One issue I have had across my devices is that, for some reason, I have had trouble getting them to turn off or go idle when I need them to.
I use a smart alarm on my phone each morning, and have had one phone struggle to go into sleep mode after I peruse it right before bed.
As a result, the bright light from the phone on my nightstand has kept me awake and caused extra battery drain.
The last thing I want is for my phone to die in the night and for me to miss my alarm. So I checked my default settings to see if there was anything I could do differently.
Because I couldn’t find anything helpful in my settings, I downloaded an app to help me identify wake locks.
The app has been around since October 2019 and is considered decent for analyzing battery drain.
At the time I knew about it, I didn’t think I needed it, since the default Android settings had done a good job of monitoring my battery life and usage.
The app is Battery Guru. I chose Battery Guru because I had tested it out as a third-party alternative for monitoring battery health.
This app also works consistently well across various Android devices, so how it behaved on my Google Pixel 8 didn’t differ much from how it behaved on my Samsung Galaxy S25+. You will need to reconfigure the app when your operating system changes.
You need to download the Battery Guru Community version to gain access to the Wakelock detection feature. The Battery Guru Community version is available on the developer’s official Telegram channel.
Experimental features and improvements in this version are not yet always available in the public app; they are not guaranteed to be stable, so try them out at your discretion.
Battery Guru gives useful battery stats
Learn battery capacity, temperature, and current on one page
While the battery settings section on my phone has helped identify app screen time and which apps drain the most battery, it isn’t alwaysconclusive.
Battery Guru gives a detailed lowdown on what’s happening with your battery, including stats on your battery capacity, current, temperature, deep-sleep timing, and discharge rate.
Personally, I like using this app to learn more about my phone’s temperature, since I bought a fairly thick cover case for my Samsung Galaxy S25+, and sometimes it is hard to gauge how hot my phone actually gets.
Plus, I’ve used cheap chargers in the past, so being able to see my phone’s temperature while charging is important.
If it heats up, that’s an indicator that I should remove the charger to prevent long-term hardware damage.
Battery Guru even has a built-in alert system for a specified battery level. I set it to around 20% as the minimum, since that is an ideal time to start charging. You can do the same for temperature as well.
All the app’s core features are free, but it has ads. If you want to remove ads, you’ll need to pay a small monthly fee. Plus, you can get even more long-term health battery stats and access custom charging overlays.
So far, I haven’t really needed a premium plan; the core features were good enough, and I have a high tolerance for ads.
Though I may consider doing so if the wake lock feature lands as a premium one when it releases in the regular app.
I used Battery Guru to identify wake locks
It does require ADB commands
Wake locks are what keep your CPU active and sometimes keep the screen on while the app is running.
For example, when streaming a YouTube video, you don’t necessarily want your phone to enter deep sleep while you’re watching.
If it did, it would be incredibly annoying to have to re-awaken your device every time the screen is turned off to finish a 15-minute video.
That’s why wake locks exist. It’s an Android power management mechanism that keeps your CPU or screen on to avoid interrupting those kinds of tasks.
It’s also why you can still have background tasks run even when your screen is off.
You can have partial wake locks, where the CPU still runs, but the screen stays off, or full wake locks, where the CPU and screen stay on.
While many known apps use wake locks properly, some poorly optimized apps don’t, causing unnecessary battery drain.
An easy fix to prevent apps from running amok is to terminate them manually. Still, if they are apps you use more frequently, you’ll want to keep them in the suspended state so they can update and refresh the app’s data in the background, if your OS allows it.
As a result, leaving them open in the background should be fine and won’t hurt the battery.
But that’s not true for all apps, as some use more permissions than they should or aren’t well-optimized.
That’s why you’ll want to double-check if those apps are misusing wake locks to keep your device awake.
Battery Guru has a way to do this, but it requires access to the Community Version (the feature might not be available in the public app yet; it wasn’t listed as a premium feature on my end) and the use of ADB commands.
The command to enter when prompted is:
adb shell pm grant com.paget96.batteryguru android.permission.PACKAGE_USAGE_STATS
Using ADB commands grants the app special but restrictive privileges to your device’s internal systems. This is necessary to see which apps are holding wake locks and for how long.
After you’ve downloaded the version that supports wake locks, scroll down to find the Wakelocks card under Tools inside the additional section.
From there, you’ll see a list of apps and package names above a bar; the ones using the most wake locks should show at the top. It’s also separated into partial and kernel, so you can see which apps or hardware-driven events are keeping the CPU and screen awake.
Delete apps that you don’t use
This is something I’ve been trying to preach to myself for years now. I keep downloading more apps that end up in folders along with my older ones, but I don’t clean them out often enough.
I recently learned a hard lesson with my Chrome extensions. I have had a few that turned out to be malicious, like the Save Image as Type extension, because I didn’t bother auditing my extensions recently.
The same applies to your Android apps. You don’t know (unless you pay close attention) when ownership changes or whether these apps will take more data, and they aren’t transparent about it.
That’s why if you’re worried about privacy or even subtle battery drain, you’ll want to stick to the apps you actively use and dispose of the ones you don’t need.
