My Android Battery

My Android Battery: a reader asks…

My Samsung Galaxy S6 isn’t that old, but the battery life is really bad. Seems I can’t get a full day anymore. I admit I use it a lot, but not for phone calls. Lots of texting and I do a lotta social media and a fair amount of web surfing. Is there something different that’s causing my battery to drain quickly, or is it just battery aging?

I’m going to hazard a guess that you use the Facebook app a lot. Facebook’s app has been really hard on smartphone batteries for awhile now, and as FB has added on additional features like Instagram, auto-playing videos and Facebook Live, this has caused the app to cost you a lot more in electricity than it used to.

Here are two options for you to try that may help. First, you could switch from using the full-featured FB app to using Facebook Lite, a streamlined app that uses less data and works faster. Get it from the Google Play Store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.lite). No guarantees, but it might make your battery last longer. I’ve seen reports that FB Lite only uses 2% of battery.

The second option is to switch from using the FB app to accessing FB using your Chrome web browser. Chrome isn’t a slouch when it comes to battery use, but independent testing showed that this used less battery than the app.

What’s interesting is that when you look at the battery usage on Android’s built-in battery statistics, FB often doesn’t show up as a big hog. But, if you delete the FB app and start using either of the above two options, there’s a significant drop in battery usage. This can be hard to measure unless you time your FB usage so you can match the number of minutes per day when testing for a difference.

Lastly, there might be an issue of battery aging. A Lithium Ion (Li-ion) battery can give you over 500 charge/discharge cycles in the average service life. Partial charge/discharge cycles don’t use a full cycle, so that could translate to nearly two years of daily recharging before your battery performance starts to suffer. If your Galaxy Note 6 is older than that, you might be seeing an age-related degradation. Or, it might just be that you’re now using your smartphone a lot more than you used to. That’s also difficult to measure, and could be just as impactful, if not more.