[G2 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] bloof:
BATTERY SAVING TIPS AND SMOOTHNESS TIPS​

RULE NUMBER 1: There are no miracles when it comes to this. It is always a compromise, on performance for battery savings, and on animation and beauty for smoothness/lag-free.

RULE NUMBER 1b: However, I believe there are ways to achieve the same performance with less battery consumption.

RULE NUMBER 2: If you play intensive games (either AI or graphic intensive), expect 1% battery drain per minute.

RULE NUMBER 3: There is not much you can do about RULE No 2. You either have a longer game (AI takes longer to respond) or worse visual experience (lower Frames Per Second).

See attached picture of relative power consumptions of various aspects of the phone in idle (on, but no apps running) and suspended (off).

Screen and network are the worst offenders as everyone knows.

However, this is without apps running. Depending on what you use your phone for your battery life will vary greatly.

Battery unfriendly tasks:

- intensive gaming (either graphic intensive or AI intensive).

- photo/video taking, editing, viewing (ie: looking at your photos, zooming, scrolling, panning, etc). However, watching videos is NOT a very intensive activity.

- internet browsing, especially with 20,000 tabs open.

- downloading, syncing (folder sync, utorrent, etc).

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SMOOTHNESS AND LAG-FREE:

If you want a lag-free experience, the most important aspect apart from CPUs and GPU is to remove the useless extras, but with the machines we have (G2, OPO) you can actually have it all!

Home Screen:

- Home screen lag: avoid using the default launchers (LG default or OPO Trebuchet). These are horrible, lack customization and are much worse than the good launchers out there. Default launchers are terrible. Some launchers such as themer use very large widgets and can have some lag.

- Animations: remove completely, or reduce animation speeds in "Settings => developer options => animation scale". You can also usually reduce/remove animations in your launcher's settings (apex, nova, buzz, etc).

- Xposed framework: avoid using theme related hacks, statusbar/navbar, etc. It is more battery and performance friendly to simply apply a MOD, but it is more of pain to do so.

- Theming engines: the CM theming engine is fantastic, I use it extensively. However, you will notice improved home screen performance if you simply have the default theme.

Applications Launching and Loading:

- See the rest of this thread.

- Use a good kernel, they include re-written drivers/code that will make your machine better.

- Use aggressive governors that scale quickly to max freq.

- Use touchboost options in your kernel.

- Use 2 cores minimum for your hotplug, this is the least battery-friendly option.

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BATTERY SAVING TIPS:

You will find ten million pages on this on the internet. I will not repeast what you can find in under 1 minute using google.

Screen brightness:

The biggest culprit is of course your screen. The power consummed by the screen raises quickly with brightness, it is close to linear in theory, but in practice I do not believe that brightness % is a linear scale on the phones, your brightness slider does NOT cover the whole range, your hardware CANNOT cover true black to true white, etc. See below for how some phones take care of low level brightness.

See attached picture of brightness vs power usage. A phone brightness slider will not cover the whole range.

Reduce your brightness setting to something useable (no point destroying your eyes to save battery), you'd be surprised that 50-70% brightness works very well (for LG G2). It depends on your machine, your eyes and what you do with it. For OPO there is no brightness %, mine is almost a third to the left and brightness is perfectly fine. The OPO also has a very good Auto-Brightness engine.

However, turning your screen brightness to a very low level does not necessarily reduce power consumption. The hardware (LEDs, whatever) cannot produce light levels that are so low and the phone will simply display a more or less dark grey layer over the screen to reduce the brightness. That does not reduce power consumption AT ALL. It doens't mean they're useless settings, they are still useful at night for example to reduce eye strain.

Some machines have very good "auto-brightness" engines, others have crappy ones. Try them if you want.

You can play around with your phone's brightness and take screenshots of a black/white picture then use a photo editor app to see what the color is of the white that is now grey. Use the 00 (black) to FF (white) as a scale and use that to see how much % reduction. See if that matches your brightness level percentage reduction.

Network settings:

The network, wifi or LTE or GSM, will also use a lot of power in idle (ON, but no apps running) or suspended state (OFF).

- The signal quality is the most important part of this. If you are on the edge of a wifi network your phone will drain battery quite quickly trying to maintain a connection.

- Airplane mode can help if you don't need a connection.

- Move closer to a tower.

- Switch off wifi when you are out and about.

- Play around with your TCP NET CONGESTION settings, but that will probably not do much.

Kernel settings:

- UNDERCLOCK!!!!!!!! You don't need that 2.8 megagigacrazyhertz.

- Also underclock your GPU, unless you play stupidly intensive graphic games, especially the min frequency. Your video playback will NOT be affected if you underclock your max GPU frequency, but you might have more lag in forward/reverse scanning.

- GAMING: have a charger nearby. But also play with kernel settings, there should be a level at which you can have decent FPS with some power consumption reduction. Here I would actually recommend some benchmarking tools to test your FPS for various kernel settings, as that would be close to your real world user experience.

Greenify:

Use it.

Task killer apps:

Use the automated killing features if you want, nothing wrong with that. Does create wakelocks on idle, but probably saves more battery in the end. I never measured.

It might even save on wakelocks by killing apps that didn't die properly and are still waiting for something and keeping your phone awake.

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Further Reading:

There are about ten million pages dedicated to this on google.

For Dorimanx users, (but also some good tips for others): The Dorimanx Q&A thread in general, tehbigbug write this.

For Boeffla users, it is of course very useful to read the main thread and linked FAQs.