Downgrading Android OS?

[Android Question]

When I bought my Samsung Galaxy Express 2, it had a battery life of about one week. Then I upgraded the operating system (to 4.2.2), and the battery life immediately dropped to less than 2 days.

After much digging, it seems to be the damned wakelock bug in the newest operating system. It seems that nobody knows exactly what's going on, and there are dozens of solutions that seem to alleviate the problem. The trick of waking up the phone before disconnecting the charger, as random as that sounds, seems to work, although the OS sometimes decides to go to drain mode at random after a while (usually between a few hours and a few days after disconnecting the charger using the trick), although sometimes the bug doesn't trigger and I get the nice one-week battery time. Often when I notice that it has gone to draining mode again (there's a clear drop in the battery usage graph) rebooting helps, although not always.

(I read somewhere that the bug might be triggered by the wi-fi connection alongside the location services, which might explain the randomness. I'm now trying what happens if I turn wi-fi completely off, but I'm not hopeful.)

This didn't seem to happen in the original version of the operating system that came pre-installed. Unfortunately I have no idea which version it was. However, my question is: Is it possible to downgrade the operating system to that older version? I'm getting sick of playing this game, and I want my one-week long battery life back without having to jump through hoops.

 

[WarpRulez]

To illustrate the phenomenon, I took a screenshot:

http://koti.kapsi.fi/warp/media/Screenshot_2014-09-14-10-40-44.png

As you can see, I was having a really good (well, normal) battery time, and then at some point the bug triggered. Shouldn't be hard to guess where.

(And this was with wi-fi turned off the whole time, so as I feared, that wasn't a solution to the problem either. It seems that the problem has something to do with wakelocks, but nobody seems to be completely sure of the exact reason. And this has seemingly been going on for months, with no fix. It demonstrably did not happen in older versions of the OS.)

 

[Mr. Lucky]

You can try installing the Wakelock Detector app to see if you can narrow this down further. TBH though, I never had a battery issue with 4.2.2 (or 4.3 or my current 4.4.4). This sounds more like an update gone bad. I think it would be better and easier in the long run to just backup everything on the phone and then do a factory data reset, followed by a restore.

To your downgrade question, it may or may not be possible:
Want to downgrade Android? Sure thing, but first ... | Android Central

 

[WarpRulez]

I don't really need to narrow the problem further because other people have already done it (at least to the extent that it's possible to narrow it). And I have tried the wakelock detector. It doesn't help me seeing what is causing the problem.

And I have tried to factory-reset the phone. It didn't help. I have tried to turn off basically everything that there is to turn off. It doesn't help.

After wading through miles of forum posts dealing with that precise issue, I found one where people had actually studied the problem in more depth. I can't find the thread anymore (possibly because the internet is literally flooded with threads about this very subject), but the general consensus seemed to be that:

- The bug appeared after a certain version of the OS (I don't remember which).

- It has something to do with wakelocks.

- It seems to be so deep in the system that there's nothing the user can do to alleviate or circumvent it.

- The bug triggers at random for an unknown reason. There doesn't seem to be any single thing or discernible pattern to it. There doesn't seem to be any single service or program that causes it, or makes it trigger. (There are approximately as many reports of "fixes" and "causes" as there are people reporting. None of them work for almost anybody else.)

- The only temporary fix that has actually helped me was the trick of waking up the phone before disconnecting it from the charger. It's unknown why that helps. (And even then, it only helps until the bug randomly triggers again, from a few minutes to a few days later. There is no pattern to it.)

 

[WarpRulez]

Not that anybody's probably interested, but an update:

Some weeks ago there was an OS upgrade (to 4.4.2), and the problem seems to have vanished. I am getting consistently a battery life of about 5d 20h.

 

[SelenaLee]

Not that anybody's probably interested, but an update:

Some weeks ago there was an OS upgrade (to 4.4.2), and the problem seems to have vanished. I am getting consistently a battery life of about 5d 20h.

Thanks for the update, so I guess this is just the bug for the previous OS version. Happy to know it's fixed.