[Galaxy S6 Edge General] Rapier:
[HOW-TO][NEWBIE GUIDE] Optimize & proper set up your Galaxy S6 Edge (stock firmware)

As I've read across this forum and on several specific threads related to usage, battery life and so on, as well as discussing with some of my friends having a S6 or S6 Edge, I realized that most of the people don't really know how to properly set up their phones or how to use them efficiently.

OK, I get it, this is a fancy phone, not every owner is a developer or tech guy so it might be that many choose it based on the looks and don't really know how to optimize it...then they start complaining about different things like lag or battery drain not knowing that most of the problems are caused by miss-usage or improper setup. Of course there are bugs too, nothing is perfect. Of course there are many firmwares available and some are market or carrier dependent so some features or settings might be missing from some of them or even work differently.

What I will try here is to provide some guidelines and tips for setting up various things on the phone in order to maximize it's battery life and for a better usage. I will also make some recommendations based on my experience, tests and usage that might not apply to everyone. Use common sense and logic to apply similar settings in your particular case. Don't come screaming that you made that or that and now something is not working.

And YES, I know there are similar guides like this posted over the Internet and I'll probably make similar recommendations here too but I couldn't find such a guide here on XDA that is particular to this phone (if there is a better one than you might as well ignore mine).

All these things I'll describe below are applicable to any STOCK, NON-ROOTED 5.1.1 firmware and won't break warranty or your phone.

Now that was a long (and maybe unneeded introduction) but I thought to write this for everyone...let's start.

Model No.: SM-G925F

Android: 5.1.1 r2 (LMY47X)

Baseband: G925FXXU2QOI7

Kernel: 3.10.61-5672012

Build date: Fri Sept 4 2015

Carrier: Orange RO

DISPLAY

First I would like to say some words about the display. We have a great display, high resolution and it is most likely the biggest battery drain factor. There are two major things about it that you should keep in mind and will help you to get a better battery:

1. It's AMOLED...that means that the black pixels on it will consume no power because are not lit. Studies showed that even if not completely black, AMOLED displays use less energy if the displayed picture is darker compared to a lighter one.

2. The brightness level. Most people use it on "auto" or high level settings and this will be a major drain factor.

You can drastically lower the battery drain caused by your screen by selecting as much as possible dark (black) backgrounds and/or themes. There are some nice ones available in the Theme Store (my favorite is the Dalkomm Coffee Theme), that make most screens and menus dark/black. Also choosing a dark wallpaper for lockscreen/homescreens will help.

Don't use screen brightness at maximum...never. You don't need that in 99% of the cases. Also you won't probably need the automatic setting either since most of the people are spending most of the time indoors (either at work or home). A low manual setting will be fine most of the time, I have it set up at about 20% and only need a brighter one when going out. At that time I just tap on "auto" and it'll increase based on ambient light level. So you don't even need to tweak it alot every time. Find a low manual setting that's fine for your eyes and just tap on "auto" when you go out in sunlight.

CONNECTIVITY

Another battery drain factor is your multiple connection/radios features. In most cases you use just several: Mobile Data, WiFi, GPS/location and BT (when applicable). That means you should turn off all the others you don't use...NFC or BT (when not connected to a headset or car-kit or not listening to music). I don't listen to music and don't have a BT headset so I mostly not using BT (just when I'm in my car) and almost never use NFC so I have both disabled and I enable them only when needed via the Quick Settings.

WiFi

WiFi should also be properly setup otherwise it'll have impact on battery. It was incorrectly assumed or considered that keeping WiFi on all the time will drain battery faster. That was proven in different tests that's not true and in fact keeping WiFi on all the time won't make a big difference and in some cases was even better than to turn it off/on. I think is something similar with the car engines that suck more fuel when started that when running at idle. The major power drain is not when WiFi is running while is not connected to any network, but when the WiFi radio is powered up. When is on and not connected, it's going into a lower power state so the battery consumption is negligible.

I had a case with one of my friends that had WiFi setup to turn off when display was off...wrong choice, he got about 30% battery drain overnight because instead of having it connected to his home WiFi, the phone was using his 4G/LTE connection to make all the background sync/updates. That was eating his battery and also his data plan. After setting WiFi to "always" his overnight drain lowered to as little as 2-3%.

In some regions/carriers there are 2 other settings that were proven to help battery life: WiFi calling and VoLTE. I don't have either of them but based on different articles and what people say, they surely help with that so don't forget to turn them off if you don't use these features.

You might also want to try turning off "Always allows scanning" and "Smart network switch". I have the second turned off but I keep on the first one. Basically the first option tell the Location service to use WiFi for locating the device even if WiFi is switched off (by the on/off switch) so that means the radio is active. Second option should make you switch faster from WiFi to mobile data in case the WiFi signal is not strong enough or fluctuating. In my country there are plenty of WiFi hot-spots and they have mostly good connections so I don't use this feature.

GPS

Well here the opinions are split but I am currently having it ON all the time and Location Service is set to "high accuracy". I personally haven't noticed such a major difference with or without it so I preferred to let it on as it is used by many apps or services. You can try to set Location to "wifi and cell only" but don't think that will bring you a major benefit.

RUNNING APPS/PROCESSES

Well this is an important one. I've initially started to turn off/disable/uninstall everything I don't need or use. This can be done mostly from the Settings - Applications - Application Manager or if you want to go further, you can install Package Disabler Pro from PlayStore, about which I'll detail later.

Now why we should do that? There are lots of apps, processes and background services running on our devices that take care about all the things we do on the device. The problem is that ALL are using resources: processor time, memory, space and so on. In the end these are translated for a user in LAG or battery drain. Of course we cannot kill everything and I learned long time ago that installing Task or memory managers on Android it's the worst thing you can do. Android it's smart enough to take care better about it's resources and processes (at least to a certain point) and keep killing a certain process won't give you more battery life but will eat more of it in the end,

What I wanted to say is you shouldn't start disabling, killing or blocking everything cause you might end up with an unstable or not properly working phone (case in which only a factory reset might help). First of all look at the ALL tab in Application Manager and try to identify what you don't need or use. For example I'm certainly not using some things like: music, books, news feeds, Samsung's keyboard (I use SwiftKey), the TouchWiz launcher (I use Nova), health services or whatever, S-Voice, S-Health, S-Finder, I don't have any smartwatches so I don't use any Gear processes, fancy device wake-up functions (like wave gestures) or animated wallpapers either.

So after all considerations above, you decided that you can safely disable some apps/processes. All good but you'll quickly learn that some of them cannot be disabled via Application Manager (the "disable" button is grayed out). Now what? Well here comes handy that Package Disabler Pro that I've told you about in the beginning. That app is able to disable ANY apps/processes on your phone, including those that are protected and cannot be disabled via the normal way (and yes it can do that without being rooted). The downside of it is that you must be careful what you choose to disable not to have something that is needed for the normal functionality or the apps you're currently using. The app has also a backup/restore function (via an xml file) for saving the list with apps you have disabled and easily import them back after a factory reset for ex. I've added to this thread my list of disabled apps as it is exported by the application (just unzip and copy the file on the root of your internal memory and it can then be imported in the Package Disabler app)

Another important thing is WHAT apps you're using. I know that socializing and social networking are some of today's most trendy things but keep in mind that some of the apps used for that are not so well made. An example could be the Facebook app/messenger which are reported to drain alot of battery. RSS feeds, news feeds, multiple weather apps or widgets, all contribute to battery drain and lag. Don't install several apps/widgets for the same purpose (like several calendar apps or weather apps). Each will take resources and won't have an added value. Want to use another weather app/widget than the one coming with the phone? Fine, install it...but don't forget to uninstall/disable the built in one or others that do the same thing. Same goes for keyboard for ex; I use SwiftKey for years and got used with it. For me it's better than any keyboard that Samsung might put on the device, therefore I've disabled the standard Samsung keyboard. I also don't like TouchWiz launcher and use Nova that offers me much more flexibility so...I've disabled both the "easy" and "regular" TouchWiz launchers. I went to the point that I've even disabled the different embedded font types, you have 5 of them and I doubt someone uses more than one at a time.

So as you all can see it's not only a matter of setup but also a matter of usage. When you have a device you have to use it properly otherwise it'll not perform as you expect. Imagine a car that has a manufacturer fuel consumption value of 5.5 liters/100 Km....that's under certain conditions not on ANY type of driving. Fly with 200+ km/hr on a highway and I'll guarantee you won't have 5.5 liters/100 km consumption. That doesn't mean the manufacturer has lied or mislead you. Same goes with a phone, if you don't know how to use it and optimize it, you'll have a bad experience.

I work in the IT industry for years and I mostly laugh when I hear someone advising somebody to reinstall the operating system to solve a problem. Same goes for "factory reset" for a phone. Yes, this method works some times but that won't solve the root cause of an issues if you're using it the same way. After several days it'll perform as bad as before and you'll just say that "factory reset" did nothing. Of course it didn't...YOU have to do something different, not the phone.

Now I apologize for the long post and I do hope that at least some will learn to better manage their devices and to understand what they're doing not just running certain commands or procedures blind. Both S6 and S6e are great devices but we should learn how to properly use them in order to benefit the most from them...otherwise we just come here asking for help or mumbling about what crap devices they are.