topic Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)? in Android

Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

gazzawazza — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 10:10:36 GMT

Hi all

With the O2 Oreo build finally out, how are people finding it?

There have been a lot of reported problems with the Samsung Oreo update (just Google it). In particular, horrible battery life. Some people have improved matters by disabling Bixby where possible, so I'm not clear whether it's a Samsung app issue or something underlying with their build of android Oreo.

Anyway, hope people can post any experiences here - good and bad.

Thanks,

Gary

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

thedude56 — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 16:44:23 GMT

Hi Gary

I found after updating to XEU on my S8, my battery was ok however it drained rapidly in airport mode (15-20%) overnight. This was reported on the German Samsung forum and apparently they are working on a fix. Not sure if this is affecting the O2U version?

The temp workaround is to switch it to 2G / 3G only before switching on airport mode. Odd but it works!

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

gazzawazza — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 18:29:52 GMT

hi dude

thanks very much for the reply.

I'm not sure what XEU is?

Also, could you confirm which firmware your phone is reporting (as per here: http://doc.samsungmobile.com/SM-G950F/000058170702/eng.html)?

Thanks,

Gary

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

thedude56 — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 18:45:29 GMT

Hi Gary

I'm on CRB7 so will hopefully get an update soon. XEU is released on sim free phones (not direct from Samsung)

Cheers

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

gazzawazza — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 18:57:47 GMT

great & thanks.

When did you update your phone?

Just wondering if crb7 is what's been released in last couple of days.

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

gazzawazza — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 21:40:16 GMT

@thedude56wrote:
Hi Gary

I'm on CRB7 so will hopefully get an update soon. XEU is released on sim free phones (not direct from Samsung)

Cheers

took the plunge (too bored and gagging for some tech fiddling) - OTA update for me is CRC7

Hopefully you may get this soon.

Cheers,

Gaz

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

thedude56 — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 21:46:08 GMT

Worth updating and always good to have the latest security updates

Yeah hopefully get the update for mine too!

Cheers

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

gazzawazza — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 22:21:28 GMT

@thedude56wrote:
Worth updating and always good to have the latest security updates

Yeah hopefully get the update for mine too!

Cheers

totally agreed regarding OS security patches.

However, I'm generally a little more cautious now with updates (both on Windows and other platforms) - I'd like to think I'd have a little patience, to try and sidestep an update causing bluescreens or other device issues.

Was very bothered about the battery problems related by samsung owners with Oreo, hence my posts here.

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

gazzawazza — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 23:17:32 GMT

initial thoughts on Oreo:

annoying notifications!

Can't help thinking it's bad design when there's a kernel of a good idea there (warning about permissions / behaviour) but just generates annoyance in the user. Will lead to user just ignoring messages, when they're actually relevant (rather like UAC implementation in Windows).

To explain/expand, it's the first obvious, new thing that greeted me with Oreo and I had to immediately google how to disable it

Example:

I've an app (micro CPU monitor) that shows CPU usage in real-time. It's an overlay. This app now generates two separate notification nags (app permissions monitor and android system). Both flagging the same overlay behaviour. No message about how to accept/disable the notification - only how to stop the behaviour of the app.

Fix:
android system message - settings/apps/3 dots/show system apps/find & tap "android system"/notifications/choose app you need to adjust & flick the toggle switch

app permissions message - settings/lock screen and security/tap "app permission monitor" (not the toggle switch)/choose app & flick the toggle switch
NOTE: this will disable all permissions warnings for said app
NOTE1: you can jump to app permission monitor app list directly from the notification

Hope this helps

app sound notifications

just discovered that notification sounds have been made more granular (i guess in some apps e.g. twitter is a pain but whatsapp is still in-app). Sounds like a good thing? Not if you have 6 conditions/events and have to configure all of them separately with the same sound.

example:
The official twitter client. I was scratching my head because i swore that sounds were set under push notifications in the twitter client. The sound option / picker has just disappeared. You have to go to android's settings/apps then drill into the twitter app and set the per-event sound notifications (or rather, change the sound if you need to, assuming it was programmed previously). Flexible or tedious?

battery usage

Not clear at this time. Feel like it's been going down fast but i've been fiddling a lot (as you can tell from this post) and the screen's been on all the time, etc.

Note that I had already tuned my Nougat install for more economy (no always on screen, no edge, all bixby disabled, black wallpaper, power saving mode on all the time (for throttled CPU usage))

analogue clockfaces

i used to have a Sony z3 compact. i liked the analogue clock for the lockscreen. Wasn't available (to my knowledge) on Samsung Nougat. Both the always on screen and the lockscreen now have multiple analogue clock options. Ok, this is just something cosmetic but thought I'd put in something positive, to balance all my moaning

Cheers,

Gary

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

thedude56 — Sat, 31 Mar 2018 16:27:49 GMT

After a couple of charges the battery isn't too bad. Probably similar to what I was getting on 7 with my s8.

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

MI5 — Sat, 31 Mar 2018 17:09:42 GMT

After every single update everyone starts complaining about battery drain but remember the phone has to re-index all your files and will be doing so for the first few days. After this it will settle down to normal.
If every update killed the battery we would be charging every hour by now.

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

gazzawazza — Sat, 31 Mar 2018 17:13:56 GMT

@thedude56wrote:
After a couple of charges the battery isn't too bad. Probably similar to what I was getting on 7 with my s8.

wow - you get a lot more endurance than I'm used to.

I think my phone would predict (if i recall) around 35-39 hours usage (after full charge) but it wouldn't get close to that. More like 25-28 hrs, at a guess.

It totally depends on what I'd be doing with the phone though. Modest use would take me easily into a second day - might well finish for the day (i mean finish with my higher drain usage) on around 50%.

Typical usage:

- some youtube vids (always )

- catching up on news articles (google news and weather)

- checking emails a few times a day (K9 & gmail apps - not typically sending though)

- maybe some texts or voice calls (nothing typically substantial)

- odd bit of gaming (boom beach, clash of clans i.e. not heavy duty 3d stuff)

- probably some messaging (whatsapp and/or messenger)

- lots of reminders - to drink water and calendar events too (am just thinking about whether phone is in sleep mode or not)

- twitter (mostly push notifications and reading - not really any tweeting)

- bit of music

- bit of exercise (HIIT programs, so screen on, etc)

Satnav / google map navigation, etc, tends to kill the battery (not surprisingly really, with screen being on all the time + location activity). Messaging apps aren't great either but maybe all this is to do with using 4G data. I think wifi usage is less consuming of power than cellular / 4G. Culd be down to my network provider too i suppose and reception quality.

Currently with Oreo I'd say the battery is better (for me, compared to Nougat). Airplane mode is very good but I'm running on CRC7 firmware. Could be better apps too (i.e. newer versions with fewer bugs OR perhaps they manage to lever benefits from new OS) or a more efficient OS or both.

My Screen on Time (SoT) always has highest usage. Then typically android system - around 7-8%. Think if i've been driving, my navigation apps would be next (maybe 5-6%).

Currently I'm on 84% battery but have had the screen on for 2 hrs 15m (which is really good actually). SoT obviously actually depends on what you're doing with the screen though - i understand that. Some IM, lots of texting so far. Bit of youtube.

Appreciate the posts btw - should help everyone to get a perspective on what ot expect from Oreo and their handsets.

What apps tend to hammer your battery most?

Cheers,

Gaz

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

gazzawazza — Sat, 31 Mar 2018 17:37:01 GMT

@MI5wrote:
After every single update everyone starts complaining about battery drain but remember the phone has to re-index all your files and will be doing so for the first few days. After this it will settle down to normal.
If every update killed the battery we would be charging every hour by now.

true but problems have been sufficiently widely reported to make it more than teething, temporary issues.

I read they actually stopped their Oreo rollout in February.

There's a reason why Samsung had to release another Oreo build only a month after CRB7 (http://doc.samsungmobile.com/SM-G950F/000058170702/eng.html).

This wasn't because Google had updated Oreo to version 8.1 etc - this was to correct fundamental firmware problems (from what I've read and researched).

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

thedude56 — Sat, 31 Mar 2018 20:23:05 GMT

Thanks for the detailed reply Gaz.

Usually I charge every couple of days but depends on how much use it gets. Alot more on the weekend than during the week (due to work).

Totally agree about navigation eating the battery. GPS is really battery hungry!

With YouTube I tend to stream to my Chromecast and watch on the TV so battery useage is minimal.

Overall happy and looks like CRC7 is just around the corner for my firmware which will hopefully help further (with the airport mode bug).

Cheers

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

gazzawazza — Sun, 01 Apr 2018 11:20:31 GMT

Battery usage update
Still running on my first full charge.

Turned off data/WiFi and put phone into airplane mode overnight.

Very pleased so far. Only modest use really though.

Lots of texts (for me though - it's all relative. About an hour of long messages), bit of YouTube, some messaging, Google navigation, lots of web browsing, etc

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

gazzawazza — Sun, 01 Apr 2018 11:54:54 GMT

Biggest issue - LED notifications

basically have been broken/made more complicated by Oreo and its changes to notifications.

Though notification control can still reside within an app, it's been heavily centralised in the OS due to the much greater granularity offered. Tbh it's not a granularity that I need, it's overwhelming and it's totally damaged LED notifications which I use massively (different colours etc, as I have my phone on silent a lot).

I think the granularity may be to do with how Oreo has focused more on background processes (think that's where it makes battery economies). Purely guessing here though.

Anyway, it seems that led notifications are handled differently now. I've noticed a couple of apps I use, the led settings have just disappeared. Stuff like show a notification light or even pick a colour.

Some implementations of Oreo have got separate led controls built into the OS notification system (apparently oneplus5, according to an App Dev I've already spoken to about led issues). Seemingly not Samsung.

My research seems to suggest that led notifications are bound up with sound notifications on Samsung (by default), so if you have the latter you have the former. Note you can have a silent sound notification I.e. no sound sample. And of course you can have your OS sound muted/silent.

Trouble is, unless the two are separated e.g. an OS or in-app notification light toggle, you can't use a 3rd party app like light manager. The result is the Samsung system led colour is dark blue for everything/anything that triggers it.

Completely messed up and utterly infuriating. It's like the lollipop sound/silent notification nonsense all over again ☹️

The reason why I like the LED notification system is because at a single glance I can see if a calendar reminder has fired (pretty critical if you forgot about a meeting or appointment). No need to even turn on the display. Obviously I can also distinguish most other notifications as I've colour coded them too. One little light and I know I have stuff to attend to. Meh x 1000

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

hamsterboy — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 08:43:01 GMT

The duplicate notifications are getting quite annoying now, after just a few days after the upgrade.

In fact I've had to turn off general notifications from youTube as I get a continual stream of notifications when I use Chromecast to watch it on the TV!

has anyone got a solution for this?

I understand that this may have been addressed in release 8.1 (although google searches show differing opinions on that) but we'll have to wait until the end of the year for that!!!

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

Mr-Mixalot — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 14:21:14 GMT

Good Afternoon

Does anyone when the latest update with the March security patch will be availble as currently I'm on Feb 2018

Or is there is way I can download and apply it manually as I hear it sorts the battery drain issues out

Thanks in advance

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

gazzawazza — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 14:40:45 GMT

@hamsterboywrote:
The duplicate notifications are getting quite annoying now, after just a few days after the upgrade.

In fact I've had to turn off general notifications from youTube as I get a continual stream of notifications when I use Chromecast to watch it on the TV!

has anyone got a solution for this?

I understand that this may have been addressed in release 8.1 (although google searches show differing opinions on that) but we'll have to wait until the end of the year for that!!!

Sup @hamsterboy

Notifications on Oreo are just painful now!

Notifications on Oreo have massively complicated matters IMO. I particularly feel for developers having to get to grips with it.

As in a previous post/rant they offer deep granularity but with that option for complexity comes implementation complexity.

It's ironic that with a more simplistic system (e.g. nougat), things worked more intuitively (at least for me). See below regarding unread badge counts.

example

Twitter has it appears 7 notification channels now. I actually quite like the idea that I can tag a separate notification tone for direct messages vs mentions. However, I have to go in and program each tone individually (though it picks up the tone set at system level for any app notification i.e. the thing under settings/sounds and vibration/notification sounds).

I reckon they need to have a global tone which you can set per app, then you can tweak individual channels as necessary. Would be loads quicker.

Double notifications – possibly an OS bug

Agreed – googling this throws up a lot of interesting info, including plenty from google handset owners. Supposedly fixed in Oreo 8.1 but Nexus users are still reporting it. Seems to be different apps too. Interestingly, I’ve seen a couple of posts claiming a Microsoft tier 2 engineer says it’s an OS issue (now you never hear about people blaming others for problems ).

Personally I suspect some occurrences could be cleared up by the app devs but maybe there’s something bugged in the OS too.

As an aside, I find it perverse if you google “oreo notifications” the first hit is an article saying “Android Oreo will make you love notifications again”

I don't have sound on much (hence why LED notifications are hugely beneficial and useful for me) but I have only really noticed double notifications on the official twitter client.

Specifically on the "tweets from people you follow" channel. I know this because I've got a unique tone on that channel (and that channel alone). Having said that, it’s happened once today (the duplication) and when I got another notification from someone I follow (I’ve only got 2 people I requested notifications from), the tone played as expected i.e. once. WTF.

I’ve not been able to test other programmed notifications for twitter (e.g. can’t send myself a direct message, without having automatically read it).

Weirdly, I’ve just discovered a twitter notification that I’ve not even programmed! If you refresh your timeline, I get a ‘pop’ sound. 100% that I’ve not configured that anywhere – it’s not even in my Samsung pick-list for notifications. Must be in-app and hardcoded.

Double notification on youtube - troubleshooting

Sorry to suggest these – fairly obvious but want to try and help.

Try signing out.
Then clearing data on the app.
Then uninstalling / reinstalling (possibly).

I’ve just done this on youtube as a test. I’ve also discovered some interesting stuff regarding notifications. There only appear to be 2 configured channels at OS level for the youtube app (download notifications and general notifications). Both were set to no sound. I've now programmed sounds to see what happens.

EDIT: just got a notification from youtube for a new video from someone. No duplicated sound. However, only one event to notify about. Notification was through "general notifications"

If you check notifications within the app itself, there are stacks you can configure. I’m going to guess you have loads of channels subscribed to. Perhaps you could change the configurations there (in-app settings/notifications/“channel settings”)? Mine appear to all be set to occasional.

Or could it be something to do with chromecast? I don’t know whether there’s a chromecast app or whether the youtube app handles mirroring/streaming? The “watch on tv” setting would suggest the youtube app handles this. I don’t have chromecast so haven’t tried it.

No sound notifications at all for some apps (though configured)

I don't seem to get any sound from gmail or youtube (see above), though LED notifications work for youtube (lol irony, given no sound gets played - I understand the 2 events are linked).

I've done a full clean reinstall for gmail too, mainly to see if i could address a relatively new error - gmail reports "there was a problem while syncing this folder. please try again later".

Never used to be a problem. I suspect it's to do with auto sync being disabled but, as said, it never used to be a problem (i like to decide when to poll and sync stuff - helps with battery consumption and data usage too).

Mind you, if you check out the shutdown issues that windows users have been experienced with google's drive sync app replacement (backup and sync) - literally been posts about issues with it on the dedicated google support channel since July 2017 - i'm no longer surprised to find google apps misbehaving or that issues are persisting.

LED notifications flaky

LED notifications are very unpredictable now. I think this depends as much though on the flavour of android Oreo / phone manufacturer customisations. For example, again as mentioned (just to acknowledge the repetition; not grumbling), apparently on OnePlus5, you can configure LED behaviour per app. On my S8, there's no such option.

I believe that LEDs will work if sound is active on a notification channel (just as a hint/tip) in the OS. You can still have an in-app toggle / switch too, which helps loads (if you want to have custom colours e.g. using light manager app) i.e. you supposedly disable notification light in-app and 3rd party app reads notification and triggers LED of your choice. Nice. Worked perfectly for me though the Samsung LED doesn’t seem to like to produce custom colours. Just try configuring “white”

Unread badge counts are no longer helpful

On nougat, dismissing a notification from the notification share/drawer might or might not change the unread badge count (depends on the nature of the notification I guess) but it seems that with Samsung's Oreo, if you do this, it kills the badge count.

This is a pain – I want to clear notifications but keep the badge count, as it reminds me I’ve got stuff to action e.g. whatsapp is a great example.

I’ve read that this is launcher defined though. Sounds like Samsung have just configured dismissal of any notification in the shade to remove the badge count dot.

The app-internal count remains though e.g. unread texts or unread whatsapp messages. The actual badge number/tally persists but the icon reverts to its unbadge state. Grrrrrrr.

Something positive

I actually quite like the in-notification images you can get now with Oreo e.g. youtube thumbnails on notifications in the shade/drawer.

Summary

Sadly really can’t see any of this going away soon.

Maybe some devs will catch up and reduce app-bugs / configure their apps to Oreo APIs but any google changes in the OS have typically taken simply ages to reach end-users on non-google devices. There again, there’s project treble, which is apparently embedded in Oreo, which might help with this. However, then there’s the question of whether end-user frustrations and issues are to do with apps, the OS or say touchwiz/Samsung experience.

And then devs might not change functionality, even if some users don’t like it. Maybe it’s easier to implement something basic or they see no need to change stuff. Equally well, double notifications really shouldn’t happen.

Cheers,

Gaz

Re: Samsung s8 Oreo - any issues (battery etc)?

gazzawazza — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 14:29:36 GMT

@Mr-Mixalotwrote:
Good Afternoon

Does anyone when the latest update with the March security patch will be availble as currently I'm on Feb 2018

Or is there is way I can download and apply it manually as I hear it sorts the battery drain issues out

Thanks in advance

hi @Mr-Mixalot

What handset, which network and what firmware build do you currently have?

I've an official o2 s8 running crc7 and the March 2018 android security patch is included.

Have you tried the settings/software update/"download updates manually" option? Maybe the OTA update is just waiting for you to pull it.

Regards,

Gary