I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 that I am quite happy with. I have had it for a couple of years now and have no plans of switching to a newer one in a while. Recently, it has started acting up and draining the battery very rapidly. I thought the upgrade to Lollipop (Android 5) would fix that, but it just made it worse. After trying out quite a few things I started researching it and found that an app called “Unified Daemon(EUR)” was using up both a lot of battery power and network bandwidth.

Searching for more information on the ‘net, I came up with forum thread describing this very issue. Apparently, the app purpose is to update the weather forecast, news and stock tickers. I don’t really use any of them, although I did have a weather symbol on the S Cover screen, so how it could end up downloading hundreds of megabytes of data I have no idea, something must be very wrong with it.

To test out if it was indeed the culprit, I went into the settings and disabled the daemon in the App Manager yesterday. And, indeed, today battery usage was down to normal again, and when I came back from work I had 50 % battery life left despite having placed a couple of phone calls, played some games and browsed some web sites. Had I tried that yesterday the battery would either have been empty long before, or I would have had to recharge it during the day.