Better Battery Statistics with Battery Historian

Continuing the relentless quest to keep my phone speedy, I stumbled upon a developer tool that is useful to anyone needing to troubleshoot a slow, short-living or overheating phone – Battery Historian

Battery Historian shows you a much more detailed and informative battery stats chart, highlighting the individual apps and sync services which are keeping your phone awake/busy in the background. It also shows network, wifi status, gps and more.

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Debugging Android Performance & Battery Issues--Like a Developer

I have a frustrating relationship with my phone’s performance. I can cleanup my phone for a few days, but it tends to revert to being sluggish within no time. I’ve had dozens of devices and they all suffer from this.

There’s a lot of voodoo about Android Performance and Battery life–task managers, factory resets, etc.

Here’s a more developer-oriented process using adb .

Using ADB to identify process hogs

By connecting your device to the Android SDK, you can use ADB to identify process hogs. If you can, just remove the app. Otherwise, delete it’s data (see pm clear below)

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Validating side-loaded APKs

I was desperate to try Hangouts 4.0 for Android, but suspicious of side-loading. I wanted to verify the APK signature cert had Google’s fingerprint of

38:91:8A:45:3D:07:19:93:54:F8:B1:9A:F0:5E:C6:56:2C:ED:57:88

Here’s how to check the signatures on an APK, as usual, in shell functions (JDK needed)

apk-check () {
	jarsigner -verify -verbose -certs $1
}

apk-print-cert () {
	keytool -list -printcert -jarfile $1
}

# usage
# make sure it's verified
$ apk-check *apk|grep verified
  s = signature was verified
jar verified.
# show cert identifier
$ apk-check *apk|grep X.509|head -n2
      X.509, CN=Android, OU=Android, O=Google Inc., L=Mountain View, ST=California, C=US
      X.509, CN=Android, OU=Android, O=Google Inc., L=Mountain View, ST=California, C=US
$ apk-print-cert *apk|grep SHA1  
	 SHA1: 38:91:8A:45:3D:07:19:93:54:F8:B1:9A:F0:5E:C6:56:2C:ED:57:88

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