My wife and I have HTC Droid Incredibles and the battery life is far from great. With nearly nothing on my wife’s phone, it wouldn’t last an entire day. Even with minimal use.
After a lot of searching and testing, it turns out that the Facebook for HTC Sense app is the main problem. It’s constantly syncing with Facebooks servers and the phone never gets the chance to sleep.
Sadly, you can not un-install it without rooting your phone and you can’t even stop it from running! However by removing all your accounts from the app, you’ll give it nothing to do. And when it has nothing to do, your battery life will increase quite a bit.
To remove your accounts, go to Settings -> Accounts & Sync and choose Facebook for HTC Sense and then remove account.
Unfortunately you do have to completely remove your account. Simply telling them to sync at a longer time frame doesn’t do the trick. 30 minutes or 24 hours the app still eats just as much battery.
Now don’t get Facebook for HTC Sense mixed up with Facebook for Android. The official app is not an issue, the HTC one is.
Our phones battery life has nearly doubled since we disabled the Facebook for HTC Sense app. If you’re having less than desired battery life, start disabling any HTC sync options that you can.
Sadly, when you disable the Facebook for HTC Sense sync, you also disable the image syncing in your address book. But you can get that back by installingĀ SyncMyPix. Or, if you’re on a Mac and sync your address book to Google and then to your phone, getĀ AddressBookSync. Both apps will search Facebook for your contacts and pull down their photo into your phone’s address book.
It’s also a good idea to remove any apps that you don’t use. Some apps run in the background and eat up your battery, so remove ones you don’t need.
Also ensure that any apps you do have sync less often if possible. Syncing every few minutes makes the phone work harder. Syncing every hour or two is much more battery friendly.
Our battery life is now decent and we’re charging less often. I really wish HTC would fix the issue rather than blaming Facebook but there isn’t anything we can do about that. For now, just remove your accounts from Facebook for HTC Sense and enjoy the extra battery life.
It would be interesting to know WHEN this blog was posted (approx.) and whether you know if this is still an issue (HTC Sense for Facebook draining battery). Anything you can tell us on that would be good to know. I got a HTC 4g lte very recently and I’m getting a bit less than a day out of it. looking to improve that – could be any number of things. This popped up on a search – I’ve since disabled HTC Sense for Facebook (I’m not a big Facebooker anyway – I like Twitter!) Hope that disable does improve my battery life a good bit. My goal is to get my phone to stay off the cable (charging) all day and all night (I will plug it in at midnight and let it get a good night’s charge).
This was posted 07/19/11. Good luck and hope it helps!