KitKat giving you battery drain problems? Uninstall Skype, says Google

It's even worse on BlackBerry - I don't have personal benchmark numbers (I use my phone a lot anyway, so it usually is pretty dead by the end of a day), but if I have Skype running my battery drops to literally a few hours. I've moved to a third party app (IM+) instead now.

Interesting. Doesn't Microsoft included Skype with their Surface tablets? I wonder if it is affecting those machines as well, or if they are doing something different with them.

yup. my nexus 4 battery was getting drained by something called mediaserver, and after a quick google search it was google now and google currents; which had absolutely ridiculous sync rates murdering my battery in a span of 2 hours. A thing to note is that when a significant portion of the CPU is being used on the nexus 4, the phone gets REALLY HOT. Untouchably hot. Leaving the phone in my pocket was actually burning my thigh.

Do you have instructions for that? There are a bunch of settings, and I want to make sure I get everything.

Disabling Google location reporting leads to more battery drainage, as that means disabling the Wifi location provider, unless by that you mean disabling location services completely. Android 4.3 had a bug in it leading to a lot of battery drainage if the Wifi location provider was on (my phone's battery life went from almost 48 hours to less than 12). As a result of me disabling it, the GPS ended up being activated a lot, like on each opening of Facebook or others that insist on getting your approximate location, with no way to turn the behavior off, unless I completely disabled location services, which I did eventually (thank Android's broken permissions system for that).

Thankfully it is now fixed in Android 4.4 - so if you experienced problems with Android 4.3 (as I did on a Nexus 4), then upgrade.

> Not that I have Facebook or Skype apps installed either though...

Not having any messenger synchronizing in the background sure helps with battery life. I've got an older Galaxy S that's not synchronizing with anything and that stays in standby for 7 days.

BUT - mobile devices are all about communications and being online. I communicate with people on Skype, Facebook's Messenger, GMail, Hangouts, etc... and not having these services on my mobile phone defeats the purposes of a smartphone. After all, why is my phone a smartphone if I can't keep it synchronized with my online accounts? For browsing? It kind of sucks for browsing. For games? I don't do that.

This is (generally) pretty bad advice.

Google location services is the least battery-intensive way to get your location. If you turn it off your phone will use other methods instead.

Google Now doesn't do much unless you use it. It's almost all Serverside functionality anyway.

Google Sync services are mixed. Gmail is pretty good, but Google Currents seems terrible.

After reading that is when I really considered uninstalling Skype. Creepy indeed. Is there any mod which remedies the issue with something like a "fake camera access"?

... causing my phone to refuse to let me use the camera!

I was getting helpful error messages something like: "Camera Error: Camera Error". After much searching, I found the solution... Uninstall Skype!

Didn't Microsoft kill the supernodes on users' PCs?

I guess heavy obfuscation is more to blame.

People are voting devx down, but as far as I remember Microsoft was the first to join PRISM, and at the time they paid a ridiculous amount for Skype in an area they really had no interest in being.

What I basically mean is a large portion of the money paid for Skype may not have been from MS, but from someone that wanted Skype's data without anyone knowing they are involved. MS is the perfect puppet because they already agreed to the PRISM related bullshit years before the existence of PRISM, and once it was a documented/codenamed thing they were (obviously against their will) the first on the list.

Downvote me too, I don't care. This is something I think is being blatantly under-examined.

Exactly

I really don't see the point of keeping it always on. (And I hate using it Skype as IM, but ok, it's needed sometimes)

For always on, go to the desktop, I don't trust Skype using my resources correctly (just see how long it takes for it to start up and log in)

It's not Skype that will appear in your battery statistics but "mm-qcamera-daemon". Typically position #1, even more than Screen.

Uh, where does Skype compete with any Google service?

edit: to those answering "Hangouts", can that actually be considered competition?

I'm one of those users that monitors the battery drainage of every app that I use - since I'm a heavy apps user, I care about my phone's battery life and certain apps make for a dramatic difference.

Skype has always been amongst the worse in terms of battery drainage. 6 months ago it was so bad that my phone wouldn't last for a couple of hours in standby with Skype active. It got much better but it's still so bad that I cannot keep it active. I basically keep it disabled and only open it when I need to talk to a contact, then I logout again. And I don't know what's wrong with WhatsApp messenger, because it too is guilty of a lot of battery drainage lately. Hence I uninstalled it completely.

Google's Hangouts is barely visible in the stats on battery life that I collect (with GSam Battery). The battery usage could be hidden within system services, however I always test messenger apps with a before & after test. In the case of Hangouts, I disabled it completely for a complete discharge, after which I enabled it again and no significant difference happened.