Why do lockscreens burn battery power

[Ipheuria]

If you are having issues with battery please turn off your lockscreen for a day and post up any difference. I've had the issue with two lockscreens now. I had the issue with the TypoWeather lockscren I thought it was the polling time that it looked for the weather conditions. However I started using the Tooche.B without weather lockscreen. I have been having crazy battery life. I usually get home from work on a normal day at 6PM with 70-80% battery life. Since I had the lockscreen I'm getting home with 40-50% and hitting under 30% long before I put the phone to charge at 11PM. I decided to do a test so I turned off the lockscreen this morning and now at 4:23PM I'm still at 90% battery life.

 

[Massie]

Does it poll for time the same way it did for weather, I wonder? I can imagine a poorly coded app that continually checks for time updates instead of checking only on activation of the lock screen. (I don't have the coding skills to know if that's even possible, but it doesn't seem out of the question.)

 

[BLiNK]

it seems like weather mods always drained battery for me; in fact i stopped using winterboard a while ago..

also finally came to terms that i did not need to see my weather every minute of my day, just check it periodically throughout the day (accuweather) i get severe weather alerts via email so i'm good

 

[Massie]

Yeah, I generally don't get the weather thing...the forecast, sure, but for current conditions I just look out a window.

 

[Ipheuria]

lol yeah the weather thing is cool but wears off really fast. I choose a nice simple lockscreen but I think Massie is right. I think the polling for the time must do something it's 2:11AM and I'm at 60% nowhere near the under 30% I would be guaranteed to have by 11 or 12PM.

 

[Ipheuria]

Well my experiment was successful the lockscreen sucks power like nobody's business. I charged it like normal over night. I enabled the lockscreen yesterday and by 4PM I was down to 60% ish by night time when I plugged in for charging I was in the 30s. I like the lockscreen though it's very elegant so now I just have to plugin at work around half day to charge it up until I might make my own lockscreen.

 

[dmoss74]

i leave my iphone on edge only, unless i need 3g. it doesn't even update the lockscreen weather unless i force push it. no excessive battery drain.

 

[cody]

i use lockinfo with lockinfo weather plugin and have great battery life. i have it set to refresh every 30 minutes.

could it just be cetrian lockscreens?

Cody

 

[Ipheuria]

Yeah sorry it is only lockscreens with info pulled from the web weather, time, etc. You can't set the polling time on alot of them. However I just upgraded to 4.3.3 yesterday and the same lockscreen I used for this test is now pulling the same as a regular stock lockscreen so might be worth the upgrade.

 

[Arelunde]

Anyone still using Slanted Lock? I'm a newbie to ViP and, after JB, added SL. Did it late in the afternoon and the stock lock screen with SL was ORANGE!!! YUCK!! Later, after doing a bunch of research on how to put my OWN wallpaper behind the SL date (never did pull it off - too complex), I discovered there are hourly changes in the SL wallpaper according the time of day. And, there's a weather icon that shows sunny, cloudy, rain, etc. (no forecast) Extremely cool! I realize this is now an "old" app, but I like it. Doesn't seem to drain the battery.

I added a custom slider icon, which makes it VERY cool.

 

[Ipheuria]

Sure there are still people using SL but you might find them in the post your lockscreen thread. If you still can't figure out how to change the background then ask for help there. It might be the amount of time the lockscreen is set to poll for info. It would be cool if you were able to change the interval.

 

[Capnjackk]

It's probably due to the fact that it uses HTML and you might have the weather refresh at a small refresh instead of something like 30-60 minutes.