“Phone Idle” horrific battery drain

[FeliApple]

I found a Moto G 1st gen I had in a drawer a few days ago. It’s on Android 4.4.2.
As I have always used iOS, I wanted to play around with the device for a bit (never even used Android), and I have found out that standby drain is absolutely pathetic.

The phone is on Airplane Mode. Everything is completely disabled, location is off, etc. Every setting that may impact battery has been disabled, for the sake of trying. No dice.
Now, the battery section shows 81% of battery was used by “phone Idle”, in 1 day and 6 hours of Standby. The phone was unplugged at 100% and is now at 56%. Screen on time is 2 minutes.
So, 44% drop in around 30 hours. When I tested it overnight the other night, it dropped 13%.
Any ideas? Is it Android 4? Is this... normal?!
I know that standby time was always far better on iOS, but 44% in a day? Come on.
The phone has not been used a lot in its lifetime, so I am not inclined to blame battery health. Battery should be good. Especially considering that screen-on time is, oddly, decent. (Got me around 1h 45 mins with 80% remaining. That’s good, it’s what my iPhone 5c on iOS 9 gets).
Anyway, I don’t know anything about Android. Any ideas?

 

[Roadstar]

It’s Android 4. Back in its day there weren’t battery optimizations such as doze mode on Android and idle drain was pretty horrible indeed. You shouldn’t draw too many conclusions about how a modern Android works based on that device

 

[tonybarnaby]

Batteries go bad with age, even if you don't use them. My guess is it sat dead for months. Nothing is worse for a battery than to die and not get charged immediately. At this point it's most likely a paperweight unfortunately.

 

[JaySoul]

I've got exactly the same phone and the battery is fine, use it eveyr few weeks.

I mean it's still super old but your battery sounds unhealthy!

 

[pika2000]

I found a Moto G 1st gen I had in a drawer a few days ago. It’s on Android 4.4.2.
As I have always used iOS, I wanted to play around with the device for a bit (never even used Android), and I have found out that standby drain is absolutely pathetic.

The phone is on Airplane Mode. Everything is completely disabled, location is off, etc. Every setting that may impact battery has been disabled, for the sake of trying. No dice.
Now, the battery section shows 81% of battery was used by “phone Idle”, in 1 day and 6 hours of Standby. The phone was unplugged at 100% and is now at 56%. Screen on time is 2 minutes.
So, 44% drop in around 30 hours. When I tested it overnight the other night, it dropped 13%.
Any ideas? Is it Android 4? Is this... normal?!
I know that standby time was always far better on iOS, but 44% in a day? Come on.
The phone has not been used a lot in its lifetime, so I am not inclined to blame battery health. Battery should be good. Especially considering that screen-on time is, oddly, decent. (Got me around 1h 45 mins with 80% remaining. That’s good, it’s what my iPhone 5c on iOS 9 gets).
Anyway, I don’t know anything about Android. Any ideas?

Older Android versions are well known to have poor standby battery life. It’s why Google started “Doze” mode in Marshmallow and newer. Even then, I still find Android to be quite poor in sleep state. Only the Chinese skins like eMUI and MIUI can somewhat deliver decent battery life, at the expense of aggressively shutting down background processes.

Secondly, the Moro G 1st gen is a lower end phone, and it doesn’t have top notch component to begin with. I’m sure by now the battery itself has degraded significantly. I actually have one, and the battery has swollen up many moons ago.

So the poor battery life is explainable through different reasonings.

 

[FeliApple]

Older Android versions are well known to have poor standby battery life. It’s why Google started “Doze” mode in Marshmallow and newer. Even then, I still find Android to be quite poor in sleep state. Only the Chinese skins like eMUI and MIUI can somewhat deliver decent battery life, at the expense of aggressively shutting down background processes.

Secondly, the Moro G 1st gen is a lower end phone, and it doesn’t have top notch component to begin with. I’m sure by now the battery itself has degraded significantly. I actually have one, and the battery has swollen up many moons ago.

So the poor battery life is explainable through different reasonings.

Thanks, this is probably the reason.
I knew Android was poor in Standby but I guess I expected better. If I enabled 3G and took it out of Airplane Mode it would be... unusable.

 

[mi7chy]

That's not standby idle drain. That's a six year old battery that's lost significant capacity. Otherwise, with a good battery Moto G1 has very long idle battery life with WIFI on with 4.4 Kit Kat when used as VOIP phone. Even longer with WIFI battery optimization on which I recall uses lower data rates (fine for VOIP) while keeping WIFI always on.

11 days without WIFI optimization

19 days with WIFI optimization

 

[Tsepz]

Batteries go bad with age, even if you don't use them. My guess is it sat dead for months. Nothing is worse for a battery than to die and not get charged immediately. At this point it's most likely a paperweight unfortunately.

This. That battery is nowhere near optimal at this point.