[Vibrant Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Woody:
Useful Apps to prolong battery life

These are some apps that will help you get the most of your battery life. I will put a brief descpition of them and you can also click on their names to take you directly to their market link. Note that some of these are ROOT apps and almost all of them also have PAID versions that greatly expand their functionality. Use the free ones and see how you like them and then kick in for the PAID ones if you want. The only one that I really suggest paying for right out of the gate to get the most out of your battery is Juice Defender Plus.

Batstat Widget –

I know, I know. Above I said that widgets were nothing more that monitoring apps on your home page, but this one works great, has low memory and is very, very simple. It shows Charge in %, Volts to know when you are FULLY charged and Temperature F/C to tell you that your phone is getting hot and exactly how hot it is.

BetterBatteryStats –

This app will show you what exactly is eating at your battery. Processes, Running Services, Wakelocks, Partial Wakelocks. It is a PAID app but for XDA users it is free. See here for more extensive details, instructions, screenies, change-logs,... and credits go to Chamonix and his development team for this app.

Batter Calibrator –

When you flash a new ROM, it is always best to wipe the old battery stats associated with that ROM, so you can start fresh as a daisy. How this works is you plug you phone in and charge to 100%, do not mess with it or surf the net (I do this overnight). While still plugged in, hit the apps, grant SU permission and hit the Calibrate Battery button. Grant SU permission again and once done, unplug your phone. Your Batterystats.bin has been deleted. You running your phone down by just using it normally. Most say to run it until it shuts off, but I have had bad experiences doing this, so I let it get to 10-15% and plug it in then. Charge fully up to 100% (again no surfing or games) and you will notice a dramatic increase in battery life.

**Note that this can be done two other ways. You can boot into CWR or Custom Recovery and go to Advanced Settings and there will be the Wipe Batterystats.bin option. Or you can do it manually by going into /data/system/ and deleting the batterystats.bin in there. Any of the three methods work to get the entirely same result in the end. I just like using the app or manually myself. **

Why battery calibration is important and what it is doing.

The app and what it does is more for when you are flashing a ROM and have around 60% and then once booted up fully, you charge it up to 100%. Decided you don't like your ROM and go back to your original ROM via backup, it will show 60% instead of the 100 or 90% you had before you went back to back up b/c you backed up the batstat bin when you nandroided your original ROM.

How about this for an example:

ROM: Deranged9 70% (and you made a backup) Then went to Zendroid, charged and hit calibrate battery at 100%. Used Zendroid for a few hours and decided it wasn't your bag. Your battery is at 50%. You flash back to your Deranged ROM and you know for a fact you had 50% before you flashed back, but now once totally booted, you are showing 70%. This is why you use the battery calibrator after you flash a ROM. Gotta create a new batstat bin for you "fresh" ROM (even though it is a backup).

Recently there has been information debunking this process. I will post it below, however I know what it says, but I also know what I've seen/experienced too. Here is the post by Dianne Hackborn, a Google Dev on her G+ account.

JuiceDefender (Plus) [Since I use JD+, that is what I am going to refer too.]

This app’s ability to kill Radio/Data has NO EFFECT on phone calls or messaging. You will still get that call in the middle of the night you were expecting.

If you set it to custom, the go into the settings tab on the right and then all the way at the bottom, there is two buttons to push, The first in Interactive which will pull up Juice Defender for up for any app that isn't already configured and the other is Configure Apps. This is the one that you can customize on an app-to-app basis where if you are no using an app and the screen is locked, it kills the radio/data traffic for that app.

Say you are listening to IHeartRadio, this you would want either Enable or Enable/off (which means the screen will be locked but the radio/data will be working). Now take the browser. If you are not using the browser, then you don't need it transmitting data right? So you would set that one to Enable (which means that it will only enable data traffic when that app is being used).

Juice Defender only works when the screen is locked (WidgetLocker lock screens interfere with JuiceDefender), don't forget and all widgets are battery drains b/c all they really are is a monitoring app and if it is tied to something like Facebook or Google+, then that data will be running constantly.

Settings:

Enable = Radio/data on when app is in use (front)

Enable/off = Radio/data on for background apps (when screen is locked)

Disable = Disables radio/data traffic completely when that app is running

Do Nothing = What is says

Examples:

Angry Birds = Disable (Here is a little known trick that I use for this and any game with Ads. With this and something like Adfree, no more ads in Angry Birds even though the ads are embedded in the .apk)

Pandora/Jango/ Tune-in = Enable/Off (this will keep your battery temp down when streaming)

Browser/ Market = Enable (not enable/off b/c then it will keep your radio/data open)

Beautiful Widgets = Enable/off

mClock/Clockr = Enable/off

SMS/MMS = Enable or Do Nothing (why would you push disable)

I have been using JD+ for over a year on 3 different phones and multiple ROMs and have noticed a considerable difference in battery life. Just takes some time to figure out YOUR settings and what YOU like. I have also used it on Stock kernel and had no problems either.

LBE Privacy Guard

This will go good with JuiceDefender, as they both prevent unwanted data transfer. Protect your privacy by controlling the permission of each application to access your sensitive data. Block malicious operation from Mal-wares and Trojans. Block unwanted network traffic if you don’t have a unlimited data plan. Find out which application is trying to steal your privacy by checking the security log.

RAM Munchers eat battery too. These will fix that for you.

Autostarts (paid-CAUTION this is for advanced users)

Keep control over your phone: See what applications do behind your back.

Shows you what apps run on phone startup, and what other events trigger in the background. Root users can disable unwanted autostarts and speed up their phone boot.

Watchdog

See what is eating your RAM. Hint: if it is using RAM,then probably it is also using battery too.

Spare Parts

Spare Parts allows you to enable some settings

that are not found in the default setting menu

Process Monitor

List the running process on your Android device.

Long click item to kill application or open application.

Fastboot –

This is a handy little app that kills all your services at once and lets them restart back up. I use this right before I hit the lock screen, so that if any app-services are running that I don’t have configured in Juice Defender Plus they will be killed, frees up about 50-70mb of memory, and then I lock the screen and JD takes over. This one is optional if you want it or not. I like it just fine and it works for me.

Matte Screen Filter –

Puts a sort of Dim setting on your screen. Almost like a display overlay, ok? And I did mean to rhyme those. I don’t use it because I have my display set how I want it but you can.

And might as well hit this thanks button too for the Hat Trick

Change Log:

12/22/11 - Per chamonix (BetterBatteryStats dev) took out apk and input his thread to get most updated version, stats, change log [still free for XDA users though]

1/9/12 - Took out actual APKs and put in market links. Click on the name and it will direct you to the market link for the free version that app.

1/23/12 - Added more battery apps and some RAM monitoring/killing apps.