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Comment by jrabone | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, you too can watch as "Android OS" drains the battery in 6 hours. Honestly, if you get a Nexus 4 be prepared to be a beta tester, or scratch monkey every time there's an OTA update. Perhaps it's just "international" users, but I totally regret buying into the Nexus hype.

And then there's the hardware issues (bluetooth kills WiFi if you try to use both at once), firmware issues (WiFi doesn't roam properly, ARP offload broken), straight-up bugs (wireless charging power management holds permanent wakelock preventing deep sleep)...

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2072930 really shows what Android is capable of.

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I use a Nexus 4. I listen to podcasts via bluetooth headset while doing chores; that's several hours on the weekends, and about one hour during weekdays. When I drive, I'm playing podcasts and using Waze (which uses GPS and Wireless networking and the screen is constantly on); that's about 1 hour/day. WiFi is constantly on and I use it to read e-mails and other social messages. I also use it for reading books (Safari To Go) throughout the day. It always lasts through the day with this behavior. I typically only plug it in on my bedstand when I go to bed, and unplug it in the morning when I get up. The only time I find I need to plug it in separately is when I watch some Netflix videos.

I recently destroyed the screen on my phone making it not possible to interact with it, so I've removed the sim and put it in a cheap feature phone. It still connects to WiFi (can't turn it off if I wanted to) and it beeps to let me know I have an e-mail. I can still listen to podcasts because my podcatcher automatically downloads and queues episodes and my headset has playback controls, and I have been using it for that purpose as much as I always have. Now when I go to bed, the battery icon has only the tiniest sliver empty; I expect it would last at least 4 days without plugging it in.

I think that it's safe to say Android OS is not draining my battery.

I'm happy that you haven't had this problem (although without a screen I'm not surprised you get multiple days use from a single charge.) Unfortunately, lots of people are not so fortunate, and I'm one of them. There are a number of known, reported, acknowledged bugs that might or might not be fixed in the latest patch update to 4.3 that cause "Android OS" (actually a partial wakelock held in the kernel) to stop the phone from going into deep sleep and draining the battery. For example, https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=52034 is one such bug. There are others (I don't use a wireless charger).

Until whatever byzantine download scheduler deigns to push the patch to 4.3 to my phone, it's basically unusable.

I ran into problems w/ stock Nexus and runaway CPU usage w/ the media process and while I had sworn off ROMs (too much maintenance), but after not being able to fix the problem otherwise, I ended up switching to CM 10.1, which fixed my issues and these days is mature enough that I never have to mess with it. The various custom kernels (Franco Kernel is relatively easy to flash and is focused on increasing battery life) seem to do good jobs at fixing various problems as well.

Still some work to do the initial flashing (wipe'restore), but as someone that hates futzing w/ the devices I'm actually using, I've been happy w/ how low maintenance things have been. If you just want the 4.3 factory image you can it here: https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images#occamjwr6...

Alternatively, if you are running stock and don't want to wipe and don't want to wait for the OTAs, you can get them directly:

4.2.2 (JDQ39) -> 4.3 (JWR66V) http://www.droid-life.com/2013/07/25/android-4-3-update/

4.3 (JWR66V) -> 4.3 (JWR66Y) http://www.droid-life.com/2013/08/21/download-android-4-3-jw...

BTW, for most issues, I find the CM bug reports have significantly better S/N than official Google or XDA. Here's one on the wifi/ARP: https://jira.cyanogenmod.org/browse/CYAN-558 and on BT/Wifi: https://jira.cyanogenmod.org/browse/CYAN-550

>Android OS drains the battery in 6 hours

My better life is around 20 hrs on average, with "medium" usage.

Good for you. If you hit the bug, it'll look like http://forums.androidcentral.com/attachments/google-nexus-4/...

6 hours?! Mine drains its battery in 12-13 hours and I use it regularly (facebook, whatsapp, google maps, spotify) all over 3g (I don't have access to wifi at the moment).

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