This is a heads-up for all smartphone owners out there. A few days ago I read Buggy Apps Killing Your Smartphone Battery. And I can now certify that the problem is real.
I’d been having what looked like serious battery issues on my HTC G2 for about the last 60 days. It was unclear whether the battery had lost its ability to hold a full charge or whether it was somehow draining at an abnormally high rate. But it was pretty bad – forcing me towards getting a new phone before I really wanted to.
Then I read this article. Short version: buggy apps can eat the battery, presumably through failing to terminate or sleep themselves properly when they should. OK, what the heck – I walked though my download list, deleting a bunch of apps I had downloaded and then decided weren’t interesting, but failed to delete.
To my delight, this cleared the problem up immediately. My phone once again readily takes a full charge and can run for a day or more on it. I haven’t been able to pin down which apps were the problem – I deleted about a dozen – but I can say this much: none of them was one I’m actually using. Hacker’s Keyboard is OK, the Angry Birds games and Coloroid and Spider are OK, the Fandango client is OK, Nexus Torch and OpenRecorder are OK, and (despite a hint in the article) none of the preinstalled Android stuff seems to have been implicated in the excess power drain.
So…if you think your battery is going south, don’t panic. Houseclean all those junk apps off your phone and see what happens. It worked for me.