I fixed my Android phone's persistent overheating issue by changing a single background app setting

Battery drain is an unwanted, consistent issue we all face.

Sometimes, your phone will experience battery drain after a major update if you use adaptive battery, or it may just be a few misbehaving apps causing the issue.

Generally speaking, my issues lie in the latter category. I download a bunch of new apps, try them out, and then they sometimes collect dust until I clean them out.

I have a bad habit of keeping a lot of apps around to compare them with others.

But with my Samsung Galaxy S25+ randomly heating up and Battery Guru reporting unusual battery drain and temperature fluctuations, I needed to conduct a more thorough inspection of what's going on with my device.

Related

I finally stopped letting my phone's default settings limit me, thanks to this little-known Android power utility

I can now see the bigger picture of why battery drain happens on the system level

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By  Faith Leroux

Why should you be worried about a persistent heat issue

Unfortunately, heat is a battery killer

As someone who worked and studied electrochemistry, I understand that even a few degrees of extra heat can be very disruptive to the battery chemistry.

What typically happens is that heat makes the chemical reaction happen faster (what occurs at the anode and the cathode inside the battery), which ages it, thus degrading all the materials involved in the reaction.

As the battery's internal components degrade, capacity decreases. It is essentially permanent damage that cannot be reversed or fixed, unless you replace your smartphone's battery.

That's why, when I can, I disable fast charging to avoid overheating. Typically, I have this enabled for its bypass charging feature.

Mainly because this is another source of heat, since more power is delivered more quickly.

Plus, I have my maximum charging capacity set to 80%, to prevent the last bit of charging from causing chemical stress with its lithium-ion battery (the last 10% produces the most voltage stress).

If you have a thick phone case, consider removing it while you're using fast charging, as this helps heat dissipate more easily.

But beyond charging practices, you need to consider other factors that can stress the battery, and those usually involve unoptimized apps that demand more power.

Your phone can be a powerful gatekeeper if you let it

The battery usage screen should be your new best friend

Especially if you have enabled adaptive battery, you will want to use the battery usage screen to either manually optimize your app usage or completely restrict it.

While the adaptive battery feature is meant to use machine learning to understand your regular usage patterns and adjust your apps around them, it won't always get it right.

Plus, some of your favorite active apps could be taking a toll on your device's battery health because they're hungrier for data.

The battery usage section is meant to give you an overview of what's causing the most drain and when, as well as some insight into your charging cycles.

Under the Daily usage bar graph, you can also tap View details to see a comprehensive breakdown of your battery level, usage by date, and time.

I like to select the dates that show the highest usage, then scan for the apps that deplete the most battery.

The two apps that usually do are Reddit and Character.AI.

I negate my time with those apps because I have screen time controls with StayFree and Google's Digital Wellbeing tools that can set timers and blocks when I need them.

However, I would still rather restrict their background activity to prevent these apps from passively draining my battery when not in use.

You can do this with any app, unless it's a built-in system app.

All you do is tap the app on the Battery usage screen, scroll to the bottom, toggle on Background usage limits, and select Put to sleep.

Essentially, I only enable deep sleep for apps that I rarely use but want to keep installed on my phone.

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Those steps work for my Galaxy S25+ running One UI 8.5, but on a Google Pixel phone, you can perform similar steps by limiting your background usage.

You can set it to an optimized or unrestricted profile, or completely tap the Allow background usage toggle under Manage battery usage to pause it/turn it off.

Use data saver in an emergency

While I am not exactly fond of using data saver or power saving mode to preserve your battery, it can help in a pinch.

Some phones let you customize your power saving mode options, while others offer different profiles, such as an extreme battery saver mode or a regular one.

For my Galaxy phone, I like toggling through some battery saving options, including turning off ones I don't like.

For one, I don't love limiting my processing power, because I want a select few apps to work properly during an emergency.

But, otherwise, I am more than okay with turning off Always On Display and dimming my screen instead.

So before you enable it, check if you have a setting or two you can tweak first — it can at least make the experience feel a lot less jarring and extreme when you do need to use it.