Got an android phone. Battery drain is out of control?

It's my first android phone, and It's a note 3. Yesterday it was mostly fine but today the battery is draining incredibly fast and "Android System" is always at the top using 51-60%

I used it for like 15 minutes today and it went down 12%

Android's battery statistics tool can be pretty useless sometimes. Try Better Battery Stats.

For me recently, the cause has been the media scanner. If I force that process to quit, the extreme drain stops. But you're unlikely to be affected by this already.

There's also a good possibility that it is caused by some of the garbage Samsung and your carrier dumped onto the phone. Most of them are useless and should be disabled.

My biggest battery drainer is the GPS, so make sure you have that turned off.

I love my Galaxy, but the one complaint I have with it is battery life. I know there are measures I can take like decreasing screen brightness, but I didn't buy a phone with a beautiful screen to just turn it down until it looks as shitty as your average phone. I do disable GPS and try to avoid using live wallpapers, but I still wish the battery life was better. I still love Android and wouldn't ever go back to crApple.

I can play mp3's for 10 hours and still have half my battery life... If its a busy day for texting/whatsapp/snapchat then I'm down to 10% after 6 hours.

Yesterday I turned off my phone's screen as the F1 app was still opening up, just to find my phone extremely hot a couple hours later and my battery at about 10%. Android's awesome sometimes.

@jjweatherman: This one? The latest update promises "improved power consumption"? Holy shit, it must be bad if no longer causing severe battery drain is worth mentioning in the changelog.

Yep, that one. I mean, I guess it was my fault to turn off my screen while it was loading up, but you'd think it'd either finish loading in the background or stop. Either would have been fine! Instead it just kinda... kept "loading."

In-app battery drain seems normalish.

It can take a bit to troubleshoot this kind of thing; I've gone through it before. I forget what exactly was causing it the last time I had to fix it, but I think it had something to do with a corrupt image or movie file from my camera that couldn't be uploaded via automatic backup over wifi, which in turn caused it to constantly attempt to upload it and fail overnight, which in turn drained the battery. Finding the corrupt image and deleting it fixed the issue. But it was a pretty roundabout way of finding out what was going on.

But hey, it's still better than having an iPoop. How people manage to live without wireless charging is a mystery to me.

Cause Androol.

I do have a corrupt image that showed up in my gallery. In an album called app_cache. But I can't delete it.

It stopped for a little bit, went down to 14% for the entire day. But today it's back up to 45% and wont go down.

Close apps that you aren't using and turn your brightness to a decent setting. You may need to start looking into a new battery of those so-called "super batteries"

@pinner458: It's the screen, it's not on while listening to music unless you change the song. Lower the default brightness if possible.

@krullban: You may have to factory reset the phone to get rid of the corrupt image.

Don't worry too much about which apps are "open" Android is pretty good about managing that all by itself. Disabling GPS doesn't do much since GPS is disabled when its not actively being used by an app. Apps if you find that an app you have installed is misbehaving in regards to location services you should consider uninstalling it.

There is a setting that will disable WiFi when the screen is off and the phone is running on battery. This setting is good because it prevents apps from syncing large files like automatic app updates in the background. It also helps in low connectivity situations by limiting the time the phone spends attempting to get wifi.

Well shit, that was kind of obvious. I'm not the OP and battery power isn't really an issue for me but I can't believe I didn't put 2 and 2 together.

Don't bother "closing" apps you're not using unless the app is actively misbehaving. Android will terminate old processes for you to free up memory. There is no user intervention required.