Battery Life Better With Rooted Phones?

olds

Elite Member
Mar 3, 2000
50,120
776
126
Phone is coming up on two years and even new batteries don't seem to hold a charge for long.
Does rooting a phone so there is no bloatware help battery life?
Contract up in May, may wait till October till the Note 5 comes out.
 

poofyhairguy

Lifer
Nov 20, 2005
14,612
318
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It can help sometimes if you use the Greenify Xposed pluggin, but that is only if you don't have Lollipop.
 
Dec 4, 2013
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Xposed is now available on Lollipop 5.0. It won't run on 5.1 yet.

Another Xposed app that helps immensely with battery life is Amped. It basically collates and reduces the number of Google Services wakelocks. You give up some granular location for less wakelocks overall.
 

Raizinman

Platinum Member
Sep 7, 2007
2,355
75
91
meettomy.site
I spoke to the tech about my battery life going down and he suggested a technique what he called cycle the battery. Here is what he told me to do.

1) Turn off phone
2) Plug in charge and charge overnight
3) Turn on phone and use for about an hour
4) Turn off phone and charge to full
5) Turn on phone and use for about an hour
6) Turn off phone and charge to full
7) Turn on phone and start using normally.

After I did the above the phone battery appeared to have a longer charge.
 

dawheat

Diamond Member
Sep 14, 2000
3,132
93
91
Have you tried a factory reset? I know it's a pain but if you plan it out right, it's not that bad to restore your apps and such. This is assuming it's not some rouge app draining your battery after an update (e.g. Facebook Messenger, etc).

Honestly I've never found that things like Greenify and such really helped battery life materially. The right custom ROM can significantly change your battery life, but takes a bit of trial and error.
 

sweenish

Diamond Member
May 21, 2013
3,656
60
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There are ways for it to help.

Xposed has an alpha/beta on 5.0. Is greenify not yet compatible? I haven't been following xposed or greenify for a while.

If you're able to root and flash a custom kernel, you can maybe eek out some extra battery life. Sometimes at the cost of performance because they realize savings by undervolting and/or underclocking.

Is the bloatware actually running? Shady free apps are far worse culprits. Especially the pirated ones.

EDIT: I second trying the battery conditioning as well.
 

Dulanic

Diamond Member
Oct 27, 2000
9,966
590
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Rooting give you more control over rogue apps so in that aspect it does help. I had a few apps that like to hide their battery usage etc... but with some research I was able to work around it. I have one app that liked to lock GPS for no reason and /w AppOps (Xposed) I just locked it out of using the GPS at all.
 

openwheel

Platinum Member
Apr 30, 2012
2,044
17
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Not in my experience. I think they are roughly equal.
However, I freeze everything I don't use anyway.
 

lopri

Elite Member
Jul 27, 2002
13,310
687
126
In my subjective experience it does. It takes some effort at the time of new app installations, however. In my case I use

- Greenify (hibernate unwanted apps)
- Adaway (ad blocker)
- AFWall+ (firewall)
- ROM Toolbox (to shut useless components within apps, such as GCM or autostart)

I am probably a bit on the anti-developer side in this way. I do try to pay for worthy apps whenever possible, hoping they will cancel each other out.
 

Naer

Diamond Member
Nov 28, 2013
3,428
181
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Just get a 10000mhm external battery. Fits nice in a pocket with a 3ft android cord attached to your phone