Battery drain issue with a cell phone case

Can you ever think about you installed a cell phone case and coincidently you are seeing the worst performance with your cell phone battery. Did it ever occur to you? I know it sounds *Different* and most cases it is not true but somehow I was experiencing something like that.

I bought a beautiful case for my big cell phone and I was excited to use the features the case offers.  It allows doing some activity through the cover’s upper part without actually flipping to the actual screen. Some common information like Clock, Date/Time, Weather, Steps count, Camera etc. Those are some common features that I can easily check without going flipping the cover. And it does few other things which are also awesome, but not related to this writing.

So, after installing it on my phone, my first day with the S View case was not quite pleasant. Usually, my cell phone runs down to around 70% after charged in the morning. On my first day, I charged it as usual and then when I was leaving office I pulled out my cell phone from my pocket and found it off. It was turned off. I tried to turn on, did not come up. I plugged the charger and found the battery was totally drained to 0%.

 I could not figure it out at the first place, was looking on the process and trying to understand what app was

draining the battery. Could not find anything that I can immediately recognize. So, I googled it like any others, found some forum post. People over there was discussing about the issue. Some of the reply was as full of sarcasm saying a case cannot drain battery. It’s the process that is taking the battery. Duh! I know it is the process but what process it could be that drains the battery- nobody replied or guessed.

So I looked into the process and found one process is draining more battery than anything and it’s a core process, not an app.

Some process name “Undefined Daemon (EUR)” was running which I could not recognized. All other apps were operating system app. I restarted the phone several times, no luck.

I was kind of noticing something after starting to use the case, it was displaying a message very frequently -“Searching using GPS”.  I thought it was trying to find the GPS and will be done once it finds it. I did not pay attention to that time.  I kept digging in different methods and places online. Finally found some post that started makes more sense, something that I can relate what I was seeing. It was about the GPS searching issue. Some process is trying to use the GPS and GPS could not find the location and kept trying until it drained the juice out of my cell phone.

Remember the features that I mentioned at the starting of my writing. So many wow features like “Weather”….. Weather, weather app uses the GPS and I chose to display that info with this new case that I bought. I explicitly turned on which features I want to see. I have chosen those displayed on my first picture.  I turned off my weather widget and there you go….  I solved it (not entirely me, people were discussing the possibilities are credited for it).

So many things to learn about and from… Something was not right with the firmware that I was using. I was using android 5.0.2 and when this case was originally introduced, was running on different version. Now there is a new version of android came out recently. Also, it could be very well specific feature by Samsung as well. I’m not sure whether it was fixed on the recent updates or not, at least somebody missed to test this features (probably assumed that very few people would use it or some other assumption). My learning from this is, when tester misses to test all the possible scenarios, it very much effect end users.