Android Best Practices to Improve Battery Efficiency

Abstract

Multi-core CPUs, motion sensors and multiple wireless radios all draw a significant amount of power which make a regular battery recharge a necessity. Applications, which extensively use the available hardware, reduce the battery runtime severely. Continuous motion sensor recording excessively stress a smartphone’s CPU preventing it from entering a deep sleep state. Android 4.4 introduces a new batchmode for sensors data to keep the CPU asleep for longer periods of time by delaying the reporting of new data from the sensors. The same technique is applied when writing to flash memory. When using a content provider to store data write amplification occurs, which affects writing performance negatively. The longer write times due to the reduced writing speed decrease the battery efficiency even more. A similar batch-oriented strategy reduces the occurrence of write amplification. In return, the reduced writing time improves the battery efficiency.