Having now lived with the UI 7 update for 3 days I find my experience focusing on a feeling of personal violation and vandalism of my property .
I purchased my A15 G5 two years as it meet all my requirement at a good price point. I was looking for a phone with excellent battery life and the A15's large 5000mA provided over two days use before charging. I also wanted to host my music collection of about 300GB and the external memory card made that easy. I also used Gmaps a lot as I live in a rural location and this work fine. Finally I needed good email and a basic WEB browser.
All pretty basic requirements that the A15 G5 nicely met for two years.
Then came the UI7 "update".
This morning my A15 consumed 20% of its battery in the first two hours of the day doing nothing but reading the morning news and checking email for a total screen time of 30 minutes. Based on yesterday by lunch it will have consumed 50% of its battery mostly sitting on the table unused.
Now if I use Gmaps while out in the car the A15 becomes very hot (even with the screen turned off!) becoming uncomfortable to hold except by the edges. A card charger is now absolutely needed but while Gmaps is active there is not enough extra power left over to also recharge the battery. After using Gmaps I no longer feel safe with such a hot phone in my pocket for fear of burning or fire.
My A15 is warm to the touch all the time now! I measured a temperature rise of 10F over the room temperature with my A15 just sitting unused on the dinner table. It seems this hot device is always just one step away from a fire after the UI7 update and now I find I no longer trust the safety of the product and worry about having it in my house.
So my experience of the UI7 update is one of violation of my security as a person and a vandalism of my property.
And yes yes I have tried all the suggested "fixes" for high battery drain with very little improvement. UI7 is simply a very broken release that should at a minimum be optional for all users.
It takes about 2 weeks for the battery to relearn your usage habits after a major software update.
It is also best practice to perform a wipe cache partition after every software update. It gets rid of leftover installation and junk files.
Power off the phone, while the phone is powered off, press the power button and the volume up button simultaneously when you see the Samsung logo let go of buttons. Using Volume buttons for scrolling and power button for Yes, scroll down to Wipe Cache Partition, press power, scroll to Yes and press power. Reboot press power.
