A few days ago, I noticed that the battery life on my Nexus 4 wasn’t nearly as good as I was expecting it to be, especially after dealing with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for a while. Initially, I chalked this up to a new device, which I hadn’t had time to configure, and might have a battery break in period. However, today I discovered another potential cause for the problem: the Mediaserver process.
In the screenshot above, you can see that Mediaserver used up a colossal 52% of my battery today, with the Android OS and Screen next in line. Now, 18 hours on battery may seem like a fairly good number, but with how much I actually used the device, it really isn’t . The Nexus 4 probably didn’t have the display on for more than an hour today, and was only used to send a few texts and check my email a few times. Most of the day, it sat idle in my backpack. It was used to play music through a car stereo for about 15 minutes, but that shouldn’t have resulted in such massive drain.
In reading on various forums, I’ve found that disabling Google Music sync is an oft suggested solution for the Mediaserver drain. That isn’t a very good option for me, though, as I use Google Music as my main source of media. Nevertheless, I suppose I’ll try disabling music sync after saving some songs to the device, and see if that helps at all. Even if it does, disabling features is hardly a solution for battery life woes, so hopefully Google can patch up whatever issue is causing this battery drain quickly.
