Android OS Killing Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) Battery

So my Android Samsung Galaxy S2 got its Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) update last week. I will post a brief review of after this post but here I just want to talk about a fairly major discovery I made relating to a rather odd battery draining issue. I was finding my phone dying at least 7-8 hours earlier than before the update, which was basically half the normal battery life!
Looking at the battery usage screen I found “Android OS” was the biggest % user of my battery and had a keep-alive of 7 hours, 1 hour short of the time since charge.

After a fairly unsuccessful attempt to contact Samsung support I fell into a deep meditative state to consider the causes. After 48 hours of constant meditation (rounded up from about 2 minutes of thinking..) I remembered that a day after installing the ICS update I noticed that Google+ had been integrated as a service, I also noticed it had happily used 50mb of data when I don’t even use Google+! Obviously I decided to disable it, alas it did warn me that it may result in unexpected behaviour but I don’t think I could have predicted what it would do. That brings us up to the present time, I re-enabled the service and suddenly Android OS has stopped eating my battery and the phone is back to normal!

The lesson? Well the real lesson is Google are kinda stupid for forcing this on people and for furthermore making it impossible to disable but the other lesson is to be very careful when disabling services. I can only assume something internal to the OS was constantly making calls or references to the Google+ service on the assumption it was there but instead found itself constantly polling the service, causing the phone to not properly standby and to rapidly kill the battery.

Update;
Right, so the above helped my battery but it was still bombing out. After a quick chat with Samsung they were pretty frank. The battery my phone came with simply can’t handle ICS, the fix? Samsung posting me a brand new battery with a higher capacity 🙂
So, short answer – call support and they will hopefully be as quick and helpful as they were to me.

Update 2: Read here for an update on how to fix the battery draining problem!

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