Battery life consumption rarely comes up as a feature bullet-point for an app writer, because visibility on whether a given app is a battery hog is low (both for developers and users). There are a couple of reasons iOS was so draconian about background processes for most of its history, and this was one of them. This ecosystem shift puts pressure back on developers to get creative and ask hard questions about how much energy they really need to consume for their tasks.
One issue is that these first furtive steps in that direction may not be putting the tools in the developers' hands to do that well. But everything in software starts at an early phase.
(It'll be interesting to see whether the market prioritizes battery life by getting the phones implementing these features or app richness by treating these phones as "damaged" and routing around them. This site certainly helps customers make that choice).
I agree. What's really broken is lack of a good feedback loop both to app developers and the OS vendors. It would be good if this translated to two things:
- google mandates that killing background apps must be based on actual battery consumption
- when an app that requested background permissions is background-killed, this is reported to the app developer and OS vendor in some sort of aggregate metrics they can see
- users should get some kind of report or notification as well about it
You would instantly see both OS vendors and app developers trying to optimise the battery life of their apps so that they can stay alive.
Ideally, users who want to should be able to actually set thresholds on how much battery any app can consume. Eg: if I am OK that my phone only lasts an hour I should be allowed to tell it to keep my minecraft server on on the background so everyone can keep playing.
>Battery life consumption rarely comes up as a feature bullet-point for an app writer, because visibility on whether a given app is a battery hog is low (both for developers and users).
Both platforms offer extremely easy to access, at-a-glance views of which apps are using the most battery for any given period.
Battery life consumption rarely comes up as a feature bullet-point for an app writer, because visibility on whether a given app is a battery hog is low (both for developers and users). There are a couple of reasons iOS was so draconian about background processes for most of its history, and this was one of them. This ecosystem shift puts pressure back on developers to get creative and ask hard questions about how much energy they really need to consume for their tasks.
One issue is that these first furtive steps in that direction may not be putting the tools in the developers' hands to do that well. But everything in software starts at an early phase.
(It'll be interesting to see whether the market prioritizes battery life by getting the phones implementing these features or app richness by treating these phones as "damaged" and routing around them. This site certainly helps customers make that choice).