@austinbarbarosa wrote:I've been having severe battery drain issues since installing 23.0.1.A.5.77. I used to easily get a day and a half of battery life without Stamina mode or any other battery-saving modes. Now I can barely reach a day. After an hour my phone is down to 90% and says 16 hours remaining on standby. I haven't chagned any settings or installed any new programs since before the update.
Is there any way to roll back to the previous version? I'm really disappointed as battery life was one of the main reasons I picked up a Z3 Compact. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Sorry but I don't know about reverting to an earlier version. You'd need the entire ROM image for the earlier build to do that (and my prior version was a true OTA update, so would guess that was just a patch, rather than a phone image).
I have a feeling there's a backup option in PC companion but I only literally installed PCC in order to do the update... and of course you'd need to have done the backup in order to revert to it. I also don't know the nature of the backup, so it might or might not be a 'complete' backup.
I hate to say this but it's just possible that you might need to do a factory reset - I only say this because I have heard with major updates that sometimes a wipe is required and/or best practice is to do a wipe either before or after.
I suspect you may be told to do a repair, as that appears the typical response from support staff (which is or involves a factory reset).
Another thought is that there is a safe-mode option, which I believe disables 3rd party apps, so you could trouble-shoot that way.
i would say that the new build has introduced one or more new apps (because I had at least one new one appear - google's "keep"). Also, there were multiple app updates too - I say this because I've blocked or disabled a good few apps on my phone and I had 5 which were reporting as needing an update... and they've all disappeared now from the update centre.
An update changelog would have helped (as it might have told us if there's been a radio update, for example).
My only diagnosis suggestion would be to have a look at apps which are running (settings / apps / swipe to right). Also check the "recent" softkey, review list and then close all. Then monitor what's active as you go along.
Another thought would be to check CPU usage (just in case an app's got 'stuck'). I use microCPU (which is a nice little visual gauge for CPU activity. I also have something call quick system info, which has a running processes tab and you can sort by CPU usage.
My feeling is that you've got something which is running erroneously in the foreground, to account for your battery drain.
I must admit I thought my battery has been going down more quickly since the update but it's difficult to be objective, as usage isn't necessarily consistent. For example, I've just installed a travel app (called citymapper), so I've obviously been fiddling a lot with this (and it uses real-time data, so will probably burn more battery than normal).
Having you tried rebooting as well?
We haven't had masses of people reporting battery probs so it might just be a glitch on your handset.
I was going to point you towards this new build's thread on xda-dev but think you've already posted there 
Happy to continue trying to assist you but I'm a n00b in comparison to some of the seniors around here.
Keep us posted, especially if you find something.
Cheers,
Gary
@austinbarbarosa wrote:
@Thanks for the helpful post @MyAliasIsGary. My first instinct was to repair and wife my phone, so that's why I did. However, since the firmware was updated by the software update the factory reset just erases your data and puts a clean install of the new firmware. That being said I think it helped --battery drain is not as bad as when I first updated the firmware. Not as good as before the update, but better.
I'm going to monitor background apps like you suggested for a few days. If it doesn't improve I may try to roll back to the earlier software this weekend. There's a few posts on XDA about how to do it and it doesn't seem too difficult. I'm always paranoid about messing around with my phone software though...
Thanks for your help! It's a shame this update has messed up my phone --although it's still the best one I've ever had.
hi Austin
my pleasure mate. I'm afraid I'm not super knowledgeable so I'm glad you've drawn something from my last post.
I will strongly suggest you try some kind of CPU usage monitor. I, literally, in the last couple of days started using an app, which then got updated to a new version, which resulted in very excessive cpu usage. The developer rolled out a microfix, which has seemed to have dealt with the problem. The point of the story is that you could have an individual app just 'burning' away and causing the battery drain (or possibly some weird interaction between the new firmware).
The other thing which is a classic drain (not necessarily a bad one but an unnecessary one for me) is google now. With the normal configuration, the phone will 'listen' for someone saying "google now" - this surely has to take power. I couldn't say how much though. It might be minuscule. I've disabled google now though. If I want something, I just google it manually via the browser. You don't have to disable google now though - you can just disable the voice monitoring.
Then there are the classic ones like excessive screen brightness, having radios active (e.g. 3g / 4g data / wifi / gps), etc. I'd disable autosyncing too. I basically turn off what I don't need. if you have bad cell reception, that drains the battery more quickly, as your phone will 'work harder' to maintain reception. For example, in london (don't know where you live), we don't have cell coverage on our tube / metro, so one could go into airplane mode, if one is going to be out of reception for a while (could be that you're in a buidling with bad reception too).
I've also used a adb script / batchfile to block a shedload of apps. I've disabled a good few too. I reckon this has helped my battery consumption a reasonable amount.
Sorry btw - I'm not 100% clear whether you updated the firmware and/or did a factory reset and what order you did it in?
I might be wrong here but, logically (to me anyway), the cleanest update would be wiping the phone, updating the firmware, then wiping again. It's possible that the last operation is unnecessary but at least you can be certain that the phone couldn't be in a 'cleaner' state.
I'm not saying you have to do this but if you can bear to, you could report this to Sony, if your battery usage is diabolical and you want to have a moan 
I have seen a few posts (not many) about people saying battery consumption is bad post-firmware update. Personally, I think a factory reset would help them but I wouldn't blame people for shuddering at the thought. **bleep** pain to have to reset the phone then go through the throes of customising again. Of course, it could be just random coincidence and a particular version of an app misbehaving, as in my anecdote.
Anyway, stay in touch. It would be interesting to hear if you can tie the problem down to anything in particular.
Cheers,
Gary
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