Why, Samsung? Why?
Another "solution" was to disable location/turn GPS off/turn the Wifi on always to Wifi during sleep only when plugged in. I ask myself why people call these solutions - these are not solutions, these are workarounds. Why would these features even be available if Android developers know they will drain the battery? It doesn't make sense to compromise performance of the phone as a solution to battery drain issues. The problem must be deeper than just Wifi/location issues.
A feasible solution I saw was to do a cache wipe - for those of you who don't know, you boot the phone into recovery mode and you get options such as reboot, wipe data, wipe cache and apparently wiping the cache sometimes solves battery drain issues - sadly, this solution didn't work for me.
There were other solutions that involved rooting the phone and downloading some sort of battery monitor but I don't want to root my phone again since I almost bricked it last time I upgraded a rooted phone. It's safe to say that rooting Android is no where as simple as jailbreaking an iPhone. I had to learn so much developer lingo to get my phone back to working order when I upgraded to 4.3 and it pretty much rendered my phone useless with no Wifi or network.
So I took it upon myself to try a few solutions out myself. I tried disabling a couple of things such as disabling NFC and S beam (those fancy Samsung data exchange via touching your phones features). That didn't really do much but it IS a part of Android System so I just left them disabled. I had a look through the phone to see what could be included in this Android System but didn't actually find anything (so many dead ends to my "solutions"), I wiped the cache of some Android related apps under the app manager in settings. None of these seemed to decrease battery drainage massively so I did a last resort battery pull and guess what? It's actually fixed my phone (well, I hope it has).
So far so good, I've been on 60% for the last 30 minutes, without any idle battery drain. I'm actually just waiting for Android System and OS % to decrease to show that the problem has been fixed. I'm hoping to see results tomorrow when I do a full charge overnight to reset the %s. But at the moment there's been no increase in the battery usage of those 2 and I hope it stays that way!
So guys, tl;dr - do a battery pull, pull out the sim card too, wait for 1 minute, put them back in and turn on the phone.
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