Android Army, need your help to try to upgrade a serious Android Bug!

Posted by qrius on March 20, 2013 12:39 pm 21

If any of you have Jelly Bean, you've probably noticed that your battery is draining faster than normal. Well, most likely it's b/c it's a bug with the process "mediascannerservice" that's continuing to run in the background.

How do you find out? Get BetterBatteryStats from the Market (it's worth the $3) and install. Then reboot your phone. Then open the app and set it to 'Partial Wakelocks' and since 'unplugged' and have the phone unplugged.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.asksven.betterbatterystats

You will most likely see the 'mediascannerservice' hogging a lot of process time. It's a process that's supposed to keep track of any new pictures, songs and other media. It gets really technical but basically the problem is 2 fold:

1. It wants to scan every stinking folder in your internal or external SD card. Instead of doing this, Android should let you choose which folders you want it to watch for media, very similar to Picasa on the PC, not everything.

2. The problem happens partially b/c it thinks % signs and "_" (underscores) are SQL wildcards. Some have resorted to renaming their files. This is stupid. By default my SG3 camera creates jpg files with underscores. I'm not going to rename every pic after taking a picture.

The biggest offense of all to this is that this is prioritized as MEDIUM, not HIGH.

So I urge you to help by voting on these issues on code.google.com here:

http://bit.ly/XpRTcu

http://bit.ly/16JBztZ

FYI, I'm on the T-Mobile Galaxy S3 with 4.1.1. But based on the comments in the issues, this seems to impact anyone with Jelly Bean regardless of device, from a Galaxy Nexus to a Nexus 7.