Did the new Android update harm your phone’s battery life?

It wasn’t just the performance of smartphones that was affected by upgrading to Android 5.0, it was the battery life as well. However, whereas performance was almost universally increased on most of the flagship devices that were updated, the effect on battery life was actually negative in many cases such as with the Nexus 5. This is according to recent tests from GSMArena. 

Previously we explored how the jump from Android 4.4 KitKat to 5.0 Lollipop had affected several flagships in terms of performance, now it’s time to have a look at what it does to battery life. For this test we’ll be using the Samsung Galaxy S5 (Snapdragon 801 version), LG G3 (2GB RAM, 16GB storage), HTC One (M8) and the Nexus 5. All four were recently updated to Lollipop and the new major version of the mobile OS promises additional battery savings through clever optimizations. They are collectively called Project Volta. The first component is JobScheduler – it organizes background tasks from multiple apps and runs them in one go. This means, for example, that tasks that require an Internet connection will go together, instead of waking up the data modem multiple times.