{"id":584229,"date":"2026-04-05T17:42:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T17:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/584229\/"},"modified":"2026-04-05T17:42:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T17:42:10","slug":"i-finally-stopped-letting-my-phones-default-settings-limit-me-thanks-to-this-little-known-android-power-utility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/584229\/","title":{"rendered":"I finally stopped letting my phone&#8217;s default settings limit me, thanks to this little-known Android power utility"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, the bright light from the phone on my nightstand has kept me awake and caused extra battery drain.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Because I couldn&#8217;t find anything helpful in my settings, I downloaded an app to help me identify wake locks.<\/p>\n<p>The app has been around since October 2019 and is considered decent for analyzing battery drain.<\/p>\n<p>At the time I knew about it, I didn&#8217;t think I needed it, since the default Android settings had done a good job of monitoring my battery life and usage.<\/p>\n<p>The app is Battery Guru. I chose Battery Guru because I had tested it out as a third-party alternative for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.androidpolice.com\/android-check-battery-health\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">monitoring battery health<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This app also works consistently well across <a href=\"https:\/\/www.androidpolice.com\/best-android-phones\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">various Android devices<\/a>, so how it behaved on my Google Pixel 8 didn&#8217;t differ much from how it behaved on my Samsung Galaxy S25+. You will need to reconfigure the app when your operating system changes.<\/p>\n<p>You need to download the Battery Guru Community version to gain access to the <a href=\"https:\/\/paget96projects.com\/blog\/understanding-android-wakelocks-and-how-to-hunt-them-down-using-battery-guru\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">Wakelock detection feature<\/a>. The Battery Guru Community version is available on the <a href=\"https:\/\/t.me\/paget96_projects_channel\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">developer&#8217;s official Telegram channel<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>                        Battery Guru gives useful battery stats<\/p>\n<p>            Learn battery capacity, temperature, and current on one page<\/p>\n<p>        <img width=\"1650\" height=\"928\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"A 3D battery icon inside a smartphone frame next to setting toggle switches on a blue background\" data-img-url=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/a-3d-battery-icon-inside-a-smartphone-frame-next-to-setting-toggle-switches-on-a-blue-background.png\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/a-3d-battery-icon-inside-a-smartphone-frame-next-to-setting-toggle-switches-on-a-blue-background.png\" class=\"img-brightness-opt-out\"\/><br \/>\n        Credit:\u00a0Lucas Gouveia \/ Android Police<\/p>\n<p> While the battery settings section on my phone has helped identify app screen time and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.androidpolice.com\/how-to-find-apps-draining-phone-battery\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">which apps <\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.androidpolice.com\/how-to-find-apps-draining-phone-battery\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">drain the most battery<\/a>, it isn&#8217;t alwaysconclusive.<\/p>\n<p>Battery Guru gives a detailed lowdown on what&#8217;s happening with your battery, including stats on your battery capacity, current, temperature, deep-sleep timing, and discharge rate.<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I like using this app to learn more about my phone&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Plus, I&#8217;ve used <a href=\"https:\/\/www.androidpolice.com\/risks-of-fake-phone-chargers-cables\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">cheap chargers<\/a> in the past, so being able to see my phone&#8217;s temperature while charging is important.<\/p>\n<p>If it heats up, that&#8217;s an indicator that I should remove the charger to prevent long-term hardware damage.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>All the app&#8217;s core features are free, but it has ads. If you want to remove ads, you&#8217;ll need to pay a small monthly fee. Plus, you can get even more long-term health battery stats and access custom charging overlays.<\/p>\n<p>                    <img width=\"960\" height=\"2080\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"The Battery info page showing graphs of charging, discharging in the last 24 hours in the Battery Guru app\" data-img-url=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/battery-guru-battery-info-page.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/battery-guru-battery-info-page.jpg\" class=\"img-brightness-opt-out\"\/><img width=\"960\" height=\"2080\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Customizing alarms in the Battery Guru app with in-app explanations\" data-img-url=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/battery-guru-alarms-page.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/battery-guru-alarms-page.jpg\" class=\"img-brightness-opt-out\"\/><\/p>\n<p>So far, I haven&#8217;t really needed a premium plan; the core features were good enough, and I have a high tolerance for ads.<\/p>\n<p>Though I may consider doing so if the wake lock feature lands as a premium one when it releases in the regular app.<\/p>\n<p>                        I used Battery Guru to identify wake locks<\/p>\n<p>            It does require ADB commands<\/p>\n<p>        <img width=\"1650\" height=\"928\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"A Google Pixel phone with a large battery icon floating above its camera module, surrounded by small colorful icons representing different settings and features.\" data-img-url=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/a-google-pixel-phone-with-a-large-battery-icon-floating-above-its-camera-module-surrounded-by-small-.png\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/a-google-pixel-phone-with-a-large-battery-icon-floating-above-its-camera-module-surrounded-by-small-.png\" class=\"img-brightness-opt-out\"\/><br \/>\n        Credit:\u00a0Lucas Gouveia \/ Android Police<\/p>\n<p> Wake locks are what keep your CPU active and sometimes keep the screen on while the app is running.<\/p>\n<p>For example, when streaming a YouTube video, you don&#8217;t necessarily want your phone to enter deep sleep while you&#8217;re watching.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/developer.android.com\/develop\/background-work\/background-tasks\/awake\/wakelock\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">why wake locks exist<\/a>. It&#8217;s an Android power management mechanism that keeps your CPU or screen on to avoid interrupting those kinds of tasks.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also why you can still have background tasks run even when your screen is off.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>While many known apps use wake locks properly, some poorly optimized apps don&#8217;t, causing unnecessary battery drain.<\/p>\n<p>An easy fix to prevent apps from running amok is to terminate them manually. Still, if they are apps you use more frequently, you&#8217;ll want to keep them in the suspended state so they can update and refresh the app&#8217;s data in the background, if your OS allows it.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.techradar.com\/phones\/does-swiping-away-apps-actually-save-your-phones-battery-life-the-answer-isnt-what-you-think\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">leaving them open in the background should be fine<\/a> and won&#8217;t hurt the battery.<\/p>\n<p>But that&#8217;s not true for all apps, as some use more permissions than they should or aren&#8217;t well-optimized.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why you&#8217;ll want to double-check if those apps are misusing wake locks to keep your device awake.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t listed as a premium feature on my end) and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.howtogeek.com\/125769\/how-to-install-and-use-abd-the-android-debug-bridge-utility\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">use of ADB commands<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The command to enter when prompted is:<\/p>\n<p>adb shell pm grant com.paget96.batteryguru android.permission.PACKAGE_USAGE_STATS<\/p>\n<p>Using ADB commands grants the app special but restrictive privileges to your device&#8217;s internal systems. This is necessary to see which apps are holding wake locks and for how long.<\/p>\n<p>After you&#8217;ve downloaded the version that supports wake locks, scroll down to find the Wakelocks card under Tools inside the additional section.<\/p>\n<p>From there, you&#8217;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&#8217;s also separated into partial and kernel, so you can see which apps or hardware-driven events are keeping the CPU and screen awake.<\/p>\n<p>                        Delete apps that you don&#8217;t use<\/p>\n<p>This is something I&#8217;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&#8217;t <a href=\"https:\/\/www.androidpolice.com\/invisible-tool-finally-fixed-digital-clutter\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">clean them out often enough<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I recently learned a hard lesson with my Chrome extensions. I have had a few that turned out to be malicious, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.androidpolice.com\/this-popular-image-saving-chrome-extension-was-stealing-your-data\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">like the Save Image as Type extension<\/a>, because I didn&#8217;t bother auditing my extensions recently.<\/p>\n<p>The same applies to your Android apps. You don&#8217;t know (unless you pay close attention) when ownership changes or whether these apps will take more data, and they aren&#8217;t transparent about it.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why if you&#8217;re worried about privacy or even subtle battery drain, you&#8217;ll want to stick to the apps you actively use and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.androidpolice.com\/ways-delete-unused-apps-android\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">dispose of the ones you don&#8217;t need<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One issue I have had across my devices is that, for some reason, I have had trouble getting&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584230,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-584229","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}