[HELP]Samsung Smartphone - Extraordinary Battery Consumption

[Xen]

A coworker of mine reported his phone being rather hot and the battery being drained at an extraordinary rate the past few days.

By lunch at 10 AM his battery was at 50% without any heavy usage at all. The only apps running according to SD Maid were a weather app and whatsapp, and his screen was at 50% brightness and consumed just a fraction of the 50% that were missing. Neither of the two apps I named are new on his phone.

He did not change any of his settings lately.

I took screenshots of the battery consumption broken down by app and all the device information.

The battery consumption lists "Android OS" as well as "android system". The latter is by far the most battery hungry app, even though no app seems to be running that would justify such a high energy consumption.

What could be the issue here? Possibly malware? How do i go about determining the issue and fixing it? (if its a virus) Whats a good and free AV scanner?

Here the screenshots: https://sli.mg/a/86jzJq

Best regards,
Xen

[Cannot_Gitgud]

Lies, we all know he has been catching pokemon, he is just looking for a coverup story

[Brati007]

tell him to buy an iPhone

[loxx_]

Get a new battery?

[peregrine]

You can click on apps in that menu to get more details. Next step for me would be turning off wlan, bluetooth, nfc, mobile data etc to see if the problem persists. When was the last system update?

PS if you hold the power button and then press volume down you can make screenshots on android.

[Swoopie]

Quite safe to say it's not malware, you can try malwarebytes virus scanner though if you want.

Using any "battery improvement" apps? Most of the times those cause your battery to drain super fast when they want to kill a "useless" app but android os wants to keep it alive, creating quite a battery hog with that cycle. There are some apps which claim to save battery and actually work but they work differently than the "GET 100% MORE OUT OF YOUR BATTERY" apps found on play store and usually require root to get full functionality (eg. Greenify, amplify)

My bet is on some sort of system wakelock (most usual cause for extraordinary battery consumption), causing the phone to stay at 100% activity even when screen is off.

Few questions:
1. Is the phone rooted?
2. Press the "Android OS" in battery usage stats and take a screenshot of the indepth stats. I'm interested to see how long the cpu + mobile radio has been active.
3. How new is the phone (or when it has been last updated)? Seeing it's running marshmallow, it might be that the phone isn't used yet to your usage (marshmallow uses a technique called "doze" to save battery, it tales about a week to learn your usage/most used apps though)
4. Does the phone recharge slower than normally?
5. Is the performance normal
6. Any new apps installed recently?

Some things you can try meanwhile:
1. Try a different battery
2. Clear the cache partition of your phone (based on the modelnumber the phone was a galaxy s5?): https://www.androidpit.com/how-to-clear-galaxy-s5-cache
3. You can try recalibrating the battery: https://www.androidpit.com/how-to-calib ... oid-device

[Xen]

PS if you hold the power button and then press volume down you can make screenshots on android.

It's not my phone, so taking screenshots on a phone that isn't mine wouldn't be very helpful.

[Xen]

Get a new battery?

I don't think it's the battery. It would explain an overall short battery life time, but that would not explain the extraordinary consumption by the "Android System" task. It should be the display and various third party apps consuming the vast majority of power. It's like that for every phone I checked. Correct me if I'm wrong on this.

[Xen]

You can click on apps in that menu to get more details.

I noticed that on my phone. I took a photo of the list of tasks below Android System. I will be going through that list later.

[Xen]

Few questions:
1. Is the phone rooted? No
2. Press the "Android OS" in battery usage stats and take a screenshot of the indepth stats. I'm interested to see how long the cpu + mobile radio has been active. I'm at home now and only got screenshots of the stats on Android System. I will get the screenshots tomorrow.
3. How new is the phone (or when it has been last updated)? Seeing it's running marshmallow, it might be that the phone isn't used yet to your usage (marshmallow uses a technique called "doze" to save battery, it tales about a week to learn your usage/most used apps though)
4. Does the phone recharge slower than normally?As far as I could see automatic updates are all enabled and it's up to date. One of the dates that stuck was 30th June, not sure if that was the latest update, though. Maybe I got that in one of the screenshots...
5. Is the performance normal He only uses whatsapp and the weather app, occasional web browsing, but rarely, so I don't think it's possible to tell...
6. Any new apps installed recently? As far as he told me he did not install anything recently.

Some things you can try meanwhile:
1. Try a different battery
2. Clear the cache partition of your phone (based on the modelnumber the phone was a galaxy s5?): https://www.androidpit.com/how-to-clear-galaxy-s5-cache
3. You can try recalibrating the battery: https://www.androidpit.com/how-to-calib ... oid-device I don't think replacing the battery is an option as a random try to fix it, as it's not my phone and my money to invest. I couldn't justify it if it didn't work. I will definitely try the other two things, though.

[Orrie]

I had problems with the constant storage reads that consumed a shit loads of battery, maybe check for that?

[Xen]

I had problems with the constant storage reads that consumed a shit loads of battery, maybe check for that?

Not sure what you're talking about. Can you explain like im five, please?

[peregrine]

IO BAD!

[Orrie]

I had problems with the constant storage reads that consumed a shit loads of battery, maybe check for that?

Not sure what you're talking about. Can you explain like im five, please?

Basically; sometimes the phone can get stuck while trying to read a portion of the storage. (At least how I've seen it)
You need to keep an eye out for running apps, as some of them won't display directly in the battery usage overview.
Hard to tell without actually seeing the apps, but anything that have been running for hours without the owner actually using it.

[fjellreven_]

Get a new battery?

I don't think it's the battery. It would explain an overall short battery life time, but that would not explain the extraordinary consumption by the "Android System" task. It should be the display and various third party apps consuming the vast majority of power. It's like that for every phone I checked. Correct me if I'm wrong on this.

There could be problems with some of the OS services. If you restart the phone, does the OS still drain battery?

You could also try to disable features, such as GPS, camera, etc. and see if that makes any difference for the OS consumption.