Portable Diagnosing poor battery life in Android, running hot

I've got a three year old Sony Xperia (1 IV, XQ-CT72) which has recently tanked in terms of battery life. In addition to this, it's also getting warm / hot in use, even while doing something mild like watching YouTube, which previously it would happily do for hours a day without any noticeable heat.

Has anyone advice on how to go about diagnosing this? I've taken a look at CPU-Z but frankly I don't know what I'm looking at. Is the getting hot definitely high CPU use or could it be a symptom of a failing component / battery?

Feels like it's full of clutter and needs a god defrag, is there a way to do a complete backup and factory reset?

I'm currently on 45% batter with only 35 minutes of screen time

 

Sounds like some background task may be eating through the battery. Could be malicious (think miner or bot), could be corporate (think social media such as FB or Insta).
I'd start by uninstalling anything that isn't easily recoverable (like 2fa), clearing cache and data on everything else, and resetting permissions. Sure, it's a pain reinstalling everything, logging back in and setting up permissions again, but it'll make it easier to find the culprit.

Putting an adblocker on your home network (PiHole, Unbound, etc) or on your phone directly (DNS66) can also help.

The battery could also just be flogged depending on your use, how you charge it, etc.

Could've also been a bad update.

 

somewhere in the settings you can see what app is taking battery that'd be the first place to look.

Next would be to look at what has changed in the past few weeks, your car for example, it's app or android auto use etc.

But yup check you have updated everything.

 

Cheers for the pointers guys, I'll have a look through everything and see what the likely culprits are.

 

Also check the back of the phone to make sure there's no indication of the battery swelling. If it is you may be able to see the back cover separating.

 

It’s also worth checking the battery wear level. I did install an app called “BatteryBot” on my tablet to try and find this, but all it tells me is “Good Health”; it doesn’t show me original mAh capacity vs current mAh capacity, or even a percentage.

I’m an iPhone whore these days, I have a “health percentage” built in to iOS, so it might also be built into Android; my tablet’s OS doesn’t show it, but it’s an older EOL Android version.

An older battery that’s experienced a lot of wear will give you a much poorer run time, because it can’t hold the same level of charge any more.

If it’s actually the battery that’s getting hot, and not the CPU/GPU, then you should stop using it. An abnormally hot battery is a sign that the battery is not a happy bunny at all, and it could very easily tip over into “uncontrolled thermal runaway” territory. In English that means that the battery could turn into a firebomb

Finding the wear level of the battery will give you a good indication of how “old” and “worn out” the battery is. Apple considers anything below 80% of the original capacity as “degraded” and ideally in need of replacement - my iPhone 14 Pro is currently at 86% after very nearly 2 years. Ordinarily I’d say that 75%-80% of original capacity is perfectly fine, but if you have ~80% or less health and the battery is getting hot then it’s definitely time to retire the phone or replace the battery (if you can do so safely, it can be tricky & dangerous).

EDIT: In fact I’d say finding out where the heat is coming from, if you can, is probably the first priority. Even a brand new 100% health battery can still potentially have a fault that’ll turn it into a self-oxidising fireball. Remember the Galaxy Note 7 furore? If it actually is the battery getting hot then stop using it regardless of how much “life” or “wear” it has.

 

Cheers, no there's no sign of the battery going into spicy pillow mode.

The heat seems to be more CPU, judging by feel and location. It was actually doing ok for a day but yesterday I went to the pub and it just tanked, ended up dying. Of course, I'm not a dunce so I had cash with me but I don't think it's ever gotten as low as 1% before. AccuBattery is now giving me data saying it's at 80% of its original capacity, which ain't great but I'm fairly certain it's being dragged down by some daft intensive process.

I've ripped out all the apps I don't need and I'm looking at what caches can be cleared without much disruption, I expect this will be quite a long process of trial and error.

 

Definitely sounds like it’s an Android problem then, thankfully.

Probably the easiest place to start is wipe it fresh and start again - just maybe don’t let it automatically re-install all your apps when you set it up again

That’s actually pretty good for a three year old phone. A phone battery probably experiences the most charge/discharge cycles out of any battery-powered device that the average person will own, even including an EV.

 

I'm unsure if the settings are the same, but in settings, go into battery and just under the battery usage there may be view details, tap on that to expand the list of apps which are using your battery.

 

Right cheers, that's what I was looking for and failing to find. Can anyone compare this background use to their phone? It strikes me as high, especially for Photos that really ought not to be doing anything, YouTube shouldn't be anything like that either. WhatsApp perhaps, as it's always "live"?

I've just wiped a couple of gigabytes of cache from Photos and YouTube in any case, it's a bit of a slow process this but I'm keen to get it sorted.

 

I've not really used my phone today having just rolled out of bed, holiday mode so perhaps not so useful but if you click on each of those do you get the power use, long number of hours, doesn't mean it has used a lot of power, if your OS doesn't show it there is probably an app for that.



Generally if you allow notifications etc, there might be a lot of syncing going on, and phots will often upload anything you have taken, this can be set to only do on wifi

 

Ok thanks; 45 minutes of YouTube in bed while off work with ten seconds of background seems entirely fair to me, it suggests mine is completely shot!

 

That’s an absurd amount of background usage for YouTube.

No point me showing my battery usage because I’m on iOS, it’ll handle background tasks completely differently to Android.

 

Do you happen to have youtube premium? If so, together with autoplay, it may just keep going without you explicitly pressing pause before closing the app.

 

I have Premium but autoplay is disabled and I would know if it was playing; checking today's use it has it down as less than a minute of screen time and 1hr 47mins background. I've not used it at all today

 

That's actually 24hrs usage from 11am to 11am, I have been doing healthy family things and so rarely used the phone in 24hrs marked difference to normal

I don't have premium and I don't allow YT notifications.

 

Something is definitely running in the background. Maybe "intelligent downloads" of videos you may want to watch. Either way, now you know the culprit.

 

Hmm, smart downloads and recommended downloads are off; I'll monitor it for a few days with the cache cleared, maybe it had just gone rogue? Photos was much higher than expected as well.

 

Next steps would be clearing data (and signing back in), or resetting permissions if clearing cache isn't enough. Or even an uninstall/reinstall.

 

Check background play is switched off. In the Youtube app, tap on Profile Picture > Settings > General. Turn off Background Play if it's enabled.