I do not have a rooted phone, nor do I ever intend to root so please keep that in mind when responding. Thank you.
My question is this, if I disable every single 'contextual' thing that the Moto X does; for example: twisting wrist for camera, active display, motorola assist, touchless control, etc.
Will the low power processors still run, scanning for detection (sensor pings, accelerometer checks, microphone still listening) if everything is disabled?
Just trying to figure it out because say I wanted to disable everything to squeeze out some battery life, would I be doing it in vain or would it actually shut down those 2 extra processors (language processing/contextual processing) if I am not using any of the services?
I am by no means a phone genius, but I am a pretty smart computer nerd and don't know if anyone has insights about how the phone kernel actually handles this situation. All my research on this matter just finds the very bland and generalized description of the X8 and just what it does.
From my understanding of the X8 soc the 2 extra low power cores are always on. They were also designed to be as power efficient as possible. So disabling all of the apps it handles might not do much in way of power saving. However, if you were to disable all of the moto services I believe the 2 cores will still run but use up a lot less clock cycles since there wouldn't be anything for them to execute. But doing so will also make the moto x that much less of a phone. Its a nice experiment there's no harm in it. Most of the moto apps are allowed to be disabled. If no battery improvements then just revert everything you disabled.
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update
Well I disabled everything but active display and I can say I have seen a massive increase in battery life. So basically even if the processors are low powered they are still powered and taking battery. I'm going to disable active display tonight before charging and go thru a workday and give an update tomorrow. I suspect I will get another increase in battery life. As of now the increase was significant, I normally take my phone off the charger before I go to sleep at midnight, do a restart and check the battery at 8am. I normally have been losing 4% every single night with everything enabled. That's moto connect, Touch less control, active display. With them all disabled my battery stayed at 100% 2 nights in a row so far
I suppose it's all a matter of context. Compared to my Samsung GS3 (Verizon) I'm seeing MASSIVELY better battery life (>2X) without playing any tricks to modify the stock experience. Some if it may be from going from a CDMA base to GSM. With low radio signal CDMA seems to suck down the battery quickly. It always seems difficult to definitively figure out what is really causing high battery drain when it happens.
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mikeuresti said:
Well I disabled everything but active display and I can say I have seen a massive increase in battery life. So basically even if the processors are low powered they are still powered and taking battery. I'm going to disable active display tonight before charging and go thru a workday and give an update tomorrow. I suspect I will get another increase in battery life. As of now the increase was significant, I normally take my phone off the charger before I go to sleep at midnight, do a restart and check the battery at 8am. I normally have been losing 4% every single night with everything enabled. That's moto connect, Touch less control, active display. With them all disabled my battery stayed at 100% 2 nights in a row so far
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Thanks for the update.
While you say that your battery has increased in standby time, has it increase in SOT?
Would you mind putting up screenshots of you're battery at 75% 50% 25% ?
Would you be able to make a list of all moto services you disabled while still maintaining the active display feature.
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Alright, been busy past few days. I will be posting screenshots with screen time starting now (unplugs phone from charger)
This is the list of EVERYTHING I have disabled, I am running un-rooted Moto X Motomaker edition on Verizon.
Disabled:
Active Display
Audio Effects
Caller Name ID
com.motorola.moodles
Device Management
Email
Google Pinyin Input
Google Play Books
Google Play Games
Google Play Magazines
Google Play Movies & TV
Google Play Music
Google+
Hangouts
HP Print Service Plugin
Mobile Hotspot
Moto Care
Motorola Assist
Motorola Checkin
Motorola Connect
Motorola Contextual Services
Motorola DriveActivator
Motorola ID
Motorola Migrate
Motorola SensorHub Updater
Motorola Skip Setup
NFL Mobile
Print Spooler
Sync Service
Touchless Control
Verizon Tones
Verizon Voicemail
VZ Navigator
So today I will been doing my best to take screen shots at 25% increments. If results look promising I will do a factory reset and run everything full stock everything enabled to make a comparison.
Also, I have no WiFi on EVER. I do not use location services either. Basically, my phone is never running anything in the background except vital system processes. Stay tuned for the pics, coming tonight around 11pm CST.
screens
Haven't been using phone so much, here is everything at 75% will be following up today with 50% and hopefully 25% pics
25% battery update
OK for those of you following here is the update with 25%,battery life. After this I will re-enable everything Motorola on my phone and use the x8 mobile system to its fullest capabilities to have a side by side comparison of what exactly goes on as far as battery life is concerned when the 2 contextual cores are being utilized.
No
mikeuresti said:
OK for those of you following here is the update with 25%,battery life. After this I will re-enable everything Motorola on my phone and use the x8 mobile system to its fullest capabilities to have a side by side comparison of what exactly goes on as far as battery life is concerned when the 2 contextual cores are being utilized.
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Thanks for the updates. While getting 27Hrs of usage is great but SOT is much more important. At 25% you have 2 1/2 hr SOT which I don't find that great, considering you lose so many features. I have always average 3 1/2 hrs SOT at 25% with all moto x features on and Google now without location reporting on and that's on LTE 90% of the time.
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mawells787 said:
No
Thanks for the updates. While getting 27Hrs of usage is great but SOT is much more important. At 25% you have 2 1/2 hr SOT which I don't find that great, considering you lose so many features. I have always average 3 1/2 hrs SOT at 25% with all moto x features on and Google now without location reporting on and that's on LTE 90% of the time.
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I am just curious, how the HECK do you manage to have 3 hours + of SOT at 25% with everything enabled? that blows me away. is your idle time very low? cause honestly my phone idles longer than its being used, i figure if i had my phone on using it nonstop i could pull off 3 hours with 25% battery, but i work alot and its off more than its on, possibly contributing to the lower SOT in my aspect.
ok, used my phone heavy today, these pics show amazing screen time with 60% battery. i really think disabling contextual services helps, i was using youtube and web browsing on 4g LTE heavily today and here are the results
anyone share their thoughts on this?
mikeuresti said:
I am just curious, how the HECK do you manage to have 3 hours + of SOT at 25% with everything enabled? that blows me away. is your idle time very low? cause honestly my phone idles longer than its being used, i figure if i had my phone on using it nonstop i could pull off 3 hours with 25% battery, but i work alot and its off more than its on, possibly contributing to the lower SOT in my aspect.
ok, used my phone heavy today, these pics show amazing screen time with 60% battery. i really think disabling contextual services helps, i was using youtube and web browsing on 4g LTE heavily today and here are the results
anyone share their thoughts on this?[/QUOTE
I'll take pics tonight I don't usually let my phone run down that low. Except when I was trying to test my battery. For a while I wasn't getting good SOT or stand by times. One day android OS ran down my battery and I got pissed off so I sbf back to 4.2.2. Afterwards I let the ota hit the phone did a factory reset after 4.4. When I was setting up my phone I didn't restore anything from play store just did it manually and it has helped. No more high android OS usage.
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This is at 74% 1hr SOT with Google now and moto services running. And I took a shot of running apps to show that all moto services are running.
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Thanks a lot mawells! I am pretty much concluding that the difference is so negligible that the battery gains do not out-weigh the features you are missing.
I also noticed that you are using backup assistant plus? its an annoying little bugger of an app, have you any way to disable/remove that feature? i am stuck with verizon and i cant seem to stop backup assistant plus from running.
mikeuresti said:
Thanks a lot mawells! I am pretty much concluding that the difference is so negligible that the battery gains do not out-weigh the features you are missing.
I also noticed that you are using backup assistant plus? its an annoying little bugger of an app, have you any way to disable/remove that feature? i am stuck with verizon and i cant seem to stop backup assistant plus from running.
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No there's no way to disable it I hate it myself. If you are rooted you can freeze it through titanium backup. But as long as its not syncing its not really doing much.
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The ambient display toggles on every 5 seconds rather I have a notification or not. So a lot of the time it is just coming on to show the clock and nothing else. And I think it must be doing the same thing in my pocket because I only had about 1.5 hours of screen on time today (light use) and the battery is depleted already.
Has anybody else had this issue or know how to figure out what app is making it come on for no reason? Driving me crazy.
Hi.
I'm currently using my old moto x with stock android 5.1. due to unforseen circumstances.
After upgrading to 5.1 I noticed that the original battery was shot so I replaced the battery, which was a bit of a nightmare but I got it done in the end.
Anyway I noticed that the new battery still wasn't so great so I've been looking at the battery page and noticed that the device is constantly awake. Now I know to moto x has two contextual cores to listen to voices and movement etc. so maybe this keeps the phone awake? If so it seems a bit silly.
I think I will have to reset the phone to see if the cores or an app I have installed.
Hello! So, I installed Android 10 and now when i wireless charge my 10+ I always have always on display on the bottom of the screen (% and estimated waiting time to 100%). How do i turn it off? Even if the light is low, I really dont want it to be always displayed during charge (and maybe it could also cause burn in problems, altho i read always on display text isnt always using same pixels, so who knows).
Thanks!
I wouldn't worry about burn in. I use my phone a lot for youtube and waze and both caused serious burn in on my note 8 (max brightness usually), but on my s10 there is zero burn since release with the same usage.
You can however disable it. It's under Display and the option is called Show charging information
Hello.
I've always used phones with a notification led so things were pretty simple. This one doesn't have a led and while the colored screen edges were ok with MIUI, I'm using crDroid and I can't replicate the same behaviour (I've turned on that option on ambient display settings but nothing lights up after a notification pop). I've tried the app "aod notification light for pixel" from the google play store and it works alright but the battery drainage is crazy (overnight it drained pretty much half my battery), being responsible for 20% usage of a full charge.
What workaround have you found? Do you just live without any notification alert?
Notification alerts are overrated. Back then we had a nice rgb small led, now mostly gone. Try pick up gesture on ambient light. Or turn on edge lighting, crdroid should have it.
I use True Edge from playstore, it's free, tons of customizations. To change the pattern, i had to watch a advertisment only once, so not much problems with it.
Klaus69 said:
I use True Edge from playstore, it's free, tons of customizations. To change the pattern, i had to watch a advertisment only once, so not much problems with it.
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How's the battery drainage using that app?
diogofd8 said:
How's the battery drainage using that app?
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Not even in the app list on batt usage.
Because the actual battery drain is under "Display"
(But I don't expect it to be high, with conservative settings anyway.)
I hate it that they removed the LED from newer phones, lighting up the display for mere notifications seems so out of place. Thanks for the advice, I'll look around some options and report back if I find something interesting.
@diogofd8 Then again with AMOLED displays, showing a small notification on display is pretty much equivalent to using a dedicated LED as far as battery drain goes.
I vaguely remember there used to be an app to pretty much simulate a notification LED when AMOLED displays were first introduced on Android by literally just showing a couple of pixels in various color, but can't remember how it was called and no idea if it even exists still.
Case_ said:
@diogofd8 Then again with AMOLED displays, showing a small notification on display is pretty much equivalent to using a dedicated LED as far as battery drain goes.
I vaguely remember there used to be an app to pretty much simulate a notification LED when AMOLED displays were first introduced on Android by literally just showing a couple of pixels in various color, but can't remember how it was called and no idea if it even exists still.
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I've tried the app "aod notification light for pixel" from the google play store and it works alright but the battery drainage is crazy (overnight it drained pretty much half my battery), being responsible for 20% usage of a full charge. It's basically the functionallity you've mentioned and I don't think 20% is just due to the light... oh well...
Klaus69 said:
I use True Edge from playstore, it's free, tons of customizations. To change the pattern, i had to watch a advertisment only once, so not much problems with it.
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Looks really nice and with network access blocked in the settings there's really no chance of ads being shown and data collection problem with Google Analytics is solved too.
The only real downside is that the app isn't open source and uses Google Libraries.