Wiping battery stats in Android does NOT improve battery life

Whaat?! But what about all those posts on xda-developers forum preaching how it will miraculously breathe new life into my battery? No, unfortunately, you’ve been duped. From the words of Dianne Hackborn herself, an engineer of Google’s Android operating system:

It has no impact on the current battery level shown to you.
It has no impact on your battery life.
Deleting it is not going to do anything to make your device more fantastic and wonderful…


She explains in a post that the batterystats.bin file in the data/system/ directory is used solely to maintain data about how your apps are using up the battery. In other words, the information you see in the “Battery Use” UI under Settings is all this file is responsible for! Wiping it in recovery mode will not affect battery performance, much less calibrate it. The convention, at least before this myth was debunked, was that you wipe your battery stats if you experience poor battery life, or if you flash ROMs on a regular basis. I was flashing several ROMs recently on my phone, and almost fell victim to this placebo ritual myself.

The best advice for maximizing your phone’s battery life is to turn off unnecessary services like WIFI/3G or the Twitter app updating every 2 seconds, dim the brightness, and charge the battery responsibly. 

4 comments

4 Comments


  1. Sigh, I was a victim of this shenanigan.... glad it's finally sorted out.

  2. @Dan: Haha, me too.

  3. Is there going to be any new articles? :)

  4. Anonymous

    CREATE NEW PAGES

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