Walking around with your Galaxy S21 Ultra in your pocket may be draining its battery

The Galaxy S21 Ultra seems to be suffering from a rather strange bug that has frustrated owners over the last few months. According to numerous reports from Galaxy S21 Ultra owners, the camera app is causing an abnormal amount of battery usage when the phone is idle. Strangely, this happens mostly when they’re walking around with the phone in their pocket, apparently because the camera app is waking up the device when motion is detected.

The battery drain can be mild to quite severe depending on the device, with at least one user reporting a drain of 21% over the course of seven hours and just 15 minutes of screen on time. Worse yet, the only way to find out that there’s something fishy going on is by using advanced battery monitoring apps (such as this one). Android’s regular battery stats monitor doesn’t show anything amiss.

In fact, that might be the reason why Samsung has brushed this off as a non-issue to those who got in touch with the company through its support channels and through the Samsung Members app. But the issue seems serious enough going by the number of complaints that have piled up on various websites over the last couple of months, despite Samsung’s official stance.

It’s also worth mentioning that the Galaxy S21 Ultra is the only device affected. Galaxy Note 20 Ultra owners have noticed the camera waking up the phone in a similar manner but have not seen it affecting battery life. Unfortunately, there’s no fix for Galaxy S21 Ultra owners at the moment despite all the software updates Samsung has released for the S21 series since February.

We’ve reached out to Samsung for a comment and will update this article once we hear back. In the meantime, let us know if you’ve noticed higher battery drain on your Galaxy S21 Ultra (or any other Galaxy phone) when you’re out and about compared to when the phone isn’t moving around.

• Model: SM-G998B
• Dimensions: Bar: 165.1 x 75.6 x 8.9 mm
• Display: 6.8 inch / 172.72 mm Dynamic AMOLED 2X
• CPU: Exynos 2100
• Camera: 12MP