Database Develop

Automated GPS on/off and sync on "autopilot"

Hi,
I puzzed why entering navigation (Google or Premium...same issue) doesn't automatically turn on the GPS and disable it on exit. The car panel setup allows for automatic turn on of bluetooth, but again no automation of GPS turn on/off. So I'm wondering if there an app out there, that will turn on GPS when charged and disable it again when disconnected from the charger? That would do the trick IMO.
Also, if anybody knows of an app that will automate syncing of the standard accounts (i.e. stock, exchange, facebook etc.) depending on time of day and weekday, I'm very interested? Exchange ActiveSync could be ex. be synced "upon new mail" during 8-17 and in user defined, reduced intervals (hourly, every 2 hours etc.) or completely off for the rest of the day/night. You might want to get updates on facebook, gmail, sense, news etc. a couple of times during workhours, but then more frequently when off work. You might change setting for the weekend and hollidays. Could be a very neat app - if it's out there?
Thanks guys!

If you leave GPS enabled then when you open nav software it turns on and when you close it it turns off, there is no extra battery drain from leaving it enabled all the time, at least none that I have found.

I don't think many people appreciate this. Lots of posts about GPS disabled to save battery life. As you write, on GPS-aware apps turn on GPS so the battery drain is minimal.
My experience of the Desire HD is that the GPS and wi-fi radios are very efficient in terms of battery life but the 3G radio is absolutely and utterly fecking terrible and runs the thing down at an astonishing rate. HTC need to re-engineer this software urgently.

tasker
Hello,
I use "tasker" to define a task to switch on/off the GPS when running a specific application. works fine!
Thomas

goofy584 said:
Hello,
I use "tasker" to define a task to switch on/off the GPS when running a specific application. works fine!
Thomas
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1 for Tasker.
I don't use it to turn GPS on/off as you don't need to - just leave it enabled and it'll only be called upon when an app needs it.
What I do use Tasker for though is turning auto-sync on and off depending on the time of day. I believe that is similar to what you're looking for?
Sent from my X10i using XDA App

SunjinSak said:
+1 for Tasker.
I don't use it to turn GPS on/off as you don't need to - just leave it enabled and it'll only be called upon when an app needs it.
What I do use Tasker for though is turning auto-sync on and off depending on the time of day. I believe that is similar to what you're looking for?
Sent from my X10i using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Will try to leave the GPS on to check if it in fact doesn't affect battery drain unless called upon by an app.
Tasker sounds very intesting so thanks a lot!

[GUIDE] Optimizing battery life of your P990

This is a guide of how I have managed to massively extend my battery-life on the Optimus 2x. I personally use instant messaging like whatsapp and talk, and everybody should where possible, so I don't believe in turning off data during the day to save battery (sms is so 1999)! This are my recommendations to tune your battery-life from unacceptable to at least acceptable times (1 workday with quite high usage).
Items found to work especially well on the Optimus 2x P990
Use WiFi whenever you can, but disable when there are no networks you can join
- 3G seems to be by far the biggest drainer of battery-life, and WiFi idle seems to consume very, very little power. Make sure WiFi is *not* disabled when the screen turns off. Make sure to switch it off when you're not able to use a WiFi network however, to stop it scanning.
Set Network-Type to GSM (auto)
- Use the default dialer and select *#*#4636#*#*, select phone information and select GSM auto (PRL). Still allows for hsdpa data, not the maximum highest speed, but still quick enough for usage and extend battery life of some networks massively. If you want to be even more agressive, turn it to 2g only, but I find this too slow for casual surfing or internet usage, but if you only need it for instant messaging it should be good enough.
Disable gestures and orientation sensing
- Disable the specific gestures in the gestures menu and disable orientation by the button on the notification bar. Spare parts detects minutes of activity of the sensors during normal usage where it's not actually needed, so simply disable it when not using it from the notification bar (which is easy to do without switching apps anyway).
Make ABSOLUTELY sure your RIL matches your baseband
This is crucial. Without a matching RIL file (lge-ril.so in /system/lib) is ok, otherwise you will have a massive drain and problems with networks disconnecting all the time. Use LG GetRIl in the market to fix this if you cannot do it manually.
Check if your MicroSD card is detected when installed!
- I have issues sometimes with my MicroSD card being plugged in but not deteced, which causes my MicroSD card to become very hot, and my battery to empty in 3/4 hours completely. Reboot or remove and reinstall when it happens. Generally try to keep your phone keep as cool as possible, hot temperatures will decrease your battery-life.
Conventional and standard items for Android phones:
Check partial-wake usage in Spare Parts to find fauly apps!
- Check once in a while if there are any dodgy apps keeping your phone awake, causing your idle power consumption to be pretty bad!
Discharge your phone in a pattern of 100% to 20% and recharge
- Keeping cycles like this where possible, especially just after resetting battery statistics or installing a new rom, will eventually mean your battery will stay better for a longer period and you will notice your battery-life should be ok.
Make sure the minimum number of apps are running as services
- Go to Applications, Active services and find which unused apps you can disable.
Turn off Wireless Network Location if you are not using it
- Go to Location and Security, and disable use wireless networks.
Make sure not to use a task killer, especially not with automatic killing
- Sometime a taskkiller can be good to stop a app that hangs or causes issues, but make sure to not make it a default practice. To optimize battery usage, please tune the min/max of free memory managed by Android subsystem itself. Download Minfreemanager from the market, and set empty app to 96mb and content provider to 64mb and make it stick after reboots. This should make sure your phone will not slow down after a while of usage and enough inactive/idle apps are closed in the background.
Set Facebook / Twitter sync to once every 2 hours or more
- Make sure you don't let your phone sync that often, better to update it manually when you want to see it instead of syncing that often. Especially with Twitter having push now your direct messages will still turn up instantly even with slow synctimes for non-direct messages.
Watch out with Picasa sync
- Great feature, but dangerous since if it decides to start syncing when you are not on WiFi with bad reception, since it will mean it will sync potentially for a long time, destroying battery-life unexpectedly. There should be an option to sync this only on 80%+ battery only on WiFi but there isn't any, unfortunately.
Disable Google Latitude in Maps if not used
- If you need a longer battery-life, make sure you tell Latitude in Google Maps to not update your location (also see the point of network location), and make sure you sign out of it as well (so it doesn't update in the background if you are not using it).
I will update this and looking for good suggestions, please let me know especially about network-type GSM auto (PRL) and if it makes the same huge difference on your side. Also, another note, I am using 0405 baseband since I find best battery-life bundled with the RIL from a Vodafone Spain 0405 RIL as shared here.
Good luck improving your battery-life!

wapz said:
I will update this and looking for good suggestions, please let me know especially about network-type GSM auto (PRL) and if it makes the same huge difference on your side.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Im trying it out, but just an observation, the setting goes back to WCDMA prefered when you reboot the phone. Any way to make it stick?

Just shut down the phone and restarted and setting has not returned to WCDMA preferred on mcr fr19 but stayed on GSM auto (prl).
Sent from my LG-P990 using XDA App

I think that if you tick 2G only on and off again it will go back to WCDMA Preferred.

Rusty! said:
I think that if you tick 2G only on and off again it will go back to WCDMA Preferred.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
mine definitely does not stick and i havent toggled 2G or anything else...

Thanks for the advice, seems to have done the trick for me. There seems to be very little speed difference with GSM auto set, I'm sure the improvement in battery life will compensate for the decrease in speed

Just restarted the phone and the network was reset to wcdma preferred
However good tutorial
Inviato dal mio Optimus 2X usando Tapatalk

Make sure not to use a task killer, especially not with automatic killing
- Sometime a taskkiller can be good to stop a app that hangs or causes issues, but make sure to not make it a default practice. To optimize battery usage, please tune the min/max of free memory managed by Android subsystem itself. Download Minfreemanager from the market, and set empty app to 96mb and content provider to 64mb and make it stick after reboots. This should make sure your phone will not slow down after a while of usage and enough inactive/idle apps are closed in the background.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's not saving. Goes back to old values.

Click on menu button and choose save and apply at reboot.
Not sure why the wcdma settings keep being restored for others. Are you guys using cm7 or stock/mcr?
Sent from my LG-P990 using XDA App

wapz said:
Click on menu button and choose save and apply at reboot.
Not sure why the wcdma settings keep being restored for others. Are you guys using cm7 or stock/mcr?
Sent from my LG-P990 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
CM7 (Well MIUI, but it's based on CM7). It's very annoying.

wapz said:
Click on menu button and choose save and apply at reboot.
Not sure why the wcdma settings keep being restored for others. Are you guys using cm7 or stock/mcr?
Sent from my LG-P990 using XDA App
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Click to collapse
xAdaM-- said:
CM7 (Well MIUI, but it's based on CM7). It's very annoying.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
For the ones having the problem that wcdma settings keep being restored, just enble 2g radio only first, from the wireless menu. Later repeat the indicated steps and reboot. Did the trick for me.

crime_of_heart said:
For the ones having the problem that wcdma settings keep being restored, just enble 2g radio only first, from the wireless menu. Later repeat the indicated steps and reboot. Did the trick for me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
sounds excellent! hope somebody can come back with any input on GSM auto (PRL) experiences, for me it really improved battery-life with a couple of hours.

wapz said:
[*]Make ABSOLUTELY sure your RIL matches your baseband
This is crucial. Without a matching RIL file (lge-ril.so in /system/lib) is ok, otherwise you will have a massive drain and problems with networks disconnecting all the time. Use LG GetRIl in the market to fix this if you cannot do it manually.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I agree with you in all points - except for this one! I could not believe it myself but it has turned out that I get the best battery life on my O2x using this combination:
- MoDaCo FR19
- Baseband 0530
- RIL 0622
Baseband 0622, which is actually recommended for FR19, was horrible for me regarding battery life! I was surprised to see this non-matching combination provide a far better experience! Also, no problems with connectivity or call quality whatsoever. I'm on Vodafone Germany, for what it's worth.

Interesting. Do you see any dialer wake in spare parts at all? I notice I recently got android system playing up quite a lot, no idea what is causing it :-(
Sent from my LG-P990 using XDA App

Yes, I see the Dialer show up in Partial Wake Usage. It's on first or second place, but the blue bar is not very long though, maybe 3-4 mm.
Dialer usage seems to increase after 3-4 days of uptime, strangely...

This was missed in the original post so let me add my two cents worth.
To save even more battery, I would as well, advise paying some attention to screen brightness and wallpaper/theme selection.
In my experience, you can save 20 to 30 mAh by turning off Auto Brightness and setting it to something lower. The auto brightness control in O2X is overly bright and dismal in its operation. It barely changes in response to varying light conditions.
For this, you need an automation app called Tasker, or something similar. I use Tasker to control all manner of things including all the network situations mentioned in the first post of this thread. For saving battery in relation to screen brightness, I use Tasker to set screen brightness to 70 during the day, and to turn it down to 50 during the night. You can adjust these to your own preferences. But, as mentioned above, running these values saves me about 20 to 30 mAh of power when the screen is on.
In general, selecting darker wallpapers and themes will also help you save some power. Many messaging and email apps, for example, will give you a choice of a dark or light theme. If they do, I always choose a dark theme to ensure minimal power consumption.
My two cents worth

abwyatt said:
This was missed in the original post so let me add my two cents worth.
To save even more battery, I would as well, advise paying some attention to screen brightness and wallpaper/theme selection.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not a bad point, thanks. I am using a low manual brightness, is there maybe a brightness bar widget so you can tune it manuallly directly from a homescreen? That would be great.
And of course you must be crazy to use live wallpapers. Why would you want to make your battery last shorter and your homescreen slower and more annoying to look at?

wapz said:
Not a bad point, thanks. I am using a low manual brightness, is there maybe a brightness bar widget so you can tune it manuallly directly from a homescreen? That would be great.
And of course you must be crazy to use live wallpapers. Why would you want to make your battery last shorter and your homescreen slower and more annoying to look at?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, good additional point that I missed about the live-wallpapers
I use a small app called Quick Settings which installs in the pull-down notification screen to quickly adjust screen brightness if I need to override the auto settings I set in Tasker.
PS. You might want to update your first post with the info about controlling screen brightness since many users are ignorant of the default auto-brightness setting, AND your post is very useful and I see it being referred to as a solution quite often. I was made aware of this thread from way over at Modaco. Good work!
Hope the moderators will stick this thread to the top of the forum.

I thought dark wallpapers are more needed for devices with amoled displays. 2x has got a lcd am i right?
Dont know if it that important for it then...

abwyatt said:
Yeah, good additional point that I missed about the live-wallpapers
PS. You might want to update your first post with the info about controlling screen brightness since many users are ignorant of the default auto-brightness setting, AND your post is very useful and I see it being referred to as a solution quite often. I was made aware of this thread from way over at Modaco. Good work!
Hope the moderators will stick this thread to the top of the forum.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I will update it soon. Where did you see it referenced on MoDaCo?
pa.pn2 said:
I thought dark wallpapers are more needed for devices with amoled displays. 2x has got a lcd am i right?
Dont know if it that important for it then...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, correct. But nobody said we should use one in this topic, we only discussed live wallpapers

[Q] Wlan/Wifi sleep control and booting question

Hello,
Here's too question : First, I've seen, in BetterBatteryStats i think, that you could see how long wifi has been on AND ALSO how long it was working (meaning receiving/sending). Cause the "wifi on" stat is always at 100% even though in advanced options i've set it to sleep after i put the device to sleep.
Second, at every boot in status bar i see "Currently checking media" but i don't understand that, since this is internal memory, and since the system has started already, why the hell it's doing this before loading everything? And also it takes at least 5-10seconds before it's starting doing it... All that take more than 20seconds...
Last thing, i saw in Android battery usage "Wifi sharing", what is that exactly?
Thanks!

In order:
The WiFi sleep seems to work intermittently. I stopped using that and use Llama to turn off my WiFi 1 minute after screen off. Tasker will be able to do this too, I believe. It works very well, and I can even set it not to turn off if certain apps are running, like Internet radio.
Media checking is something that happens. It is a good thing. It gets lists of all media files so you do not have to search when loading most apps. If charging while off, I normally leave the Note plugged in until all searches are done, and then another minute or two to reach 100% battery when I boot.
WiFi sharing is a leech on your battery, unless you happen to want to share your WiFi. It was one of the first items I blocked once I rooted the phone. You need Root to block, disable or remove this.

Thanks for all that, but there're things i don't get : 1/ Are you saying that "turn after screen's off option" is useless/defective? And why you tell me to use tasker (not free) if Llama (free) can do the job? 2/ Do not have to search what? And why telling you keep the note plugged 2min after Media Checking? 3/ Wifi Sharing app (the trouble maker) is not android tether function, right? If so, in which app does it share wifi? As said, i tried to freeze it with Titanium but it kept loading. I don't like Freeze with Anttek cause there's still an icon app in my Folder Organizer widget (which list all apps icon on a screen).
PS: I really wanna find back the app where was displyed the info i mentionned in 1st post (see when wifi's working and not just when it's on)

1. Yes, I think the WiFi sleep function is defective. Just my view. Llama does the job much better, which is why I suggest it. It does a great deal more too, which is also why I suggest it.
2. The media search operation is searching for all media. This is music, photos and videos (not sure what else, if anything). Once completed applications do not have to look at your SD card every time they open to search for media. This makes the apps faster and saves battery. Ignore the rest of what I said.
3. I do not know if WiFi sharing is the Tether function. It certainly seems like it could be. If it is frozen by Titanium it should not be starting. I have no idea why it does.

2 issues

I just noticed these issues today usage no different from the past weeks. 1st is I noticed battery drained really quickly with no indication. 2nd is music the equilizer would not work. Idk if the 2nd one deals with the whole ram management issue but it does come back and it's like it's turned half way down

Lots of threads in the forums re: battery drain. For me, my biggest hitters were (1) the stock email app sync and (2) wifi scanning.
I'd suggest going into stock email app settings if you use it and turn sync to manual long enouh to see if it has an impact and make sure your wifi's always allow scanning is unchecked. Then do some reading imto other causes people are niting.
oh, and android 101: shut off location when ur not using it.
Not sure about the EQ but I thought it only works with the stock music app.

jeff_roey said:
Lots of threads in the forums re: battery drain. For me, my biggest hitters were (1) the stock email app sync and (2) wifi scanning.
I'd suggest going into stock email app settings if you use it and turn sync to manual long enouh to see if it has an impact and make sure your wifi's always allow scanning is unchecked. Then do some reading imto other causes people are niting.
oh, and android 101: shut off location when ur not using it.
Not sure about the EQ but I thought it only works with the stock music app.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Also, use an automation app such as Tasker to control syncing, wifi, etc.

Yea it didn't die on me today which is good. Will try that tasker

My biggest battery drain was with Google wallet, specifically the NFC Tap & Pay. It's almost as if the Wallet app gets an exclusive hold on the NFC radio & doesn't let go... Finally had to just turn off the NFC radio & the battery drain is much better. .

I have a 300mbps DL and 20+ upload and a 5ghz modem. My s5 has no problem showing 100-200mbps on the speed test app, but my s6 is barely hitting 80mbps. But in real life situations its less then 1mbps. There will be long periods of time for Pandora to load the next song without skipping as well as overall growing the internet is slow. I'm outside my 14 days so I'm hoping its a bug. And that damned screen rotation issue.... My battery has been stellar. But I don't text much or make too many calls from it.

Widgets not updating

My widgets are very slow to update. It may take him a half hour or longer to update. I have checked battery optimization is not on for those apps, although one of those two apps that I have the problem with background data is grayed out. So I can't turn on allow background data. Not sure why that would be great out.
Any thoughts?

Wunderlist Task List.
DTG/GTD
But, I did some things poking around, don't remember for sure what all, but I had read that changing the Animation Scale etc to .5 would help. I did change that.
Before posting, I had found that Wunderlist was on battery optimization. Changing it didn't appear to help, so I posted. But now, it seems to be working. Maybe it's fixed. I'll post back in a day or two and indicate if it is still working or has stopped again.

Well, no, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that's the only change I made, and at that point it had started working.
Are you having same problem, albeit different widgets?
FYI... mine is now not working again. I'm not surprised. But am frustrated.

Update...
I am finding that it does eventually update. It feels like the phone has been taken over by something. But, then, other things don't seem slow.
I just installed Gsam battery monitor, and ran the ADB cmds to try to identify apps using battery. Maybe I'll find something using a lot of battery and hence cycles.
My battery does seem to be going down quite a bit faster than it should.

It cleared up for a while after a factory reset,But it's back, and, I find that notifications from Lightflow come in 30 minutes after recieved.
It's like the phone is operating in molasses.
I'm beginning to think this phone is crap. If I switch back to my old Mate 9 it works fine.

jd14771 said:
certain apps aren't syncing well with pie. i had this same issue with Beautiful widgets, could not get the weather or time to update unless i manually updated it.
Under <Problem APP's> App Info > Battery
1.A Make sure the app is allowed background activity
1.B Make sure the app is not set to "optimized"
. (note: by default, the optimized list will only show apps that HAVEN'T been optimized, . you have to select "ALL" at the top to see all apps.)
Under <Problem APP's> App Info > Mobile Data
2.A Make sure "allow background data usage" is enabled.
2.B Make sure "allow app while data saver is on" if you have data saver enabled.
. (enable this if you want to be sure an app will receive background data.)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the suggestions. I don't seem to be having any luck with that. Had already done those.
But!! ...
I just found a post after doing a global search for another issue I am having that seems to coincide with the widget issues, which is, Play Store freezing during updates. The post was in a Xaiomi forum. He said that he found if he had blue tooth on, his play store would constantly freeze. He turned off BT, and rebooted, and it worked.
I just did the same thing...and it is working...both the play store, and widget updates.
Interesting to have the great feeling of success, along with the frustration of a new (newly realized) issue yet remaining (BT).

Looking for a little further and through the settings on Bluetooth, I turned off Bluetooth scan. Now at first I would still have problems with Bluetooth on even though Bluetooth to scan was off. That of course would be very quickly after turning it on or off at cetera.
so this morning I get up having left Bluetooth on all night, with scan off, and everything's working fine. I did find last night that when I would first turn Bluetooth on even with skin off, the problems would be there. But of course when you first turn Bluetooth on it's going to scan anyway.
so I will update this thread little later after I see a little more about weather. Just having scan off actually cures the problem, in case someone else runs into this and it helps them.