This is lunacy. Ok, lunacy is a bit strong. But I disagree with this and am throwing a "premature optimization" flag.
Modern phone batteries last plenty long, and the radio being on is nothing compared to the big bright screen.
/edit Given the opportunity to chose, I know I would gladly sacrifice a few minutes per charge battery life for a better user experience, especially since my phone never gets below 20%.
Your users will be better served by you fixing bugs or adding features. Really, unless you're a huge team with a huge budget, there's other stuff to worry about in your app experience before "maximizing battery life" should be a responsibility you want to help the OS/device maker with.(If you're one of the lucky ones who has the time and money to do both, by all means, go nuts.)
Being conservative with resource usage is sound advice. Making battery usage the prime concern for most apps is overkill.
Games and other applications that you know users will have open for extended periods of time, and/or that are already eating up battery should give this issue some thought, everyone else, really, don't worry about it.
I've seen apps do some crazy things and it really has a significant effect in over-all battery life. A popular Android weather clock widget woke the phone up every minute to update the minute number on the graphics and updated the weather information every ~15 minutes (gps + radio!) which single handily crushed the standby battery life from multiple days to less than 8 hours.
Yes, I don't think _every_ decision should be based on minimizing the wake ups... but on the other hand, all developers should at least try to have as much understanding of the platforms that they're working on so that they know what trade-offs they're making with each feature they're adding.
I'm glad that Google has these videos available and that they're being picked up in places like HN.
Go for a long walk in the park? All that time your phone's wifi is straining to find a wifi signal. It's not as big a power sap as the screen, however it's constantly, silently in use and the screen isn't.
The mobile radio will eat your battery very quickly, and probably chews through as much power as your screen. If you want to see how expensive it actually is, disable fast dormancy†. A slightly less brutal demonstration can be had by opening an OpenVPN connection. The keep-alive packets will keep your mobile radio in a higher power state, pretty much in the same way some disrespectful apps do and you'll (quite unsurprisingly) see your battery drain faster.
A badly written app can drain hours of battery charge, not minutes.
> Your users will be better served by you fixing bugs or adding features.
Excessive power drain is undoubtedly a bug. I absolutely love apps that respect the fact I want to go as long as possible without charging my phone. I might often be in a position where I can't charge my phone too. (Carrying a second or third battery is useful, if you've got a phone that has a replaceable battery.)
> Really, unless you're a huge team with a huge budget...
It's quite trivial to think about performance and battery life. This is something every mobile developer should be thinking about from the get-go anyway, and if you can't afford to write an app that performs well, you can't afford to write an app.
> Making battery usage the prime concern for most apps is overkill.
I'll uninstall apps that I identify as too power hungry without a second thought, and I'll also write negative reviews too. I'm pretty sure that when put in this light, power consumption suddenly becomes important.
--
† Don't do this. Some phone networks are misconfigured and may fail to ever recognize that the phone is FD-capable again.
I work for a mobile operator, and have had to work on several network issues related to poorly designed apps. I agree with kintamanimatt on this, it's not premature optimization, you need to know the cost of what you're doing. There is an incredible resource cost, to all the naive developers making apps these days, that treat the wireless interface as an always on connection.
1. Server polling every minute We actually sent one customer an invoice for over $100,000 because they had a particularly bad application that polled a server every minute. This was only an internal app used by a few hundred people, but they used it at their office, and it caused constant blocking on the cell site covering their office. This actually broke cellular coverage near their office, and caused issues for all the other customers in the same area. Ultimately, we said, we can help you fix you're app, you can pay the invoice to upgrade cell coverage to you're office, or get off our network. In this instance, we helped them fix their app, so it only interacted with the server when something needed to be changed (the server pushed changes), which was actually quite easy to do. This simply isn't the same thing, as writing an inner loop in assembly, to shave off a few microseconds in runtime, which would be premature optimization, and actually making robust software that works well wherever it is used.
2. Synchronized network access This one has been the bane of us on a few occasions. If you write a network access to be like a cron entry, that run's not only every 15 minutes, but does so at exactly the same time between all devices. We get to hunt you down, and scream, as our wireless network crumbles. When every device, wakes up at the same time, and asks for a higher power state, at exactly the same time, the network will only process so many. The funny thing is, you'll test this yourself and not see anything, but then when you release your app, you might find 30% of those checks are failing for some reason, and struggle to figure out why. For any one who is thinking, well the operator should add more capacity, the answer is we do, but ultimately the customer pays for the network build.
3. High usage apps What happens is, your device vendor, is in the interest of protecting it's customers as well. We once had an app on our network, that would treat all reject codes, as a cause to retry. This caused it, to every time it was run, begin uploading data, over and over again, leading to thousands of dollars in bills to the customers for excessive data usage. The device vendor, pulled the app from their stores.
Now, how do you feel, about having to plead the case why you should be allowed to continue to sell your product, not only to the device vendor, but the carrier who found the problem, prove that you fixed it, have our bureaucracy test that you actually fixed it, and maybe if we feel like it, let you sell again. It's not as simple as fix the bugs, you might actually lose you're ability to make money of you're software, for months while this get's sorted out.
What do you think you're store rating will be, when all your customers get sent a $5000 bill for using your app?
Now the question is, should there be a better way, and I'd like to see more from mobile vendors, in making it stupid easy to be smart about this. In the phone API's, if I need to do a background update, I should be able to register with the OS, and say, I have an update to do, within the next 15 minutes, let me know when you have an active radio connection. You're phone goes into a high powered radio connection, and bam, all you're background updates now go out together. Need to send notifications, here is our push API, only interact with the mobile when an update needs to be done. If the API's you're using, are designed for mobile, and take alot of this network stuff that you shouldn't need to know into account, it's a lot easier for the naive developers to do better by blind luck.
-- * my views in this post are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer.
Release early, release often. If users love your app after release, focus on fixing the littler things like battery usage. If users hate it, try to fix the things that make them hate it, and then focus on the battery life.
Caveat: As in all optimization discussions, there are reasonable minimum thresholds for acceptability even in the "unoptimized" state. Desktop software can't take thirty minutes to boot no matter what stage of life it's in, and mobile software can't kill your battery in an hour or crash the nearby cellular network at any point either.
Don't make your software egregiously bad; just make it good enough.
Absolutely.
I'm not saying throw caution to the wind and poll a remote host constantly and indefinitely, as I said originally, I think it's right to be concerned about resource usage. This is just a baseline for decent software. Be a "good citizen" and all that. (In most cases) If you can make one query for 100 items, rather than 100 queries, or 10 queries, do that. But that's just common sense.
>Excessive power drain is undoubtedly a bug. I absolutely love apps that respect the fact I want to go as long as possible without charging my phone.
Again, I think we are in agreement. Excessive drain is a bug, but my experience is that if you're already following best practices and not doing anything wild, you won't be a battery hog.
The article makes a HUGE list of do's and don'ts
I think it can be a lot shorter:
* just because you can, doesn't mean you should
* learn and follow best practices
* be mindful and conservative in your usage of all resources on the system
> I might often be in a position where I can't charge my phone too. (Carrying a second or third battery is useful, if you've got a phone that has a replaceable battery.)
(gadget aside) Even if your phone doesn't have a replaceable battery, there are a lot of slim, rechargeable battery packs you can buy for around $20, many with short little USB cords that fold up in to them and others where you can use your own cord as well. The nice part is it will still be usable even if you change phones, and can be shared with other devices and people if needed. Some of them will even let you charge them inline with the phone so you're only using one usb port.
What are you doing on your phone/what phone do you have that you need 3 batteries?
I think the average mobile app developer has no business thinking about radio optimization.
They should however be spending lots of time thinking about cacheing and minimizing interaction with servers. Developers in general have gotten too comfortable with unnecessary traffic on Desktop machines. There are too many devs who have been focused on speed as the limiting factor for mobile apps, when it fact should be cost. The end user is paying not only to acquire your app, but also to use the mobile provider's transport.
We should take every opportunity to reinforce the importance of minimizing mobile traffic to only what is necessary. Just because you can use a 4G connection to move a ton of data doesn't mean you should.
For instance, doing single calls to APIs for multiple pieces of information instead of a bunch of calls. If you design for these up front, you can then head the problem off before it even becomes a problem. It's not premature because users expect it. They do notice network lag, they do notice battery usage, and they will give you one star on the app store or play store, etc. I've literally seen this play out in real life. It's no different than making sure your website loads quickly IMHO. You still have to do all those other things you listed to worry about, but this isn't to be glossed over and addressed when you realize people are noticing.
It feels like so many apps are designed by people who never have experienced a bad connection, and just assume that their app can download everything it needs quickly as soon as it starts up. What you end up with is bad experiences when your connection is slow or has high latency.
Radio power consumption is very significant. It could well be more than the screen takes - it's not just the RF amplification, but also the computation required to generate the modulated RF in the first place.
However, changing behaviour based on battery level is trickier than it seems.
* The point of reducing energy usage is to leave the user more juice for the actions that are most important to them. It could be that your app is the important one.
* Stopping expensive operations at 20% or 30% battery level means that 70-80% was already wasted. If there are good ways of optimising energy use, they should be applied at all times, and prolonging the time until you reach 20%.
* The appropriate threshold depends on what the user imagines doing for the rest of the day. If I'm travelling to another city, I disable background data in the morning to make sure I still have battery left for phone calls in the evening after heavy use of maps during the day. If I'm travelling to the office, it doesn't matter, since a charger is nearby. Predicting "time to next charging" and "use of other apps before charging" automatically for context-aware app behaviour is non-trivial.
And if you're doing something that sucks up battery, you should know about it and act accordingly.
If you're not doing heavy lifting, It's just not something you should have to think about as an app developer, there are so many other areas to focus on to keep users happy.
Apple has a few WWDC sessions that talk about it I think.
Here's what they have to say in their "performance tuning" section:
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iphone...
that said, this is hardly new knowledge. or is it? i thought there had been articles about it a couple of years back, and even though i would consider this advanced common sense there is a high chance that i would take this optimization into account right away.
Besides, in my experience the biggest drains on battery life aren't data transfers, they're (a) having the screen on, especially when bright, and (b) being slightly out of range of a cell tower, and constantly dropping and reacquiring a 3G connection. The latter turns my phone into a hand-warmer and chews up my power.
Prefetching isn't applicable to every situation, but in some circumstances it makes apps more enjoyable to use. The trick is to analyze and understand the high volume usage patterns for your app and to target those for improvement. If you see that the vast majority of your users will take a next step to view content that must be web loaded, it may make sense to prefetch when the wi-fi or cell radio is already on so you can piggy back on the high power state and avoid waking the hardware.
> Besides, in my experience the biggest drains on battery life aren't data transfers, they're (a) having the screen on, especially when bright, and (b) being slightly out of range of a cell tower, and constantly dropping and reacquiring a 3G connection.
As someone who has encountered apps with bugs that do constantly make or maintain network connections, these kinds of bugs are a much more severe drain on battery compared to the screen. We're talking about bugs that are constantly powering your wifi or cell radio hardware 90% of the time. This will kill your battery in no time, screen on or off.
While the screen is definitely a huge power drain, it's easily controlled by the user. Poorly behaved apps will drain battery regardless of what the user does, and definitely _can_ be a huge drain. These used to be a lot more common when Android first came out -- many of these apps got better when users got better visibility of battery usage and started complaining to app developers.
And in general, we're talking kilobytes of data here. Not megabytes. Prefetching is good for metadata and text content; image content and other large assets should be an opt-in feature. (Android's "News and Weather" app was a good example of how to do this right.)
KB of data could be reasonable, depending on how often its being fetched. But the OA specifically mentioned retrieving several MB of data for use "during the next few minutes." If that's an app that doing some kind of news feed to an always-running widget, and it's grabbing images and stories in case I might want to read them, it can really add up.
As for prefetching, I think that should be a user setting. I've had to pre-fetch and cache data because the content was enormous and the backend was out of my control. But I do agree that a user should be able to decide themselves how the device uses resources and I try to push this into every app. Give the user a choice if they feel inclined.
Except when you can't. Are you really always near a power outlet? There have been plenty cases where I just haven't been able to charge my phone and have had to turn it off rather than use it for what I want.
> I can't control how much of my data plan an app is using, except by uninstalling the app.
Depending on where you are, get an unlimited data plan. I know not every country has these, but most do.
This highlights a good point: it's not just the number of bytes of data, it's the cost per byte. Many data plans have an explicit cost per byte, but even ones that don't will have an opportunity cost: if your app is sucking up a portion of my bandwidth, you're preventing my other apps from retrieving data. Even if my data was free, my bandwidth is limited.
For this reason I'm pretty happy that my Android has an option to force 2G network for battery savings. Gives me 50% better battery life with no noticeable speed difference.
On topic, this is why I prefer native (or at least non-webview) apps. The control over the connection and app lifecycle provides a better experience and better analytics.
Another point that struck me is that when I briefly used Android more than a year ago, there was a nifty tool that showed which app drained what %-age of the battery. If I am having troubles with my battery life on Android, I am likely to uninstall (or not use) an app that consumes more than its fair share of the battery.
I haven't seen an equivalent statistics pane in iOS, I wonder whether Apple will introduce it at some point to encourage app developers to author more efficient apps.
Assigning battery usage to apps is a hard thing as there are so many grey areas. OTOH you will notice apps that are stuck in CPU expensive loops that will not terminate, however this is not that common in my experience.
The Android battery statistics are nice but they usually don't provide me with a useful answer to the question: Which app is really draining my battery.
I'm thinking of a "limiter" app that runs locally on the phone, and disables TCP/IP transmissions every 18 minutes out of 20. That way things like email you can still get relatively quickly, but the radio's only on 10% of the time.
Developers and users both being aware of the problem and trying to fix it might mean their solutions collide. E.g. a badly behaved app that tries to access the network once every 30 seconds will always get through during the 2-minute window, but a well-behaved app that only hits the internet every 10 minutes might miss the window entirely.
So maybe the limiter should intercept outgoing TCP/IP connections, lie to the initiating app and tell it the connection happened but the remote end isn't sending any data, then connect the outgoing app to the real remote end when the radio switches on. Of course if there's an application-controlled timeout interval on the connection, it'll trigger and the 10-minute-interval app would miss the window.
You might get around that problem by using whatever UNIX signal Ctrl+Z generates, to lock up an app entirely when it tries to open an outgoing connection, then resume it when the radio's on. Of course, this'll probably lock the app's UI too, so it'll become totally unusable. Although if the limiter acts like a screensaver and goes away whenever the user's recently given any touch or keyboard input, that doesn't really matter, does it?
Or maybe Google should make an API where an app can say, "I want to make a connection, and I'm willing to wait if turning the radio on right now wouldn't be good for the user."
Dev info: http://mobile.couchbase.com
I really wonder how to implement push to client on the html5 platform. I even wonder if this is possible at all for now.
It doesn't have to be "every decision" if you architect the app to not do CRUD-over-mobile-data and do sync instead.
This not only improves battery life, it has a strong positive effect on perceived performance and interactivity.
Fortunately, there will soon be a book all about that (ISBN 1118183495).
We (Android) usually don't recommend developers try to implement push themselves. Using GCM allows the Android servers to schedule and collate data transmissions, so push messages from different apps get sent as part of the same transmission. Anything you roll yourself won't be able to do this.
This is seems incorrect - as I understand it, a websocket holds open a TCP connection indefinitely, which would require the radio to stay in its active state as long as the websocket remained open.
See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456407/iphone-keep-webso...
For example, Apple recommends that VoIP apps on iPhones keep a TCP socket permanently open and use it to receive notifications of new calls and similar:
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iphone...
Suppose no data is being transferred for 60 seconds ... is the radio kept on at maximum power? Or does it power down in between? Or does it turn off and break the poll (abort the TCP connection)?
apt-get remove apache2 php5 ...
Puns aside, good article. If everyone did this (for example caching for 2-5 minutes ahead) things would run a lot better! Next time I'm going to code an app, I'll read through everything on this page first.
I strongly doubt the intent of things like Google Cloud Messaging is to intercept all your data and siphon it off to the NSA, GHCQ, and others. GCM is an incredibly useful service that has been designed to make it easier to write apps that use less power by eliminating polling. When you don't have to poll you can keep the mobile radio in a low power state. But the trouble is, you are indeed passing data (possibly even sensitive data!) through Google data centers when you're using GCM and it's equivalents.
The tech industry seems to trust Google less today than it did this time last year in light of the Snowden leaks, and quite rightly so.
The fact that data being captured by intelligence communities already shows you who owns this "land" and considers the "natural resources" theirs for the pillaging, this is a great example of the kind of neofeudalism this proposed platform is building. We just rent the internet, the data that it generates is for the kings and gods.
The fact that these so called mobile platforms leave so much complexity to be managed by the developer just goes to show that these so called platforms are simply land grabs and don't actually offer anything to the developer except his software locked down to a single platform. They don't need to offer any service, just a rent collecting system for their captured land.
eventually you realise that C isn't fast enough and you can make it faster, but nobody else cares because they spunk clock cycles and bytes everywhere like they have billions of them (which of course they do... :D)
...and suddenly every language and platform is solving problems you never had because you just weren't a bad programmer to start with, and instead of solving your problems they are just tying your hands to prevent other people from shooting themselves in the feet.