The Nexus 5 is one of the best smartphones you can get right now, as
long as you don’t want or need the most recent hardware under the hood.
Even after a year since it was released, the Nexus 5 is still the go-to
phone of many smartphone enthusiasts, mostly because it runs on stock
Android and you get timely updates, as well as very good performance.
But the Nexus 5 does have battery drain problems very often, which can
be annoying to users, especially since the Nexus 5 battery can’t be
swapped out because it is not removable. In this article, you will find
out what exactly is draining your battery on the Nexus 5. Beware,
though, as devices depend very much on their users, so these might not
apply to everyone.
First off, location services are the biggest drain on your Nexus 5
battery. Location services aren’t themselves responsible for battery
drain, rather the apps that they are vulnerable to. By that, we refer
mainly to social media applications which constantly access location
services, causing severe battery drain. The applications that use
location services keep your Nexus 5 awake even if you’re not using it so
that they can update themselves with location data. High accuracy
location services are the ones that drain your battery the fastest. You
can avoid the many wakes of your Nexus 5 caused by apps like Facebook by
disabling location services or restricting app access to it. With some
apps, you can restrict it from settings, but other apps won’t let you do
that, so you might want to use a third-party app to do it and Greenify
might be the best option out there.
One culprit for the Nexus 5 battery drain problems is actually your
signal strength. Your phone will use up a lot of power if you’re in an
area with poor signal strength. By signal, we mean data, not Wi-Fi. Your
data connection, if used on a low signal strength, will eat up your
battery in a matter of hours. You’d be better off using Wi-Fi in areas
where you just can’t get optimal signal, because Wi-Fi drain is minimal
on your battery. Apps will try syncing and gathering data on a data
connection, and if you’re far from satellites and such, it will drain
your battery very much. You can restrict the access apps have to your
data connection, but if you notice bad signal, your best choice is to
turn data off or use Airplane mode, which will save you a lot of battery
power.
You should also know that when a phone uses vibrating alerts, it
drains more battery than you would think, so if that’s not a necessary
feature for you and you are striving for good battery life, you should
turn vibration off on the Nexus 5. Task killers are also surprisingly
heavy on your battery, as they do more harm than good. Killing off apps
and having them restart later on when you need them uses more power and
CPU than letting them stay idle in the background. Battery saving
applications are also a double-sided issue, as they tend to wake your
phone often, thus draining the battery, But that depends on the app your
use and how much you actually wake your phone to check it.