Android devices have always been known for their poor battery life. Experienced Android users would know that the secret to getting good battery life from your Android device is to keep a tap on the wakelocks from various apps.
Applications like BetterBatteryStats, Wakelock Detector and GSam Battery monitor have always been the go-to app to find out which apps are holding a wakelock in the background and draining your phone’s battery. There was no official API used by these apps to detect wakelocks, but they did an excellent job in finding the culprit app or service.
Sadly, with Android 4.4 KitKat, Google has restricted third party apps to access battery stats, rendering them useless. This means that all the above mentioned apps no longer work under Android 4.4 KitKat. Imagine the horror of an app running the background, holding a wakelock and draining your phone’s battery, and you are unable to find out the culprit app.
Right now, the developers have only found one workaround to this problem – root access. If you are running KitKat and have root access on your Android device, you can use the updated version of BetterBatteryStat without any issues to see the wakelocks held by various apps. If not, well you are out of luck. Sit tight and hope that Google releases an official API with the next version of Android.
