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My Moto G phone (3rd gen; Android 6.0) used to charge rapidly and last over a day. I upgraded it from Lollipop to Marshmallow in mid-February and it still performed well. However, for the past 3 weeks or so, its battery life has suddenly pretty much halved. It also gets warm to the touch even when left alone!

I'm familiar with general tips for increasing battery life, such as those provided by Motorola or on this site. From looking in GSAM Battery Monitor and Settings → Battery the most likely culprits seem to be Google Play Services and/or Google Calendar. But battery drain is still high even after denying all but the Calendar permission to Google Calendar; and it's not obvious how to configure Google Play Services.

If anyone knows of a solution that doesn't involve rooting the device I'd be very grateful. Or do I just have to wait for Google to release a bug fix?

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  • Android 6 auto backs up app+ app data or is supposed to. Try disabling that to see if it helps. I don't have that OS to tell you how exactly, but that linked article should help
    – beeshyams
    Commented Mar 23, 2016 at 6:24
  • Also, use the Battery monitor to check if any app is using 50%+ of the battery. Disable anything that is not system core, and that uses triple to quintuple times the charge everything else uses.
    – Bonatti
    Commented Mar 23, 2016 at 17:35
  • I've since discovered then when I boot the phone in Safe mode the battery consumption is much lower, suggesting that at least one third-party app is to blame. This is despite Settings > Battery saying Google Calendar is the worst offender. It looks like the third-party app is using Google Play Services. I'm gradually uninstalling blocks of apps and observing the effect on battery life. I'll post a full answer once I've isolated the culprit(s). I use App Detective to list my apps in the order I installed them.
    – snark
    Commented Mar 23, 2016 at 21:48
  • Struggling to get to the bottom of this. Each time I think I've arrived at a set of apps with low battery consumption, rapid battery drain suddenly sets in some time later! I've reported Google Calendar's apparently high battery consumption to Google. (This happens even when I don't open the app!) I might have to cull most of my apps or even do a factory reset soon...
    – snark
    Commented Mar 30, 2016 at 19:55

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I tried lots of things but in the end only a factory data reset of the phone worked.

Before I did the reset the battery drain looked like this in Settings > Battery:

battery drain before factory reset

The shallow gradient was when I booted the phone in safe mode. This at least suggested the issue was likely to to with one or more apps rather than something inherently wrong with the phone.

GSam Battery Monitor wasn't much use. All it told me was that Google Services or Google Play Services was draining the battery but it didn't tell me which app(s) were causing that.

So I opted for a factory reset of the phone data and installed apps manually, just one or two at a time, watching the battery drain in Settings > Battery to make sure the newly installed app wasn't suddenly increasing battery drain. I'd wait at least 12 hours before installing another one or two apps. So this approach takes a lot of patience and isn't very practical if you use your phone for many things in the mean time. But now my battery life has increased from just half a day to 4 to 5 days...

battery drain after factory reset

I don't know whether this could've been fixed without a factory reset, or what app or setting caused the battery drain to increase suddenly in the first place. Ideally there would be some way of getting a breakdown of battery drain within Google (Play) Services due to different apps invoking it.

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  • I have the exact same problem (Google Calendar seemingly draining a lot of battery), and I yet haven't found a solution. Does anyone else have another suggestion? I would like to avoid the factory reset.
    – DiegoDD
    Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 20:32
  • Try disabling the Google Calendar app. That worked for me when battery drain increased suddenly again for me the other day. Obviously that means you won't be able to use the Calendar app but that's not a problem for me.
    – snark
    Commented Jun 21, 2016 at 19:58
  • How do I disable it? And since I do use it, I guess I just can temporarily use another calendar app (and see if that one drains the battery too)
    – DiegoDD
    Commented Jun 21, 2016 at 23:43
  • Settings > Apps > Calendar > Disable. That's on my Android 6.0 Moto G 3rd gen phone. Unfortunately you can't uninstall it because it's one of the pre-installed Google apps.
    – snark
    Commented Jun 23, 2016 at 7:05
  • Sounds like similar problem that I had, battery drain started happening for my huawei p9 a few days ago all of a sudden, no apparent cause. Google Play Services top battery user but also a variety of other apps. In the end a suggestion to turn off automatic app updates solved the problem for me (after I had done general cleanup and os upgrade which had not solved problem).
    – gaoithe
    Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 11:07
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Are you rooted or okay with rooting? Do you have Xposed Installer installed or okay with installing Xposed Installer?

If so, you can get Amplify from http://amplifyandroid.com/. The app basically lists all of the wakelocks and alarms (not alarms that humans use) that cause wakelocks and tells you how many times it woke the system and for how long. From there you can start delaying the alarms/wakelocks to increase battery life. Amplify dramatically increased my idle battery life.

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  • Thanks for the tip; but I wanted a solution that didn't involve rooting the phone. Good to know Amplify is an option though...
    – snark
    Commented Mar 26, 2016 at 10:20

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