What is the Dumpstate?

A dumpstate is a log of the thousands of scripts and actions performed by your phone, from how many times it's been charged to the duration for which an app has been open, even if it's in the background. To the untrained eye, the log may look like the Matrix, with lines and lines of text that can be hard to interpret. With the search command and a general sense of what you're looking for, you can find plenty of useful data points to help you make informed decisions to improve your phone.

How to Enable and Access the Dumpstate

To access the dumpstate on an Android device, follow the steps below. Samsung: Open the Phone app, dial #9900# to launch the SysDump menu, tap on "Run dumpstate/logcat" to download your phone's log (this will take a few minutes), then "Copy to phone_storage" so it's accessible through your file manager. If you get an error message when dialing the code, you may need to turn off Samsung's native Auto Blocker feature. Google, Motorola, and most other OEMs: Open the Phone app, dial ##7262626##* to prompt the bug report notification and confirm that you'd like to download it. You can also download the report by enabling developer options, tapping "Take bug report," choosing between an interactive or full report, and then saving it to your Google Drive or local file manager when it's ready.

3 Useful Data Points

Once you've downloaded the dumpstate log, you can easily parse through the information by searching for key terms, like the ones below.

1. Battery Degradation

A piece of advice I often share is to consider replacing your phone's battery before upgrading or buying a new one. While recent developments in lithium and silicon materials have improved battery longevity, phone batteries still degrade over time. If you're on year three or four with your current handset, there's a good chance it's lost upwards of 20% of its original battery capacity due to charging. To get the exact charge cycle count and determine if it's time for a battery swap, search for dumpsys batterystats. You can calculate your phone's battery health percentage by dividing the charge counter value by the design capacity. I generally recommend replacing your phone's battery if the capacity is below 75% and the number of charge cycles is over 500.

2. Rogue Wakelocks

Wakelocks prevent your phone's CPU from fully sleeping when the device is inactive, and they're often used by apps that run aggressive background tasks you may not be aware of. The result is battery drainage at a much quicker rate. To pinpoint exact which app is running rogue, search for statistics since last charge or dump of service wakelock. Within the list of apps, look for those with suspiciously long real-time durations relative to your phone's screen-off time (typically found in the power and storage settings). Or, you can even compare the values to how long your phone was left idle overnight. If an app has 6-8 hours of real-time usage and you slept for a similar amount of time, it's likely running in the background and using CPU. An example is my Instagram app -- specifically, its location services -- operating for hours overnight. I followed up by disabling location permissions to reduce the passive CPU usage.

3. Clearing Out Previous System Logs

Even when you're not manually requesting a dumpstate log, your phone still occasionally runs system reports for tracking purposes. These minutes-to-download files, as you may guess, can build up over time and take up gigabytes of internal storage. So, beyond uninstalling apps, clearing cache, and migrating photos and videos, it can often help to delete outdated system reports. First, you'll want to see if your phone is struggling to read/write memory due to heavy loads. You can find this information by searching DUMP OF SERVICE diskstats or sysdump, and finding the Write MS value. A high disk write latency, anything over 200ms), means your phone's internal storage is likely struggling to read and write files. To remove the excess logs, you can use the ADB command-line tool on your PC to delete the system reports.