CAT S60 battery life issue with 6.0.1 (Wifi drain)

[slimbobaggins]

So I dunno if anyone else has a S60 yet, at least in the USA yet. I got mine yesterday. I charged it overnight, and this morning took it off the charger with 100% battery life. Estimated battery life was like over 48 hours.

My usage today was typical of setting up a new phone... digging up all the hidden settings that need disabled/ tweaked, getting rid of apps I don't want, and adding ones I do. I had an issue that led me to do a factory reset as well, so I'm sure that ate a lot of battery.

At any rate, the battery life today has been less than impressive, especially for such a big battery. Down from 100% to 34% in 13.5 hours off the charger. Then I noticed that Wifi has been pegged on all day, despite being disabled.

A little google searching turned up the Marshmallow Wifi drain problem. I proceeded to try and follow the steps from one of the youtube vids, but found there's no "options" menu (triple dot) on the Location page, to disable wifi and bluetooth scanning. I don't know if this is specific to the S60, or if others with the latest android build have found it hidden as well?

I know I'm unlikely to find another S60 owner, but I'm hoping a knowledgable Galaxy or Nexus owner might be able to help.

Edit: I have also not yet optimized the battery settings. I left everything battery-related as "out of the box" for today.

CAT S60:

Wifi Drain:

Disabled sleep wifi:

Settings menu in "Location" is missing, so I can't disable scanning:

 

[slimbobaggins]

The changes I made yesterday have improved things, but there's obviously still a button I'm missing, because you can see in this shot that at some point the phone was turning on wifi and GPS, and hitting the battery hard. I never turned either on.

 

[estherpolyester]

If you have a Nexus, DO NOT UPDATE to 6.0.1. I normally accept updates without questions, and boy, do I regret this latest update. Drained the battery of my Nexus 5 completely to the point that it would just shut off/restart for no reason, dramatically altered my LTE reception, and COMPLETELY destroyed my phones ability to use WiFi. I have been not been able to turn on WiFi at all ever since I updated to 6.0.1. Tried deleting apps, rebooting, deleting caches, nothing worked! Looked online and MANY other Nexus users are experiencing these same problems. Android program designers, how come you give us haphazard updates without the ability to downgrade back to a previous version? Android 6.0 was way better. Fair Nexus users, be warned!

 

[slimbobaggins]

If you have a Nexus, DO NOT UPDATE to 6.0.1. I normally accept updates without questions, and boy, do I regret this latest update. Drained the battery of my Nexus 5 completely to the point that it would just shut off/restart for no reason, dramatically altered my LTE reception, and COMPLETELY destroyed my phones ability to use WiFi. I have been not been able to turn on WiFi at all ever since I updated to 6.0.1. Tried deleting apps, rebooting, deleting caches, nothing worked! Looked online and MANY other Nexus users are experiencing these same problems. Android program designers, how come you give us haphazard updates without the ability to downgrade back to a previous version? Android 6.0 was way better. Fair Nexus users, be warned!

Sorry dude, wrong forum. This is the CAT S60 forum.

At any rate, as I reported in the previous post, I made changes above that dramatically improved things... even with the wifi still coming on, on occasion, I still had 20% battery life when I put my phone on charge last night, after 2.5 days of average usage. The battery life estimation carried well into three days. That's pretty good for not trying to limit usage for the sake of battery life. I could probably squeeze 4 or 5 days out of a single charge if I tried hard. And this is on 6.0.1. I wish I'd had enough time to test the life of the battery before upgrading to 6.0.1.

 

[Ninjakebab]

Cat S60 owner here! I signed up because of this thread
First of thanks for the info! Did not know Android 6.0.1 had a wifi drain issue. What startles me is that they havent fixed it yet?!

Anyways, I'm having a massive battery issue as well. Have written a support ticket to Cat just 1 hour ago about it.
I got my S60 less than 48 hours ago, and the problem is severe enough for me to be here, already!

On the first day the full charge lasted 16 hours, with what I would call light use; installation of 5-6 apps, some general getting-to-know-my-phone-settings-browsing, not a single call or streaming or other heavy tasks. Note that only location was turned on, and Wifi, bluetooth and NFC off. However, in battery usage I could see that Wifi had been on even though I turned it off. After rebooting the phone Wifi was succesfully registered as off...

The weird thing is that all the individual battery consumption culprits were amounting to only 20-25%... So where is the rest going? Screen was at 7% consumption after the first complete drain, wifi at 4%, google services a 3%, MyFlir at 3% and so forth.

I recharged it in the evening, awaiting morning to see how it fared in completely inactive standby mode. Unimpressive! Lost approximately 35% in 8 hours of sleep! Wtf? The Wifi appears to be deactivated, succesfully.

I have tried changing the Location service to 'battery saving' instead of 'high accuracy', to see where that leads me. But so far, it doesnt seem to me that wifi is to blame. There is something hidden draining the S60, to the point where it is completely unacceptable, in my case at least. I hope its fixable by tweaking, if not I might be looking at an RMA.

Next steps if Location tweaking doesn't work:

1. Turn off Location entirely
   
2. Uninstall AVG
3. Reset Android to 6.0.0

 

[slimbobaggins]

Yeah something definitely seems off with your phone. For what it's worth, AVG was one of the first things I removed. I also disabled/ uninstalled everything that I knew I wouldn't use, including all of the Google nonsense. Display timeout is set to 2 minutes, with about 30% brightness and auto adjust enabled.

When I received my phone, there was actually a problem with the FLIR camera, it wasn't working properly. So, without using the FLIR camera at all, after I sorted through the above issues, my battery life was terrific.

One key difference between you and I is that I leave location services turned off, unless I'm actively using the GPS. For that matter, I leave wifi, bluetooth, all of it turned off, except for LTE. That's always on unless I'm really trying to conserve battery life.

Bullett group sent me a new phone this weekend with a working FLIR camera, and that's what really eats the battery. You can see the slope of the battery curve nose dive during the FLIR usage. So I took it off the charger this morning, and with about an hour of talking on the phone via bluetooth, average LTE usage, and using the FLIR at work today, I'm at 80% battery. It's estimating a day of life remaining, and I'm sure now that I'm done using the FLIR for the day, that estimation will increase as the slope levels out some. I'm not going to charge the phone tonight; I should easily get through tomorrow without charging.

At night while sleeping, I have shut LTE off, and I've left it on, and that didn't really have any effect on the estimated battery remaining.

The new phone came with 6.0.1 already installed on it, so I didn't have the option of keeping 6.0.0, or I would have just to see what effect it had on the battery.

I couldn't be happier with this phone, at this point. It has its quirks like any phone, but it's a lot better than what I had. And I didn't even pay for it, so I really can't complain about a free phone.

 

[Ninjakebab]

Thats interesting. How long on average would you say you go between charges?
I really love the feel of this phone, and I would hate it if I didn't figure out this battery thing.

Anyway, I've went through a full charge now (already) with location services on battery preservation. I got less than a day. Not much difference it seems. Extrapolating from the slope while Im at work (the first region in below picture), I have approximately 24 hours of battery per full charge - this is with light to zero usage, not a single phone call, only the occational check to see if any important mails arrived. No FLIR, no wifi, no instagram. Nothing...
Here is day 2:
Day 2.PNG
Notice how theres a nice slope when I begin to sleep (this is what it should be!), and then something happens and the phone gets busy before I wake up! I don't get it.

The battery contributions come in at 19% pokemon (dont judge me), 11% screen etc., which sums up to 51% total out of the 100% drainage :/ what does your individual drainage contributions amount to?

Next step is obviously turning of location entirely. I just didn't assume this would do much, since AFAIK location is a passive feature only kicking in when specific apps ask for it, like google maps etc. Right?

Coming from a Cat B15Q (2000 mAh) I was expecting a whole lot more from the S60 (3800 mAh). I managed 3-4 days easily between charging on the B15Q - I'm really a light phone user. Which also assures me that theres a problem, and it will get better.

Im currently on day 3, with location, WiFi, bluetooth, NFC turned off. Still too early to see a trend. What is LTE, btw? lol

I got a reply from Cat support BTW. It was a dissapointing cookie cutter, copy/paste reply with suggestions to improve battery life :/
Funny enough they suggest to charge before the battery drops under 50% to improve longevity. In order to do that I would have to charge 2-3 times a day. But the nice lady apparently didn't read my support ticket.

 

[Ninjakebab]

Update:
WiFi, Bluetooth,NFC and Location now disabled. No change. I uninstalled AVG as well as I saw there was no difference. Plus I turned off notifications from Google, Instagram etc. Again, no change.

Battery life on standby: 24-25 hours. Again losing 30% while I'm sleeping, with no change of slope. Individual consumption amounts coming in at 15%, yet battery has lost 68% as I'm typing - this is in 16 hours of inactivity.

I'm feeling the RMA sneaking up on me.

 

[slimbobaggins]

LTE is 4G cell phone data. I see your native language is different from mine, so you may or may not have it where you're located. I'm in the USA.

Leaving location on, might leave the GPS radio powered on. Not sure... I don't know how they have the radio implemented on hardware. But if it leaves the GPS radio on (even though it's not being used) it'll still comsume power.

If you look at my slope below, you'll see roughly where I was asleep, and the battery leveled out.

At this point it looks like a charge every other day for me. Unless I try hard to conserve.

It looks like you've got some sort of app that's waking the phone up and taking things over. Try going to Settings -> Memory -> Memory used by apps -> change to 1 day and sort by max use (triple dot option) and see what app is using the most... that might give you a clue towards the offender.

Did you do battery optimization for all apps? If you go to apps, then settings, it's on that menu.

I'm back to having a wifi problem. I just noticed that something is kicking on my wifi even though it's turned off from the menu... more wasted battery. I just uninstalled a few apps I put on last night, hoping to locate the offender.

I like a lot about this version of android, but I detest how it allows apps to override your settings. As far as I'm concerned, if I switch wifi off, it should stay off until I say otherwise.

 

[slimbobaggins]

So I just went into app permissions, and found a couple apps that had location permissions that I didn't intend to grant, so I shut them off. That's the aspect of this version of android I love... much more transparent about permissions for stuff.

Might be worthwhile to go through all your app permissions, especially location, and see what has the ability to manipulate your phone.

 

[Ninjakebab]

Very helpful, thanks! The memory trick is nice. Ill definitely try looking at a 6hour period when I wake up! Right now its hard to decipher.

Battery optimization has been done (automatically? never did anything), only Google Play services are listed, and cant be optimized.
I envy your battery life! Haha. More than 24 hours left on half a charge. If only. I miss my B15Q already in that aspect. BTW, I just noticed that Cat specs the S60 to last up to '30 hours of talk time', and '43 days (!) of standby time'. I dont get it. Why just throw random numbers out there? Having an honest estimated standby time is an important aspect of evaluating a product before purchase.

I really dislike not having control over my phone and what apps are running! Thats the worst thing about android and the app developers. I think I will try to do a factory reset, and see what upgrading to 6.0.1 does (Im pretty sure mine came as 6.0.0), and slowly install apps and greenlight them.

 

[slimbobaggins]

BTW, I just noticed that Cat specs the S60 to last up to '30 hours of talk time', and '43 days (!) of standby time'. I dont get it. Why just throw random numbers out there? Having an honest estimated standby time is an important aspect of evaluating a product before purchase.

It's probably not a dishonest estimate. It's kind of like when an automobile manufacturer rates engine power or gas mileage... they'll all under perfect ideal conditions.

If I took the S60, removed every single app except for the phone app, turned screen brightness and timeout all the way down, disabled every unnecessary process, shut off all data and extra radio-rated setting (location, wifi, LTE, etc), and then used a bluetooth headset to make the calls so that the local speaker and microphone weren't sapping energy... it wouldn't shock me if you couldn't squeeze out that much talk time. Ditto with standby... that's will all radios off, etc. If you literally shut everything off, and let the phone just sit there, with nothing running on it... it wouldn't shock me if it lasted a long, long time. Not your phone, since it apparently likes eating itself... but look how low my usage was while I was asleep... and that wasn't even really trying to conserve battery life.

I really dislike not having control over my phone and what apps are running! Thats the worst thing about android and the app developers. I think I will try to do a factory reset, and see what upgrading to 6.0.1 does (Im pretty sure mine came as 6.0.0), and slowly install apps and greenlight them.

Not sure what to say there, about control. Sure, root would give us a little more... but Marshmallow offers more control than every available before... the app permissions are a huge improvement.

Something else for you to check... I forgot about developer options. If you go into settings to "About phone" and scroll down to "Build Number," tap it 7 times and it will unlock developer options. Go back to the main settings menu, and the option will be over "About phone." You can go in there and look at running processes, and see how much ram they're consuming. From that you might be able to deduce what your offending apps are.

 

[slimbobaggins]

Okay, Instagram was the problem. Guess that's where that 4% rating came from. A coworker told me he had issues with Instagram hijacking the wifi. I uninstalled it, and viola', no more wifi lock. No idea why I had no problems with it until last night.

 

[bandario]

Instagram uninstall might have fixed up quite a bit for you but I can confirm that Android 6.01 on this phone can and will use battery for WIFI even when it is disabled. And yes, I have it set to never use WIFI for location services etc yet somehow I still have 5% of my battery in 7 hours go towards WIFI usage when wifi is disabled. Not cool.

 

[slimbobaggins]

Instagram uninstall might have fixed up quite a bit for you but I can confirm that Android 6.01 on this phone can and will use battery for WIFI even when it is disabled. And yes, I have it set to never use WIFI for location services etc yet somehow I still have 5% of my battery in 7 hours go towards WIFI usage when wifi is disabled. Not cool.

Yeah I'm aware that it'll use the wifi despite being disabled, but that's not a S60 thing, the same happens with the Galaxy S7. That's where I first learned about it. Its a 6.0.1 problem.

 

[Ninjakebab]

Hey again. Thanks for the tips! The developer setting trick is really nice for tracking things!

Update: I manually updated all apps, and made sure to delete the cache. Simultaneously I deleted Snapchat, since I could see it was constantly on.

Result: awesome battery! It estimated 2 days from the remaining 45% left, and the estimation slope was steeper than the actual preceding one! Yay! Unfortunately I can't say whether it was out of date apps and residual data, or the removal of Snapchat that did the trick. But now it seems to work.

THEN I got WiFi issues being constantly on. I'm not even sure how I fixed it, but I did. It seems so random to me.
I then installed Messenger, and battery is drained again. Now uninstalled and trying Trillian as an alternative. Have blocked Instagram completely, notifications wise, in hopes it will keep the WiFi off, and battery up.

New issue: Quick Charge no longer works have tried 3 different cables, power outlets, jamming the cable into the block, etc. No dice. It really sucks that it takes 4 hours to charge it now... I'll try finding a friend with a quick charge compatible phone, and see if my charger is good.

 

[slimbobaggins]

Are you using the charger that came with it?
I havent really used mine, to be honest. I have a nicer charger I got off of amazon, and so far so good, it takes about 1.5 hrs to recharge the phone from 14% battery life.

 

[slimbobaggins]

I use Messenger as my sms app with no issues. I don't know why there is a difference between "messenging" and "messenger." Why bother making a nearly identical but slightly less featured app? Google doesn't make sense sometimes.

I think in general, 6.0.1 seems to be somewhat prone to wakelocks. I hope they fix the issues and push a patch.

 

[Ninjakebab]

Are you using the charger that came with it?

Yep. My 1 week old charger Have no clue why it suddenly bailed on me.

I think in general, 6.0.1 seems to be somewhat prone to wakelocks. I hope they fix the issues and push a patch.

Oh yes. I feel like I have to be way too critical in terms of which apps to install, and to troubleshoot battery issues, compared to my old B15Q on KitKat... I guess the new Android just have to mature a bit more.

 

[slimbobaggins]

So my alarm went off to wake me this morning, I shut the alarm off and unplugged the phone from the charger.

I checked the battery status about 15 minutes later, and it had been off battery 14 minutes, and awake the entire time.

Since there was no obvious reason for it to be wake locked, I flipped it into battery saving mode for a minute, and then back to normal. This successfully broke the wakelock, its been fine since.

 

[Ninjakebab]

It sounds like wakelock is exactly what I'm seeing now. After doing really well, I had a 1 hour phonecall. Afterwards the battery kept draining at the same rate. It seems to be very on/off whether its doing well. Have tried installing Greenify, but with no apparent result. So right now I'm back to a phone that drains within a day with minimal use...

I'll have to look into wakelocks

 

[bandario]

I've come to join the club...

Charged my phone to 100% last night and unplugged it just before going to sleep.

When I woke up 7.5 hours later, Google Play Services and WIFI (which was off) had eaten 25% of my battery...in 7.5 hours!!!

I had a think about what I had changed recently, and the only thing that came to mind was using google fit to track a run (this was before I charged), but I made sure to close everything before I went to sleep. The only other thing I did differently was lock the phone using the greenify widget to hibernate and lock screen.

I have cleared all data for google play services and uninstalled google fit. Will see how I go today; if I get this kind of drain again I'm going to have to do a factory reset as 25% in 7.5 hours is totally unacceptable and a long way from what I've been getting for the past week.

--------------------------------------
EDIT: After uninstalling google fit, clearing google play services data and running a program called Gservicefix, my issue appears to be resolved.

 

[Ninjakebab]

Welcome! sounds very much like the way mine is draining. I have installed GSam battery monitor, to pinpoint the culprits.

My screen comes in at 40% usage after a full battery drain. Even though this is with slim to no use: 21 minutes of screen on time! The weird part is: "Discharge while On/Off = 6%/114%".
Doing a quick google it seems others are reporting screen off time as a consumer with this app. Not sure if it is a sign that the screen is ACTUALLY using power while off, or erroneous reporting.

App usage comes in at 37% with google play services being at the top. I'm not too familiar with this, but what the heck is Google play services good for? Isn't it only relevant when I actually USE google apps? In the meanwhile I've restricted background data for Google Play store, Google Play services, Google App and Chrome.

I have cleared all data for google play services and uninstalled google fit.
EDIT: After uninstalling google fit, clearing google play services data and running a program called Gservicefix, my issue appears to be resolved.

By clearing data, do you mean clearing the cache for Google Play Services? If it doesnt work ill give Gservicefix a try.

 

[slimbobaggins]

So I'm apparently dumb, and couldn't figure out how to save images from the AOSP Messaging app, so I had installed Google Messenger, which I was used to from my last phone, and knew how to save the images.

I noticed a moderate decrease in battery life over the last few days. Looking in the battery section, the graph didn't really indicate the Messenger app was the culprit, but if I looked at its details, it said the app had kept the phone awake for over 4 hours, even though that wasn't really reflected in the "Awake" bar graph. I suspect this was part of what caused the wakelock I had yesterday morning.

I googled the messenger app and found this was a common problem on other devices. So last night I figured out how to use the AOSP app properly, and ditched messenger. So far so good... no wakelock today, and I have 94% battery life after about an hour combined of bluetooth audio and phone calls on the way to work this morning. I recorded the hell out of some videos last night (using LED as well), so I had to recharge last night as I was below 50% and figured that I wouldn't make it through today without a charge.

 

[bandario]

Welcome! sounds very much like the way mine is draining. I have installed GSam battery monitor, to pinpoint the culprits.

My screen comes in at 40% usage after a full battery drain. Even though this is with slim to no use: 21 minutes of screen on time! The weird part is: "Discharge while On/Off = 6%/114%".
Doing a quick google it seems others are reporting screen off time as a consumer with this app. Not sure if it is a sign that the screen is ACTUALLY using power while off, or erroneous reporting.

App usage comes in at 37% with google play services being at the top. I'm not too familiar with this, but what the heck is Google play services good for? Isn't it only relevant when I actually USE google apps? In the meanwhile I've restricted background data for Google Play store, Google Play services, Google App and Chrome.



By clearing data, do you mean clearing the cache for Google Play Services? If it doesnt work ill give Gservicefix a try.

Google play services does a lot of background stuff, especially with regards to syncing accounts and keeping various android apps fed.

Clear cache by all means, but storage management for google play services and the google app is 'special'. Go into app management -> google play services -> storage -> manage space and then click clear all data. Most things (gmail etc) will login automatically again but you will have to choose your backup account again.

I have only used 15% battery in the last 19 hours with a little bit of usage and a few phone calls so I'm going to call this a win for now but I really think android 6.0.1 has a few things that need addressing; I'm not sure if they will get fixed with the new version right around the corner. Let's just cross our fingers that CAT and BULLITT don't leave us out in the cold.