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Frequently Asked Questions - GSam Battery Monitor

GSam Battery Monitor and KitKat As of version 3.3, GSam Battery Monitor is now fully compatible with Android KitKat (4.4) for non-root devices.  If your device is rooted however, there are more statistics that GSam can collect.  So if you have root, make sure you install the GSam Battery Root Companion app.  If you don't have root - no problem, things will still work well, but some stats such as app wakelocks will not be available. Unfortunately, Google has removed the ability in KitKat (4.4) for non-system applications to access battery statistics.  On versions prior to KitKat, GSam obtained battery statistics from a built-in set of statistics from Android.  If you have root, we can still get at that data.  If you do not, then GSam will track as much of that data as it can by itself.   Not all data can be tracked however. Permissions: In order to manually track usage for non-root users in KitKat, we had to include 2 new permissions.  READ_PHONE_STATE and ACCESS_WIFI

Support for Kernel Wakelocks

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Version 2.28 of GSam Battery Monitor has added support for displaying Kernel Wakelocks.  Kernel wakelocks are a very advanced feature, and are not intended for your average user.  Indeed, I see so many users getting confused by them in forum posts that I have resisted the urge to add them in.  They are often unique per phone / manufacturer, and a high wakelock time is not necessarily indicative of a problem. All that said, kernel wakelocks are very useful for folks trying to diagnose custom ROM problems.  If you're running a custom ROM and are seeing battery issues, kernel wakelocks are very useful, and can help the ROM developer understand what is going on.  For people using stock ROMs they are useful to simply understand how their phone usage affects their battery life, however this takes a lot of understanding and often a lot of research reading code to understand what a certain wakelock does. So - use with caution.  Click on the wakelock and select the Google Me button t