I’d get one of the battery monitoring utility programs, and run that for a while; most of them can give you a lot more insight into what’s eating your battery and/or causing the overheating.
Personally, I have GSam Battery Monitor installed, but the Google Play Store is lousy with them, so pick your favorite. What it lets me do is monitor power usage for a period of time, and show a graph of power usage over time, power usage vs. heat, a list of applications by power usage, sorted by highest percentage to least, along with some other stuff.
That ought to give you an idea of what’s causing the problem.
Plus, I’ll second the notion that you ought to get a new battery. Lithium-ion batteries gradually crap out over time even if they’re not used, and high charge/low charge excursions accelerate that, as do high temperatures. So smartphone use is probably pretty rough on a battery, as they’re often being cycled from nearly empty to entirely full, and operating fairly warm.
The good news is that batteries for S4 phones are cheap and easy to replace. $12 buys you a top of the line aftermarket battery as good as the OEM version.
Check and see if in your google settings you have it enabled to look for wifi at any time; not the wifi settings themselves but in Google settings*. How comfortable are you rooting your phone, and/or putting a custom ROM on it?
In Marshmallow that would be Settings>Google>Location>Three Bars under scanning. Disable WiFi scanning.
I have an S4 Mini and just this one step gave me about 50% more reserve because my phone wasn’t constantly checking location.
I had an S4 that had the same thing going on, sometimes. My best guess as to what was going on:
The rapid battery-draining and heating up always happened on Wednesdays when I was in court here. Now, the courtroom here is on the third floor of the courthouse, all concrete walls, no windows. Cell phone reception in that location was horrible.
I think that the phone was getting a very spotty connection to home base, such that it would lose its connection a lot. That meant that it was almost constantly switching from the home network, to roaming, finding home again, losing it and going back to roaming, over and over again. The constant switching from one radio signal to another heated up the phone and sucked the battery dry in about 4 hours.
I would see if the problem persists in airplane mode as step one. Try it for a couple of hours. If your battery doesn’t drain, you might try disabling the background processes of as many apps as you can, then seeing if the drain still happens with airplane mode off.
At the moment I have a completely dead phone and two completely dead batteries. On Sunday I tried to charge them both, but with each , the phone went directly to overheating and shutdown inside of a minute. I can do nothing with it at the moment but set my drink on it. I am expecting a new battery from Amazon tomorrow and I’ll see how it works, but my hopes are not high.
From everything I’ve read, there is no way it’s a problem with the battery.
When I say dead, I mean dead. As in door-nails, disco and Elvis. I plug in the the wall charger and it’s still just a really expensive coaster, with a wire attached.
I’m a microprocessor designer, and I collect tons of information about processor temperatures and current (for processors much, much bigger than the ARM cores in a phone) so I know all that. I don’t think our OP does. Like I said, I have no battery usage issue.
The big problem with S4s, for Verizon ones at least, is that you’d have to root the phone to uninstall the crapware they install, and that isn’t worth doing.
Much of the stuff that is running are apps I do use sometimes, and thus don’t want to disable, but do want to kill. I have a Task Killer app to do that, there are plenty around.
I’ve had a similar experience. But that shouldn’t kill the phone that quickly. If the new battery doesn’t fix the problem, I bet there is a short somewhere in the phone. If that is true it will still fail after a factory reset (and airplane mode won’t help.)
Yeah, I think the factory reset needed to happen a while ago. Hopefully a new battery will get it going long enough to do that. I agree it’s not the battery, though.
My phone issues have been resolved. However, I have no clue what was wrong. And I pretty much got half-fucked in the process. Considering the unit would no longer turn on, I could not pay out the upgrade fee of $110. Instead I had to rely on the insurance I have on the phone to have it replaced … of course I had to claim I dropped the phone in order to get this done, which I wasn’t really comfortable with, but fuck it, what’s done is done. The half-fucked part is that the deductible on my insurance was $150.
So now I’m out 150 clams, but I have brand new phone, with none of my apps, or passwords, or text histories.
All in all, I’m not very satisfied with this shit, but there’s really not much I can do about it. I think I may opt out of the whole smart phone thing altogether when my contract is up. I’m gonna go full luddite - flip-phone, rabbit ears on my TeeVee, butter churn in my kitchen … the whole nine.