Samsung Galaxy S7 Battery Drain and Overheating Fix

For the latest generation of smartphones, there has been one consistent issue. Between the capabilities for extremely high performance, the fastest processors and consistently more sealed cases, overheating and battery drain have proven to be the biggest problem facing new phone owners. Here, we will take a look at the Galaxy S7, and how to fix overheating, as well as a quickly draining battery.

Solution 0: The Easy Fixes

For the Galaxy S7, many small and peripheral issues may be at play to cause a bit of battery drain and overheating. As a result, by checking these steps you can prevent the need of a much more in depth fix.
Have you noticed that overheat happens not so much when the battery itself is draining, but instead charging? When unplugging, is there a lot of heat coming off the bottom of the phone? If so, you may want to look into getting another charger. Lower quality charging cables can sometimes cause an excess transfer of heat alongside your normal charging, so upgrading your charger could very well solve your battery woes, and also increase battery life.

Have you perhaps put a new case on your phone and now realized that it’s been consistently overheating and draining the battery? While cases can be fantastic to stop damage from the occasional fall, they can also insulate and suffocate your phone, causing it to operate at much higher temperatures than it should and likewise burning through battery. Try using the phone without the case for a day or two. If the issue is subsided, look into a lighter weight or more porous case for protection purposes.

Solution 1: Check your apps

For many of us, having half a dozen apps in the background is no big deal, and in truth the S7 can likely handle that without much issue. However, having this occur too often, for too long, with too many apps can cause battery overheating and very severe drain. Ironically, one of the best solutions to this, if you have trouble keeping the running app count low is yet another app, Greenify. This app helps monitor and control battery and app usage to help correct for otherwise overwhelming amounts of computing needed to keep up with demands you may not even be aware you are placing on your S7. Likewise, simply deleting apps you don’t regularly use can help with this issue, as well as potentially saving some of your data from being used for effectively useless updates.

Likewise, if you’re using apps fairly often, and tend to have your phone one 24 hours a day, turning it off for a few minutes each day may actually improve battery life and prevent overheating. This gives a chance for the device to essentially set itself up for another long haul, and undoes any temporary settings apps may have put onto the phone that could be causing an overheat.

Solution 2: Divert the Stream

As anyone who regularly views videos on Twitch or YouTube via mobile or plays Pokemon Go can tell you, streaming videos and playing graphically intensive games can burn through data as well as battery life, and make the back of your phone hot enough to cook a decent breakfast on if you’re not careful. While doing this for short periods of time is not harmful to your S7, consistently spending a few hours a day without break doing this, especially if the weather happens to also be rather hot, can permanently stunt the battery life and performance (a well known issue for the Qualcomm processor). Regularly taking breaks (for example, in standard temperatures one 15 minute break every 30 minutes or so) will generally prevent such issues, as will not doing these actions while charging your phone which will inherently bring more heat to the equation. Similarly, if you use Bluetooth speakers alongside your streaming, consider limiting the amount of time you do this. Bluetooth devices tend to drain the battery life of phones and provide incremental temperature increases.

Solution 3: Software: The Good. The Bad, and The Outdated

For the Galaxy S7, as stated previously, most apps unless piled together will not cause a large amount of battery drain. However, two things that very well could are malware, and out of date Operating Systems. While malware has never been terribly common in the Android world, the fact of the matter is that Android is based off infrastructure which is common throughout any program that uses the Java language, so malware is easy to adapt from PC to smartphone. Users who typically use only the play store to download apps and only trusted sites to download everything else will likely not run into this problem, but jailbroken phones which use alternative markets, or downloads from random spots on the internet may bring this issue. To take care of malware, downloading 360 Security or Avira Mobile Security apps may be your best bet.

Much more common for the average user is the use of out of date Operating Systems. More often than not, OS updates address inefficiencies in the operation of the phone, and can often help correct battery drain and overheating by streamlining processes. To update your phone, go to the Settings page, then About Phone and Software Version. There should be a Check for Updates prompt, select it to download the newest updated version. This typically will take only a few moments. As usual with all changes to your system, backing up your S7 is recommended in case of a crash.

Solution 4: A New Start

Sometimes, issues just happen in the tech world. Whether you want to explain it as bugs, entropy, or magic, something will always eventually go wrong with a piece of tech and given the high volume of sales of the S7, some will statistically be assured to have a few issues right out the box. If the previous solutions have yet to help, and you’re not keen on taking the phone to a certified dealer or repair outlet to have the hardware swapped out, doing a full hard reset may be your last chance at repair. Before going through with this solution, backing up all the data on your phone is heavily recommended, and using Google Backup is probably the best way to do so.

To factory reset your Galaxy S7, open Settings and then choose Backup and Restore. Next, select Reset Device. This will open warnings involving the potential loss of data. Confirm that you are aware of these risks, and reboot when the wipe is complete. Then, import your data and you should be well on your way to a good as new phone.