Improving Battery Efficiency in Mobile Applications
Chosen theme: Improving Battery Efficiency in Mobile Applications. Let’s build apps that feel fast, stay helpful, and respect every milliamp. Join our community of makers determined to reduce drain, extend sessions, and delight users without compromise.
Wakeups, Wakelocks, and Work That Can't Wait
Uncoordinated timers and partial wakelocks keep CPUs busy long after users set phones down. Maya, a teammate, cut overnight drain by 28 percent after batching alarms into a single deferred task window.
The Radio Tax: Networking’s Energy Price Tag
Cell radios ramp to high power states and linger after transfers finish, wasting energy in tail time. Batch requests, reuse connections, and prefetch on unmetered Wi‑Fi to avoid frequent, tiny transmissions.
Location and Sensors: Precision Versus Power
High frequency GPS with fine accuracy guzzles energy fast. Prefer coarse location when possible, fuse sensors intelligently, and switch to significant-change or geofencing when continuous precision is unnecessary.
Architecting for Efficiency From Day One
Serve data from a local cache immediately, then refresh opportunistically. Use stale-while-revalidate to avoid blocking UI, and mark background syncs with network and charging constraints to conserve precious power.
Architecting for Efficiency From Day One
User interactions can trigger storms of updates. Debounce noisy inputs, coalesce emissions, and apply backpressure in reactive streams so the app does less redundant work and the device rests more.
Measure What Matters: Profiling Energy Like a Pro
Android Studio Energy Profiler, Perfetto, and Battery Historian
Record traces, mark app events, and correlate CPU, network, and wakeups with user actions. Perfetto timelines reveal bursty work; Battery Historian flags excessive jobs, alarms, and partial wakelocks across device sessions.
Xcode’s Energy Log and Instruments
Use the Energy Log to spot high CPU, networking, and location impacts during scenarios. Pair it with Instruments and os_signpost markers to pinpoint code that spikes power without obvious performance benefits.
Field Telemetry and A/B Energy Experiments
Collect anonymized session metrics like wakeup counts, radio bytes, and foreground duration. Run controlled rollouts comparing strategies, then ship the variant with lower drain while preserving performance and reliability.
UI That Feels Alive, Not Power-Hungry
On OLED screens, true blacks turn pixels off. Prefer dark palettes with sufficient contrast, avoid fake grays that glow, and let users opt into power-saving themes that still look polished and readable.
Network and Data: Do More With Fewer Packets
Replace frequent polling with FCM or APNs push, using collapsible keys and topics to avoid floods. Align updates, deduplicate messages, and surface summaries instead of many tiny notifications that wake devices repeatedly.
Location, Sensors, and Wearables Without the Drain
Start with coarse or significant-change updates, promoting to fine GPS only when users begin active tasks. Geofences handle place-based triggers reliably without constant tracking, delivering context with far less energy.
Location, Sensors, and Wearables Without the Drain
Combine accelerometer, gyroscope, and step detectors to infer state, then sample less when users are stationary. Duty cycle aggressively, using short burst windows followed by sleeps to minimize continuous drain.
Location, Sensors, and Wearables Without the Drain
Use longer scan intervals and shorter windows for background discovery. Prefer connection parameter updates and batching where supported, and stop advertising promptly when goals are met to preserve precious battery.
Join our mailing list