Why is my battery life dropping with wi-fi on?

[etcohen]

Experiments indicate that with WiFi off, battery life is only a little worse than with Kit Kat.  But with WiFi on, battery life drops like a rock.  It seems to be due to Google Play Services and the phone being periodically awake (even if in lockscreen) and doing ... something.  Any advice on how to track this down further?  Or to get Verizon/Samsung to admit there's a problem?

[vzw_customer_support · Accepted solution]

We definitely want your phone to function normally, etcohen! That's great trouble shooting that you have done to pinpoint this issue. By chance, have you attempted this test also by using Safe Mode to see if the battery issue is replicated?

http://vz.to/Q7Zvma

Keep us posted.

NicandroN_VZW

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If my response answered your question please click the �Correct Answer� button under my response. This ensures others can benefit from our conversation. Thanks in advance for your help with this!!

[etcohen]

The battery drain problem I was having stopped after about 3 days.  What had me puzzled is that it didn't start immediately after installing Lollipop (but a few days afterwards).  As to why, that's not clear -- something was downloading a lot of stuff over WiFi, and there aren't any good tools that I know of (without rooting the phone) to figure out what app might have been doing this...