Samsung Pay Reportedly Draining Batteries

Samsung loves doing things on its own. The less it depends on others frameworks and services, the more independent it feels. But such NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome does have some disadvantages, like running into bugs that might be harder to pin down, trace, and fix due to limited exposure. That might be the problem that some users of Samsung Pay are running into as they report strange drops in battery life, with no other common cause than Samsung Pay itself.

Like Bixby, the idea behind Samsung Pay has merit. Unlike Bixby, it does have a better track record of not irking users, at least until now. Unlike completely NFC-based mobile payment systems like Apple Pay and Google (formerly Android) Pay, Samsung Pay's MST lets it work on both NFC as well as traditional mag stripe terminals.

While perhaps not as popular as Apple Pay by word of mouth, Samsung Pay does boast of quite a large network in the US and a few other markets. It has been working without issue for months, even years. But now some owners are reporting that their phones are getting drained and that battery monitors are pointing to Samsung Pay as the culprit.

At the time of this writing, there has been no theory yet on why Samsung Pay suddenly became that broken and it doens't look like all users are affected. It's still affecting enough users to make some noise to reach Samsung, who has, unfortunately, remained silent so far.