[Moto X General] kschang:
Having had the original Moto Droid, and then the Bionic, and having owned Moto X (2013 DE) I've tried a dozen different supposed battery enhancers, screen adjusters, and so on and so forth. The phones nowadays are so complicated any tweaks involves complex interactions that any savings becomes almost purely anecdotal. Thus, I can only share a couple of my experiences.

Current Setup:

Moto X 2013 (XT1060) Verizon, Developer Edition (unlocked bootloader) running Lollipop (5.1) / LPA23.12-39.7 / Xposed w/ Mobile Radio Active Fix

Current Config:

* Greenify (w/ donate package)

* KinScreen (free version)

* YAAB (free version)

* LeanDroid (free version)

* Some tweaks done through Xposed / GravityBox.

Battery life monitored through BatteryMix

One observation: Screen always almost always consume the most juice, unless you have a bug like the mobile radio active bug.

Thus, it is no surprise that most apps tries to play with the screen settings, but there are at least 5 types of battery savers (6 if you count the root / kernel tweaking)

* Adaptive brightness doesn't quite do the job, but something like Lux.Lite may be a bit of an overkill. YAAB seem to be a decent compromise.

* The default screen on/off is not that smart, and there are variety of apps trying to anticipate your actions. KinScreen was one of them, as are apps like Screebl and Gravity Screen. And frankly I have both (registered too). So far, KinScreen seem to be the least user-friendly (it just presents a menu of choices) but apparently also the most logical if you understand the options given.

* I've tried the PixelOff battery saver for AMOLED screen but didn't notice much if any battery savings. And in any case this only works on AMOLED type screens.

* The additional configs like automatically disable WiFi, Bluetooth, Data, GPS, etc. doesn't save that much juice, and annoys the heck out of the system itself as well as the user. But this is the "obvious" goto, and old classics like JuiceDefender went for this approach. It can work, but may also make the system more aggravating. LeanDroid operates in a similar modality, but seems less aggressive, at least when I turned off its control of Bluetooth.

* Doze mode / Deep Sleep forcers are relatively new. I've tried Doze and Deep Sleep

battery saver. Former seems to work, latter didn't do anything for me when I tried it.

* If you are rooted, you can tweak kernel settings with apps like Kernel Adiutor but this is definitely superuser area, not for noobs, as the potential of making device almost unusable is high. Or you can go REALLY crazy with Xposed / Amplify and try messing with the services and whatnot directly, but that makes the system very unstable.

So, any way, what have I learned?

* NOTHING can save power if you are actively using the device. Most of these apps can only save power if you are NOT actively using the device.

* The more "aggressive" the battery saver app is, the more annoying the device is to use, esp. if you do use it for surfing, Facebooking, listening to podcasts, navigating, etc. Thus, you want a least intrusive app or apps.

* You want apps with least amount of memory footprint. That way, the system won't have to swap them out of memory, to load a different app (and that takes power). And some of these apps are surprisingly HUGE. You can check memory taken up in Settings / Apps / Running.

My personal standard of "success" is relatively low: if I can reduce the "idle consumption", i.e. phone idle, not surfing or playing podcasts, screen off, to about 6% per hour (so hypothetically the phone can last most of the day with occasional usage), that'd be good enough. I'd say I've barely succeeded, as you can tell from the attached screenshot. When idle, consumption is about 6% per hour. As soon as screen comes on, it pops up to like 16% per hour.

Altogether, not too shabby for a 3-year old phone, right?

What have you tried, and makes you believe that your favorite battery saver app works? Got any proof? Let's compare notes.