Phone battery is it fu*ked?

I suppose you could have one app that's eating power, have you tried rebooting?

you can check power usage per app in settings / battery usage

it should show you a graph too, does that nose-dive from the time you took it off charge?

Sounds like the battery is but a shadow of its former self

Are you sure that it's not running a background task or a crashed task?

Most smart phones will have a battery or energy App giving you an indication about which other App is using the battery and/or showing what percentage of the battery energy the App is using.

You may have to go into to all the Apps in the list one at a time and "force a stop"

If the battery is removable perhaps remove it for an hour before putting it back and restarting the phone.

I would say six years is pretty good for the life of a battery. It sounds like the battery has died...

not sure exactly which that is. Pretty most phone shops will replace the battery, but as most 2020 era phones are on unsupported and so unpatched and with security holes, so perhaps a good time to downgrade to a newer phone..

Dave

The phone shouldn't feel quite warm in normal use. Only during fast charging.

It is probable that there is an internal fault with the phone which is causing a rapid discharge, either software or hardware.

Cheers

Dave R

I had something similar recently and it turned out to be the charger.

I am on my third battery after ten years

Sod that. If you like the phone, replace the battery

The phone will usually get warm when it is in use, i.e.transmitting and receiving constantly. Most people that hold their phone correctly* will notice that their ear is getting warm when they have been yabbering about nothing for any significant period. The fact that the battery is getting depleted relatively quickly and the phone is getting warm in your pocket suggests that there is some sort of background transaction taking place constantly. Do you use social media so could the phone be updating?

The fact that it is down to 37% in four hours doesn't mean that it has been working for 4 hours - the fact that a recharge later in the day only depletes by 12% in the same time period could indicate that all of the phone activity could be taking place in the final hour in the morning and other updates have pre-warmed it. It could also be that you are in a weak signal area so the infrastructure has told the phone to run at higher power than usual and hence the battery loss. I have a Moto G8(pwr) of about the same vintage (I assume yours is a Moto G5, not 5G?) and the battery in it is still working well.

When recharged at 14h00 in the subsequent three hours it only looses 12% says to me that there is nothing wrong with the phone or battery, but rather that you have some sort of software issue.

My phone is permanently plugged into this desktop except when I am out and about so its always on charge And it is always warm.

And its running NOTHING beyond whatsapp, SMS messages and incoming call s*it. Wifi is 5 feet away.

Just a follow up, I left it off charge last night and it lost just a few % of battery charge overnight and no more getting warm. The app I used yesterday was not shut down properly and as has been pointed out could have been going through battery charge and causing the warming.

Anyway it seems back to normal again so will monitor performance before rushing out to get a repair or replacement and I will take more care to make sure apps are properly shut down after use.

Richard

First, check the settings to see which app is doing that.

Then reboot the phone and see if it keeps doing it.

If not, problem solved. If so, mark the app as disabled and see if it fixes it, or uninstall it if it's an app you don't need.

If it's still happening, you could try resetting the app. In Android settings for the app you can 'clear cache' (removes temporary files but not your settings/data) and 'clear data' (clears your data from the app), which will reset it back to how it was originally installed. You can mark an app as disabled so it stays present but doesn't ever run.

Theo

I would try a restart, as this can be an app that has failed to do power management properly. This has always fixed it for me.

For recent Androids, at least, whilst the symptom is present, you could also look in settings, for the battery use graph, and which applications are using most battery.

If the battery is getting hot a result of failing, you have a high risk of a fire.

That's not a great plan. Constantly charging the phone can reduce its lifespan significantly.

Many manufactures of phones and laptops recommend that you only charge to 80% and incorporate inbuilt software to allow users to configure that option. My Samsung phone has this feature and will report that "charging has stopped to protect the battery"

For the Motorola 5G

The Apple stuff I've got all charge to 100% by default - and they've been doing that every day while still keeping within spec - 80% of battery capacity after 1000 cycles.

Charging does tend to slow considerably after about 90%, though.

My mac regularly holds the charge at 80% for a while before going all the way 100%.

- and they've been

It appears that different manufactures have different protection algorithms but a quick google for Apple stuff also shows the recommendation is 80% charging to extend the life of a lithium-ion battery.

The behaviour you describe is the Optimised Battery Charging that occurs when the charging limit is set to 100%. You may be able to change this.

But what is meant by 100%? Battery capacity is a very woolly measurement anyway so the whole 'charge to 80% for longer life' thing depends a lot on what it's 80% of.

So it's claimed. There's a Siemens Gigaset on my desk that was issued to me by BT for a trial of MMS in the fixed network. This must have been about 2002-4. It's still working fine on the original batteries!