In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the globe in 2020 and 2021, the demand for mobile apps skyrocketed. It could be for something like a school assignment, the delivery of lunch during recess, keeping up with the news, or even just for fun. Mobile apps provide solutions to various problems because we can accomplish virtually anything we need to with a single click.
According to Statista, the number of mobile app downloads worldwide was about 250 billion in 2020 and is projected to increase even further in 2022. One drawback to this phenomenon is the high churn rate that typically accompanies app use.
When people often use mobile apps and share high-resolution media through them, the battery life of their mobile devices can suffer. To prevent this from happening, mobile app developers must make changes to their programs to improve battery life.
This blog will teach us how to improve the battery life of our mobile apps.
Make An App That Is Easy On The Battery To Deal With Churn Rates
Battery life being drained by an app is a big reason why users uninstall it. No one wants to use an app that requires constant gadget recharging. Simply put, the quality of an app’s use depends on how much juice it takes out of the user’s battery.
Therefore, as the app’s owner or developer, it is incumbent upon you to minimize the app’s drain on the user’s battery. It is crucial to balance performance and energy efficiency throughout this optimization. A perfect app would have a power drain that was low enough to ensure prolonged app use but high enough to prevent any performance drops.
So, what can you do to make your software less draining on the user’s battery? Let’s have a peek at it.
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Comply with Industry Standards for Energy Efficiency in Apps
Developers and publishers of mobile apps should familiarize themselves with all of Apple’s and Google’s energy-saving and optimization rules and recommendations to minimize app battery drain.
For example, Google gives Android developers a set of guidelines. The most prominent is the number of times an app requests the device’s location and the amount of shared data across apps. By Google’s recommendations, developers are urged to minimize this occurrence as much as possible to avoid unnecessary power use.
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Lessen the Number of Times the Network Is Requested
Your app’s constant network requests greatly contribute to its excessive power consumption. Any app that makes network queries every few seconds is damaging the battery life of the device it’s running on.
If you want to make the most efficient use of your network’s requests, you should follow these tips:
- You need to be able to collect and evaluate data about network usage in your app in response to user input.
- Increase the network traffic efficiency that users, applications, and servers start.
- Optimizing the numerous network queries sent by these sources can significantly reduce energy usage.
- To go back and optimize every possible source of network traffic, you need to know where it all comes from.
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Do away with Wake Locks
Adding a “wake lock” feature was once common practice for app creators, and some still do it today. A wake lock will keep the screen on to prevent the phone from sleeping. Optimizing your app’s speed is one of the most crucial concerns you need to evaluate to prevent unnecessary app battery drain.
Some programs must keep the screen from going dark at all costs, even if it means using more battery life than usual. To give just one example, no one wants their phones to enter sleep mode in the middle of a movie or a game. There are various ways to keep the screen on without excessively draining the battery.
The FLAG KEEP SCREEN ON feature is widely used for this purpose. If you’re already using Android, it doesn’t need any more permissions to continue functioning normally within that environment.
In addition, the DownloadManager allows you to continue downloads in the background, saving battery life. If your mobile app is backing up data from a remote server, you can utilize the sync adapter framework in Android to do so.
If there are only specific points in your app where wake locking is needed, you can use the PARTIAL WAKELOCK feature instead. At the very least, this facilitates the user’s ability to turn off their display.
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Putting Off Unnecessary Code In Your App Can Help Preserve Battery Life
Unnecessary coding stages and processes may also be contributing to your mobile app’s excessive energy consumption. You can reduce the app’s power consumption and boost the user experience by postponing or eliminating them if doing so won’t negatively affect the app’s commercial or functional requirements.
For example, is it possible to store data so that it doesn’t have to be downloaded again? Or, can your app wait a little longer to back up the data?
Developers can use any number of available tools to set up repeating or periodic tasks within their apps. JobScheduler is a popular option since it lets you schedule and manages multiple jobs at once, reducing the stress on your battery.
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Don’t Ever Launch Something Without First Testing It
Because no software program can be optimized without going through a rigorous testing cycle, many software houses and businesses invest considerably in their SQA teams. If you’re a developer, you might try everything you’ve ever tried or learned throughout the years. But after the app has gone through a series of testing cycles, you need to pay close attention to every single step, including batch operations, network utilization, location service usage, code optimization, etc. After this step, the app can finally be deemed to have been published on the appropriate platform.
Improve Your Phone’s Battery Life By Learning These Tips For Optimizing Your Apps
The amount of time a smartphone’s battery lasts is an important part of the mobile user experience. Battery life is typically impacted by a mobile app that provides the most recent updates and functionality. Yet, a few key factors may be addressed to ensure that mobile apps are as gentle on battery life as possible. The following are some of these factors:
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First Of All, Make The App Slow
To make an app lazy, you need to look for ways to minimize and optimize power-hungry processes. In the Lazy First choice, you’ll be offered these three crucial questions:
- Defer: Is there any time crunch that the app must meet? Can the software, for instance, hold off on making a cloud backup until the device is fully charged?
- Reduce:Is there anything that could be used instead of your app if it weren’t for it? Does the program include a cache where previously downloaded data can be stored so that the radio doesn’t have to be activated to re-download it?
- Coalesce: Is there any way to perform app functions in bulk so that the mobile device doesn’t have to repeatedly go through the active state? Is it possible, for instance, for multiple applications to coordinate their radio transmissions rather than each delivering its own message?
These questions need to be answered when utilizing the radio, the computer processor, or the screen.
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Making the Most of the Tools Offered by the Platform
To a large extent, battery consumption is determined by the platform for which the app will be designed. Some built-in safeguards assist with power management. These processes vary depending on the OS in question. Mechanisms include-
- Background Restrictions.
- Testing & Troubleshooting.
- App Standby Buckets.
- Capacity Restriction in Power Management.
- Invest in higher-quality tools, and put them to good use.
Which tools you use depends largely on the system you’re developing in. It’s useful for figuring out which program features are hogging the most juice. There are several Android utilities, such as Battery Historian and Profile GPU Rendering, that can be used to optimize for longer battery life. Now that we’ve covered the steps taken to improve the app’s battery life let’s take a look at the upsides of this strategy.
Optimizing The Mobile App For Longer Battery Life Has Many Benefits
Before a mobile app is released to the public, its creators can save both time and resources by optimizing it for maximum battery life. However, if the mobile software isn’t optimized before release, it will use RAM independently, which could negatively impact battery life. If this occurs, the device’s battery will deplete more rapidly since the processor will be constantly engaged in the process of fine-tuning the mobile app.
Conclusion
Smartphone applications (apps) have rapidly grown in importance in recent years, to the point that they are now indispensable. However, mobile apps indeed reduce the battery life of mobile devices. To prevent this problem, mobile app developers should optimize their programs for improved battery life before release or else do so soon after release. To improve app battery life, developers can follow the advice given in this blog post. Get in touch with Saffron Tech, a mobile app development business, to get well-optimized and powerful software for your device.
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