Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Battery killer - Outlook App on Samsung Galaxy S4 Android

Suddenly one my Galaxy S4 Android phone battery began dying halfway through the day. I charge it every night.
I was thinking it was a hardware problem after owning the phone just under a year.
Then I discovered the problem.
I went to :
  • Settings
  • More
  • Battery
Then you see Battery use by application.


Here I saw the culprit. Microsoft outlook had used  55% of the battery. I had never noticed this behaviour before. I had installed Outlook to access my old Email that My provider Bell had given me years ago. Recently I had cancelled my home DSL internet with them. (switched to a CABLE based Provider) It seems they cancelled my Email accounts tied to the account (name@bell.net , name @sympatico.ca.) So the app was not even working. Looking at the settings I saw  I had configured push notifications. I had not received any new emails in over a week. When i selected SYNC it seemed to contuously try to connect to the mail server unsuccessfully.  So the issue was likely the app was trying to continously access the server and failing and retrying every 10 minutes. This not only drained my battery but also drained my wireless data plan. (since I had turned off wifi to save battery when away from home.)
THE FIX
In my case the fix was simply to uninstall Outlook since I now longer needed it.
If you encounter this problem you may be able to disable push notifications, Change how often it does push notification, or troubleshoot any service connection issues.
 

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