Find out what your own phone is actually spending battery and storage on

short · 30 min · Objective 1.4

Task

Use the device's own reporting to distinguish a hardware complaint from a software one, because the three most common 'my phone is broken' reports are answered entirely by these screens.

Steps

  1. Record free storage, total storage and the percentage free in lab/phone/storage.csv with header total_gb,free_gb,pct_free.
  2. Record the top five storage consumers in lab/phone/consumers.csv with header rank,item,gb.
  3. Record the top five battery consumers over the last 24 hours in lab/phone/battery.csv with header rank,app,pct,foreground_min.
  4. Record the device's own battery health or maximum capacity figure, where it exposes one, in lab/phone/health.txt.
  5. Write lab/phone/verdict.md stating, for a user reporting 'my phone is slow and the battery does not last', which of the four causes from the lesson your data supports and which it rules out.

Verify

These checks run in a POSIX shell: Terminal on macOS or Linux, and on Windows Git Bash (it comes with Git for Windows) or WSL. A stock Windows PowerShell or Command Prompt has no awk or grep, so there the first line fails.

awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=3 {print $3" per cent free"}' lab/phone/storage.csv
awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=3 {n++} END {print n" storage consumer(s)"}' lab/phone/consumers.csv
awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=4 {n++} END {print n" battery consumer(s)"}' lab/phone/battery.csv
grep -c . lab/phone/health.txt
grep -Eic 'storage|background|thermal|update|battery' lab/phone/verdict.md

Storage percentage recorded, five consumers of each kind, a health figure present or its absence noted, and a verdict that names a specific cause. A verdict that says 'could be several things' has not used the data above it.

Notes

A phone below about five per cent free storage behaves like a broken phone. Checking that first costs ten seconds and resolves a real share of these calls.

This is an independent study companion for CompTIA A+ Core 1 220-1201 and is not produced by or endorsed by CompTIA.