Stephanie Daugherty wrote:
Many older phones had the option of an "extended" battery, which often required a special replacement battery door which would curve around the extra bulk of the larger battery. This would be easy to offer with many of the current Android smartphone in particular, so you could have your cake and eat it too - just not at the same time...
Surprised the aftermarket hasn't done more in this particular area too, I mean, how hard is it to double or triple the battery thickness and stick on a larger cover?
With that said, a lot of the battery life problems are bad apps, in particular, Android apps that abuse "wake lock" functionality. data connections, and other functions to prevent the phone from going to sleep, which will drain a battery very quickly. There are several tools out there that can help identify the culprit so that you can close or uninstall it. (Hint: If turning off mobile data makes a huge difference, then so will neutering the offending apps - properly implemented push notifications don't use that much battery.)
Carat (http://carat.cs.berkeley.edu/ or on the play store at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.berkeley.cs.amplab.carat.android&hl=en) is a data mining app that tries to identify battery hogs based on aggregated data from a large number of users, as well as data just from your phone, but it does so over a relatively long period of time (a week or so) as of the last time I used it. Despite the delayed results, it's through, and able to identify battery hogs that only happen on particular devices.
Wake lock detector (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.uzumapps.wakelockdetector) targets one particular menace to battery life - apps that are using Android APIs to prevent the phone from going to sleep. While many of these serve a useful purpose like video playback or navigsation, when they get left running and suck the battery dead, they aren't so useful.
There are also some battery saver apps out there which will force the data connection off and wakelock off when the screen is turned off, or if the battery drops below a threshold. These should be a last resort, but if you can't bear to uninstall a particular battery hog, there are apps like JuiceDefender (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.latedroid.juicedefender&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5sYXRlZHJvaWQuanVpY2VkZWZlbmRlciJd) that, while overhyped, do actually manage to do at least some of what they claim.